I've just finished working on a number of changes to literary works and topics in general. These changes are meant to give you greater control over how your work is presented and shared.
Topic Images
You know how you see those Featured Works on the front page? The images displayed are default images, and you used to not be able to change them.
That's changed. When editing or creating any new topic, go to 'Upload Attachment.' You'll see a new button called 'Make Topic Image.' Just choose the image you want, then hit that button, and presto! The images even get resized for you so no worrying about that.
The topic image then is shown at the top of the topic from then on. I've included one topic image up above as an example here. If your work becomes a featured work, it'll get displayed there too. I look forward to seeing what people come up with!
Special Formatting
When posting a literary work, your work got formatted automatically according to which forum it was placed in. That's still true, but only to a degree.
If you go to Options when creating any new topic, you'll now see "Special Formatting" after the "Disable BBCode" and "Disable smilies" options. The Default does what has always been done; it formats your topic according to the forum it's placed in.
Alternatively, you can choose to present it another way, or simply remove all formatting. When you select 'None,' that just means the topic gets displayed like any normal topic (those in the Lounge for example).
Unfortunately, you won't be able to see the changes until after you hit 'Submit.' I'm working on getting it to work with 'Preview,' but no luck yet.
Lock your own literary works
Unlike the other two changes, this only applies to literary works. That is, now you can lock a story or poem without asking a mod to do it for you. This gives you, the author, more control over how your work gets shared.
Gold Stars
Starring a work has been moved to the bottom of the topic, which I hope will increase the number of gold stars given out. If you liked something, give it a gold star. If on a scale of 1 to 5, you thought the story was a 3, give it a gold star. I think a lot of people impose a high standard on giving gold stars, but that's more damaging to the system than helpful.
Also, I've enabled gold stars for information topics. I'm hoping that by doing so, some announcements will become featured works and thus more prominently displayed.
Character Counter
Whenever you make a post, you'll notice a character counter right below. This is to help people figure out if their post will be counted as a review or not. I am somewhat worried it could lead to review spam, so please report such posts if you see them.
Reviews Tab in User Profiles now called Lit. Comments
To reduce confusion, I've renamed the Reviews tab in all profiles to Lit. Comments. It's just the same as before, but instead of calling them reviews, they're called comments. This is because some users were getting confused, which is understandable. We were using two different definitions for Reviews on this site!
So from now on, Lit. Comments (or just Comments) refers to any reply to a literary work. Reviews, though, only includes replies to literary works that are 250+ characters.
Thank you.
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