Young Writers Society

StellaThomas wrote:NATE. STOP WORRYING ABOUT IMPORTANT THINGS. WORRY ABOUT US.

WHAT STELLA SAID. *slams fist on a giant office table*

.
NOW.
Make sure YWS is a part of your dream to TAKE OVER THE WORLD.

Heh.

If you all want, you can play around with the submission system since it's largely complete (not 100% though):
Click here to submit something crazy

I'd actually like people to submit all sorts of crazy stuff as that gives more data to work with. Don't worry: it'll all be deleted before it goes live. The one exception is to folders; if you add a new folder in 'Step 2,' that folder will actually be added to your portfolio.

To be clear, the editor on step 1 is a javascript application called CKeditor. It's a what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor, so what you put in there is literally what you get out of it. I think there are some downsides to that (what looks good in a word processing program won't necessarily look good online), but it should make things substantially easier for everyone.

At any rate, a couple things I still need to do with that submission system are:
- Photo uploads
- Content ratings

The first (photo uploads) are proving exceptionally difficult, but it should be done soon enough. The second just hasn't been added because I completely forgot about content ratings until last night.

If you notice anything missing from the submission system, speak your mind or forever hold your peace! Also, I'd like to know if you find it easy or difficult, a breeze or convoluted, etc. I'm somewhat worried about having a three-step submission system, but I'm hoping it'll actually be less confusing than the current way of doing things.

Edit

Also, please purposefully play around with the submission system. Try to make it throw an error or mess up.

Nate wrote:Also, please purposefully play around with the submission system. Try to make it throw an error or mess up.

I'll see what I can do!

I love it so far.

You say that what you see is what you post. What about BBcode? I quite like to have a spoiler as an Author's note to say what I worked on and if there's any special things I want people to comment on.

Perhaps something like an author's note would be good? If that's possible. Lots of people use them...

I like how even though my browsers are messed up and won't let me access my keyboard directly (it's an issue from my computers I think), all the formatting stays, which is good. Also, I love the 'going back in time' bit! xD


About the author's note, I pressed Source and found (what I judged as) HTML, judging by the less than/more than signs > < and I found the code below:

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<a id="show_id" onclick="document.getElementById('spoiler_id').style.display=''; document.getElementById('show_id').style.display='none';" class="link">[Show]</a><span id="spoiler_id" style="display: none"><a onclick="document.getElementById('spoiler_id').style.display='none'; document.getElementById('show_id').style.display='';" class="link">[Hide]</a><br>spoiler_content</span>

I got that from: http://gendou.com/t/26412

I was thinking that perhaps that code could be used but adapted so it's this here? :

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<a id="show_id" onclick="document.getElementById('spoiler_id').style.display=''; document.getElementById('show_id').style.display='none';" class="link">Show the Author's Note</a><span id="spoiler_id" style="display: none"><a onclick="document.getElementById('spoiler_id').style.display='none'; document.getElementById('show_id').style.display='';" class="link">Hide the Author's note</a><br>spoiler_content</span>

In the actual editor, all that came up was an unclickable [show] but when I submitted it, it worked. The text showed next to it.

I pressed source and inserted the code there.

I've no idea how it'd work, but I thought it'd be useful for you

-AB

Edit: Not that I know anything on BBcode and very little on HTML from 2 years ago, I thought I'd play around with it here:

[html]<a id="show_id" onclick="document.getElementById('spoiler_id').style.display=''; document.getElementById('show_id').style.display='none';" class="link">[Show]</a><span id="spoiler_id" style="display: none"><a onclick="document.getElementById('spoiler_id').style.display='none'; document.getElementById('show_id').style.display='';" class="link">[Hide]</a><br>spoiler_content</span>[/html]

http://www.garyshood.com/htmltobb/ says the above code would be the equivalent of this: [show]Testing[hide]

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[show]Testing[hide]

*shrugs* Just messing around.

This was a running list I created while playing around with every button on the submission system:



Overall, I really liked the setup. I was a bit put off by a few format things not working yet in the finished piece (that, thankfully, don't show up in stories often), and I loved the ability to set it to Canadian spellcheck, along with adding words.

Yet more me xD

I have a possible improvement. You know for the folders thing where you *have* to click a circle? I can't 'unclick' out of those ones. It's a bit of a stupid thing for me to ask, but in case anyone didn't want to do folders and liked it disorganised (not that I do), it'd be a bit annoying. Would it be possible to have it as a checkbox thing, but you can only click one check box?

Also, If you click URL and press upload - I'm sure you're aware - it says 'choose file'. Should that be the equivalent of:

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[img]http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_T-5Vbgiu2cc/TNycxyxxEvI/AAAAAAAAAHg/xdk9ShiRhYw/s1600/IMG_2756A.JPG[/img]

or uploading a photo from the computer? If it's the former, I'm sure you're aware it doesn't work and if it's the latter, it's a bit... hidden. Perhaps an attachment icon would be better? Also, it came up with an Error 404 when I couldn't upload my avatar, as if it was a URL.

Hope that was of any use to you

-AB

-Edit - Rosey posted before me by a few minutes and I probably posted something she did too xD Ignore any of my comments if I have.

-Edit - Edit - The quotation marks appear over the text in the quote.

Nate wrote:If you notice anything missing from the submission system, speak your mind or forever hold your peace!

Um, I remember coming onto this site like a year ago or so, and I believe there were "ratings", such as "E", "12+", "16+", and "18+". I don't know, it just seems like it's nice to make it clear which stories have more adult themes, since (to my understanding) this is a teen / young adult website after all.

Looks amazing though!

Natural Militia - Nate said he's not integrated that yet, but it'll be coming back^

AhmadBlues wrote:Natural Militia - Nate said he's not integrated that yet, but it'll be coming back^

Oops! For some reason, when I read "Content Ratings", I thought he was referring to rating stories on quality, from "1" to "5". Sorry, my bad!

So I just managed to create a spiritual politics story about a carrot named Harry who gets eaten by a pony.

I like this new format.

I'm awful at finding faults in things like this, so I don't really have anything negative to say. Think of this as complimentary feedback. I really love all the different genres we can categorise stories under, especially the fact that we can add secondary genres. I'm always awful at categorising my things, so hopefully, a broad selection of genres will sort that out.

So yeah, awesome job!

Block quote no worky and where are the colours?
I like the privacy settings. I'm not too sure whether or not the old YWS had that.

The editor eats line breaks. Things look fine in the preview, but as soon as you hit Submit, no more line breaks. Manually hitting Enter between lines results in paragraph gaps between lines, while Shift + Enter results in one giant text block. Changing the work type from Poetry to something else results in the same line-break eating.

I looked at the source of the post, and the <br> tags are there, but they don't seem to be displaying properly.

I can insert umlauts and such using ASCII codes, but I can't insert an m-dash using the Insert key (-- + Insert). The Insert key in general doesn't seem to be recognized by the editor.

In addition, the editor takes a full second to load after the page finishes, which is much longer than the plain text editor. It's not an issue on newer computers, but I'm not so sure about older ones.

---

I like how the privacy settings are the third, optional step, and also how the steps are outlined on the right. It makes the feature much more visible.

I would like to see a category for Satire. It might not be common, but in the past, quite a bit of drama has been generated by people not realizing that satirical pieces were satirical (such as this one). Having a category for satire would help cut down on such drama.

I think it would be nice to be able to select multiple secondary categories and/or list keywords.

Thank you everyone for taking the time to test out the submission system and provide recommendations! Unfortunately, I don't have the time to respond to each recommendation one by one, but I will be incorporating many of them into the system.

THE SUBMISSION SYSTEM IS NOW ESSENTIALLY LIVE. PLEASE, NO MORE TESTING.

By essentially, I mean there's still some work to be done and we're not moving to it quite yet. However, I have transferred all literary works up through January 15, 2012 to the new database.

To see any literary work, take it's topic id number and put that number at the end of:

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http://www.youngwriterssociety.com/work.php?id=

That'll give you any literary work posted up through January 15, 2012.


More notes:

- If you pull up any literary work, you'll see the 'Comments' button. Ignore it. It's just a button. Clicking it does nothing.

- You'll also see 'Administrative' for every work right now. That'll change such that you only see that for your own works. The administrative area will be for easy editing of the options (privacy setting, genres, type, etc.).

Just added line numbering for poems. It doesn't work quite right in all cases (for instance, an author's note is included in the line numbering), but it works fairly well.

So with that said, let me ask you all if the line numbering is worth it. Here are some examples:

With Line Numbering: work.php?id=91953
Current: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=91953

With Line Numbering: work.php?id=92333
Current: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=92333

With Line Numbering: work.php?id=1145
Current: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1145

If you go through all of them, line numbering works well for the first two, but not the last one because of the author's note. Still worth it?