Young Writers Society

A couple changes for today! New books tab and the cost to post a new literary work is now 300 points.

A little less than a week ago, I added tabs for Poetry and Short Stories as an experiment; that is, to see if that boosted reviewing in those areas. Well, the results are in and they're... inconclusive. There was a slight bump (~10%) in reviews after the tabs were placed in, but it wasn't a big bump and so it's hard to say if the bump would've happened regardless of the tabs. If I had some time, I could code in some A/B testing, but alas.

However, I personally like having the tabs so I added the third one for Novels (henceforth Books) as mentioned previously in the Apollo Updates thread. As you can tell looking at the navigational bar, this is likely to be the last tab ever, although I could always do what Amazon used to do (it was a lot easier to navigate back then)...

By the way, the "Weblogs" tab will soon be changed to just "Blogs." I'm holding off on doing that though until I'm done with a redesign of the blog index page, as well as a new blog template.

The second change is lowering the point cost for new works from 500 points to 300 points, and it will likely stay at 300 points. That's equivalent to two solid reviews in the Green Room, and three reviews otherwise. However, if doing just the bare minimum to count as a review, that would be 12 reviews.

To recap the difference between Green Room and regular reviews...

- Writing 250 characters (roughly 4 sentences) will earn you 25 points anywhere

- Each character in a regular review is worth .1 points, with a maximum of 100 total. So a 1,000 character review (~16 sentences or three paragraphs) will earn you 100 points.

- In the Green Room, each character after the initial 250 counts for 0.2 points up to a maximum of 150 points. So a 725 character review (~12 sentences) will earn you 150 points.

The initial results from lowering the point cost seem to be very good. The number of literary works posted today doubled from yesterday, but so did the number of reviews.

By the way, if you'd like to see the stats updated constantly, go here:
http://youngwriterssociety.com/stats.php

Ignore the oldest day for each of the columns; that stats page works by looking at the past 240 hours, not the past 10 days.

I may eventually get used to it but now, so many tabs!
Something that may also be worth trying (if it is possible) is to have the Books, Poetry, and Shorts tabs appear in a dropdown box whenever you mouse over All Literary because right now (for me at least), the line of tabs is looking a bit too cluttered.

No drop-downs!

The problem with drop-downs is they don't work on smartphones or on tablets. They also hide menu options and can be confusing for new visitors as a result. If something is important enough to be in the top navigation bar, then it should be displayed as such. Otherwise, it can go in the footer.

There are a lot of tabs now, but I'm sure people will get used to it. The more important thing is that it makes it much easier to access the most popular areas of the Literary section, which should lead to more reviews there.

There ARE a lot of tabs now. (And submissions cost points? What? Since When? ....I have not submitted anything in a LONG time, xD)

Tabs are nice, but maybe you could reorder them so Books, Shorts, and Poetry come right after "All Literary," would make more sense to me... took me forever to find that "Books" button.

("But it's alphabetized!" Eh... who cares about the alphabet, we're writers afterall. Heh.)

Eh, well . . . I personally like the changes.



They're great. Personally however I'd do better with a 'Novel Chapter' tab . . .

But anyway.

I should go ahead and start organizing the tabs based on the Dewey Decimal System.

That would be nice. Also, SBs should be at the end. 'Twould make it special, then.