New site - your views!

the idea of ratings are crap -- who gives a f**kc about being rated? Not me -- But I sure would love some interativity -- put some comments, get some comments in turn -- that's what is so invigorating about writing at websites like this -- But heel, do do away with kid stuff like ratings and critiquings -- that's for kindergarten --

why does it highlight the word 'none' ?

I have to be honest..... after numerous utter failures to get restarted in the past, I've just been waiting for everyone to give it the thumbs up before I dare give it another go. It does look very sleek, but I really am not sure at all that this was worth the lengthy period of confusion. Obviously, you didn't know how long it was going to take at the start, but it does feel like a terrific anticlimax.

i would like to know how to unpublish something i am not happy with ... is like having one's smalls on the line and not being able to take them in ...

I appear to have two memberships. In the e-mail you sent me, there are two user names and two passwords. Both allow me to log in to the new sight and both are user names that i use. If you remember Tony, way back - 'How ever long ago it was when i joined ABC, my original profile disappeared. My guess is that the second one is my original sign up details? Don't suppose it matters really, i will stick to using just one of them. As for the new ABC. Well I've had no problem getting around. Haven't encountered any log in probs, but i haven't tryed to put anything up yet and i don't intend to until everything is going ok. I like the look and lay out.

oh dear...i think i just made a diary i wrote in 2002 top of the last 100 sorry...and i was WARNED that "abc might be a bit confusing for you at the moment, dear"..

Just spent ninety minutes trying to put a new piece up - pasted it up and it put no paragraphs in the whole document. So, I went into edit. Put the paras in by hand. Saved it. Then every time I looked at how it would appear, there were huge bold letters. So, went back and edited it (line by line, because it wouldn't let me select all, or remove the bold (you can add it, but not remove it) ) and it still put the whole thing in as huge bold letters. And the no delete function meant that I had to keep attacking the thing rather than just giving up. And I love that the box you're editing inside bleeds from red into black, so that you can't see the last paragraph in the box without scrolling the whole bloody thing up. And that the editing tools bar remains fixed to the top, rather than at the side, so that you have to keep scrolling down in the document and then back up in the page to find the tool bar. Sorry lads, I know people have worked really really hard on it, but it just made heavy weather out of something that should have been easy. What's wrong with it just cutting and pasting from Word exactly as you laid it out? It is nice to at least have the ability to bold and italicise, so that you can put some emphasis in the dialogue, but that was so mind-numbingly user-unfriendly. I don't think I'll be posting anything else, which is a shame. And it looking in the edit box the same way it looks after you've saved it would have been fairly bright - I want the edit to be WYSIWYG.

When i uploaded my poem just there and once saved it went on to publish in a prose type format yet i uploaded ina poetry fromat. Any ideas?

Author: fish (---.proxy.aol.com) Date: 11-01-04 22:06 i would like to know how to unpublish something. fish, first I assume you CAN log in? If so, follow log-in by: clicking on 'my folder' from top right menu open folder to view set open set to find piece you want to delete put check in left column to indicate said item page down to bottom of list and click on delete. That worked for me.

Fay has mentioned everything that I think got lost in the change over say. I want to be able to see authors name and cherrys in the last one hundred. And story and poem of the day/week was great. As was author of the month. The discussion of writing from ABC forum seems to be mostly full of people telling us to read their work. One of the great things about ABC was that there were always lots of people making recommendations of other people's work and sparking discussion about it. I think part of the reason this has stopped is because of the new layout. I'm just not inspired to read anything on the last 100 because I can't see what's cherried and I can't clearly see the author's name. And when you do read something the text bar is too thin. As for the critiquing thing - I value a comment about the technical aspects of my writing - and how I can improve - far more than someone telling me they liked a piece. I think the site looks quite good at a glance but you discover when you use it that its not very practical. Joe

'But heel, do do away with kid stuff like ratings and critiquings...' Since when are critiques kid stuff? What's the matter? Afraid you might get panned?

Oh come on Tim.. don't you think that a comment such as "this really touched me thanx 4 sharing" is so much more valuable than "I suspect that the length of line 2, third stanza might be two beats out, had you noticed?"

What other changes are planned? At the moment it to me looks like just as many improvements have been initiated as downgrades. You don't get notified when your work is cherried any more for one thing. The rating thing has been kept which i don't agree with. The comments thing: Could this not be trialled for a while and voted on after say a three-six month period? 'The discuss writing forum,' is apart from sporadic bursts dead in the water. So we have to come up with something fresh surely? But i'd like to comment on the site when it is finished, seems unfair to say any of this when it is still in transition.

Like Jon, I am reluctant to get in too deep with the machinations of the site until I'm certain it's running smoothly. I know that the old site was like a staggering drunk towards the end, and needed life support. The new site may/may not be working above basic level at the moment though I'm sure it will eventually be fine. There seems to be two separate areas of dissatisfaction at the moment, one being the actual workings of the site and the other being the visual layout etc. The layout is personal preference and I for one am not overly impressed (I've mentioned narrow writing displays elsewhere). I can't comment too much on the workings as I've already said I'm reluctant to test my patience, but I have noticed that the 'searches' are limited and they need expanding and some of the old ones restored. I also would like to see the 'browse members' list returned complete with the pics. It would also be nice to see the list expanded from it's original 'last 500', and the searches I HAVE used appear to have limited results, which make them a bit of a waste of time. Sorry if this all seems negative but then again good news is rarely reported.

thank you shelagh! i was trying to change the status of a poem from inside the edit on the actual poem ... now have deleted ... x x x

Looks good, feels good is GOOD, kind of and kind of not. I quite like the old set up in way that there where bits and pieces floating about like cherrys and stuff, that was fun, seriesly it looks really professional and i suppose thats what the site is after, any way keep up the good work and have nice day.

Thankyou all for your comments. I will be writing a Help directory in the next few days that should answer most of your problems. Clearly the site is working for people as we're getting hundreds of new stories and poems each day!

I think it looks good - the front page is fine. I like the fact you can paste in HTML. It makes it much easier to format your work to look like you want it to. I say this but I have only just put up a diary piece - it looked ok when viewing it and it even had hyperlinks. In fact the editing section is very fancy - when you click on the editing history it even shows you what you've changed. And I also like that you can make sets private so they can't be viewed. Useful for storing work. And also good is the date range you can set for viewing a piece. Well worth the wait I'd say.

Well, now I've discovered it keeps logging me out. Everytime I click on Last 100 or anything then I have to log back in.

Well, I have finally managed to log in. So that's good news. I'm not going to push my luck by trying to post any stories though.

True dat, Mr Beswetherick. The forums and the writing were never seperate in my eyes. Now I feel that they are. Tis a shame.

Hum, the delete thing doesn't work for me? On the other hand, I COULD read things in last 100 today!!! What I loved about the old ABC was that it didn't matter who you were, how clever you were, what your background was or ANYTHING. You could just come here to write. It was a wonderful sense of freedom. I know I would not have written any of the stuff that's on here otherwise? Now, I feel as stupid and frustrated as I do in real life

I'm sorry, that was very rude please ignore

Spot on, Joe. That's exactly how I feel about the site. A useful addition would be an 'Alp has stopped posting' alert so that people could upload confident that their work would stay in the last 100 for at least a day.

Several changes tonight. The theme of my current activity is summed up thus: "What did the first version of the site do?" The second one, bluntly, sucked. The first one, everybody liked. Here we go. Most important one first. The others in no particular order. 1 HTML? Structured Text? Python Source? Re-structured text? Clearly it's confusing the crap out of people, and I think that very definitely *includes* the HTML option, which was never part of ABCtales until the last 'tav' version. They've all gone. Plain text, baby. Cut and paste. 2 The fonts on the site layout have been reset, since evidently most people aren't comfortable with the way they've been for the last month or so. Again - back to version 1. Helvetica for headlines. Helvetica for copy at 1.5 line space. 3 HTML being disabled, you won't be seeing Kupu and its funky colour scheme anymore either. 4 My other half (wedding next Saturday, by the way, thanks) has been through the process as someone who a) builds websites herself and b) has never used ABCtales before. She found a bug which nobody'd reported to me before. When you create a new ABC Set the site was throwing a stupid error which kept telling you you'd made a mistake. It doesn't any more. 5 She's also given me another 30 or so concrete pointers to work through to simplify the interface across the board. 6 If you don't want your stuff rated, go to your preferences and untick the box marked 'rate me'. If that doesn't work for you, I want to know about it. Email Mark and he'll send it on. 7 God damned cherries. I wish I'd never thought of them. The magic cherry picture of legend (which was, in fact, ripped off an old Pacman screen grab when we first did it 5 years ago) is still sitting along with the source code for the original web site on the very computer I'm typing at right now. It will return, imminently. (update, 10 minutes later: look! http://www.abctales.com/images/resources/cherrypicked.gif/variant/original ) 8 While I was at it I found an old front page image, which I think is one of Liana's. I've lobbed it on the front page. Nothing like the illusion of home, is there? :-) 9 We need a manual, and we need it to be placed front and centre on the front page of the site. I hereby commit *myself* to writing one which you can actually understand. To be honest, I'm as sick as any of you about the never-ending grind involved in making this thing work in a way which mimics what we had before. If we hadn't been landed a system which was written in Zope to begin with, we would probably have used something else to build the new one. But we're stuck with it, so I have to make this one work. Progress, nonetheless, is afoot. And please, please, keep moaning. But *give us URLs* if something doesn't work - how else am I going to find it? Cheers Fingers [%sig%]

2 more things 10. Changed the FP image to something less staggeringly cryptic. Sorry Liana. We need something which bears at least some passing relevance to the subject matter of the front page at the moment, imho 11. Someone asked about comments-under-stories. This can be done, relatively trivially. But it's a bit contentious. I suggest you fire up another topic to gather opinion.

I give up. How do you make something 'published' editable again.

I cant see an old front page at all, never mind a cryptic one (I never did cryptic, I'm not clever enough for that) What I can see is a graphic thank GOD, at bloody LAST. Good work John. Good luck for Saturday.

That’s what I’d like to know! I can’t even delete the published stuff that I can’t edit, so it seems like certain pieces of mine are messed up and stuck like it.

This site is dead in the water.

Big improvements - thankyou. But we're not finished - a few more on the way - and just make sure you get up before 5 p.m. on Saturday, John.

Hay don't look at me, i had nothing to do with the authoring of the sight!

Comments noted - John H. is now away with the wedding thing but is still looking in, I hope, at this Forum. I'll call him later tonight and flag this up. Thanks again, Tony

Aaah. But I know me as well as you do, TC. We've scheduled it for 7pm.

Fay - it wasn't rude at all - we do want your views. 'Cherry picking' is working but the icons aren't there yet - that will be fixed soon. 'Times read' is a bit of a nightmare for all sorts of reasons but we are working on a solution. Drew - the logging out thing is a pain. I'm on to them about it to see what solutions there are. It will all get easier (a) as you use it and (b) as we make it more user friendly. Spack - it is VERY secure now - your stuff won't get lost. We've managed to hang on to all your work during the changeover and that has been a major achievment. The 'editor' 'published' 'private' stuff sound confusing but isn't - we may need new words for it though. Basically whilst it is private, only you can see it. This allows you to post stuff then come back later and edit it before making it public. Once it goes to 'editor' then anyone can see it unless it goes on to the trusty spike but it is only 'published' once an editor has read it - either coming off the spike or from the last 100. Clear? As mud most likely. Keep the comments coming - they are very useful, however disparaging!

I don't delete any published stuff - I simply edit, highlight the content, delete it all then load it back from WORD documents on my PC via copy and paste, and it seems OK, and gets rid of all the funny characters. Unfortunately there are a few pieces which I can't edit, and everything goes back as new work via the "Last 100", so I'm only doing two or three at a time. Stories that is, poetry's not so badly mangled to begin with. Interestingly the naughty stuff - or quite innocent stuff which falls foul of the filter - goes back on the editors' spike and can either lose or gain "cherries" in the process!

I guess, once it's all sorted out, maybe a link to a little FAQ or step-by-step guide for a first timer wanting to post a poem would be helpful. Not an entirely altruistic suggestion, since I'd quite like a brief walkthrough of uberabctales.

The obssession with bloody cherries on this site amazes me.

It's my job for tomorrow - to get it started at least!

Neil - you have it right! I have no problem with stuff that is edited going back into the last 100 - that's great as far as I am concerned. You've had another look at it, changed it a bit and back it goes into the cosmos. alp and others - the editing bit is top of the techie's list and I'll get back to you tomorrow (Friday) on it. trev - thanks for the support. I'm really pleased you'd paid so much money towards us. Cheers, Tony

Liana, and anyone really. About layout. Write your poem as you want it on Word. Then save it as a web page. Open this document in Notepad and cut and past the html code of the poem into the submission box on abc making sure HTML is selected at the bottom. It should appear as you want it then. Hopefully. That's what I did and my diary 'looks' right.

Tim, that's one of the things that I'm beavering away at as you type. To be honest, I'm playing about and trying to break things myself, to see 'exactly' how best to explain how the thing works. What I need is a list of the cracks that you're falling down when you're using the site. I agree that, at the moment, the whole thing looks daunting and overwhelming. It's a bit like "I've just spent all day doing work, I don't want to work at having bloody fun". There are some definate benefits to the site as it stands now, it can just be hard to see them when confronted with so much new stuff to take in. Send me an email titled 'Oh bugger it's all gone wrong' detailing what you've found, what hasn't happened and what information you need.

hm, it's just taken me over 30 mins to get a piece on the site and it still comes out double-spaced. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? (I'm c&ping from word)

I can see where you're going wrong Mark, take your face out of the beaver!

Write your poem as you want it on Word. Then save it as a web page. Open this document in Notepad and cut and past the html code of the poem into the submission box on abc making sure HTML is selected at the bottom. It should appear as you want it then. Ok, I can do that (pretty) easily enough - but what about folk who arent particularly techie? For example, I cant see Jay/Kath managing all that?

Scanning Liana's last post for box-cutters... Okay, it's clear. And now sarcasm... *whoop-whoop-whoop!!* Aha. Takes me a while sometimes. Gotta keep irony alive, or the terrorists have won.

I joined up a looooong time ago, well before this overhaul, and decided to check back in once I saw that some work was being done. And while it appears as though I'm being redundant, based on all the previous posts in this discussion, here's my two cents. Pretty much everything that turned me off about the site the first time is still there. It's slow and hard to navigate, the format isn't terribly user-friendly (and rather bland anyway), the upload feature is kind of a joke, but most importantly, it's still nearly impossible to correctly format a story without knowing HTML. I'm a member of other sites that have found an incredibly simple way to solve this problem: They teach people HTML. Or at least offer a help window with basic commands in it. If a person really cares enough about their work, they won't mind taking the time to enter in a few extraneous characters. All in all, an ambitious and well-intentioned idea with a disappointing execution. Bravo to you, however, for encouraging writers and trying to give them a place to showcase their talents. Your heart was certainly in the right place. happy writing, stacy [%sig%]

I'm with Andrew on the bleeding edit box thing - I would hold forth further, but to be honest I think the site is 2x better from the last couple of hours I have pried my e-fingers through it. Hello Fay! I have heard some news of you!? Mail me - r.watt@dundee.ac.uk

i have a small gripe on the reading side ... in the past when i have been looking through the last 100 for something to read my first trawl would be via the author's names ... especially if i didnt have too much time i would have a scan through and pick up familiar names to read ... (and to avoid) .... or to pick up on someone new ... in the new 100 the names are difficult to distinguish - they seem to blend in among some other insignficant (to me) information .... e.g. .... [1%] by wandelaar, 2004-11-14 08:35 .... and it's in teeny weeny grey type ... now all i want to pick up from that is the author ... and it makes it more difficult to scan and select ... gripe over ...

My gripeis that abc is no longer easy to use... seeing as it is supposed to appeal to people who might otherwise find it difficult to get their work 'out there' i find it astonishing that it has become something that only an IT graduate can navigate with ease.