Forum: Site Announcements

How will removal of multi-author stories' support affect the authors' credits toward earned premier membership?

AJ

As for Interactive stories, well after six years we have 9 stories and most of them were never updated and several have no real branches, so it's also a failed feature and needs removal.

When do you expect this to take effect?

What would happen to existing interactive stories? And when are you looking at dropping them?

(Wondering if it's worth continuing to work on one I started.)

Feel free to correct me, but was there not a post in the forums (fairly) recently about the creation of interactive stories? And wasn't one of the main points of it about how no-one (or very few people) actually knew how to create an interactive story and that was the main reason it wasn't used?

Or did I dream it?

I have a niggling memory that someone was going to write a tutorial/instructions on how to use the system properly...

I'm still intrigued on giving it a go, but alas, the usual time constraints and other 'stuff'.

Or did I dream it?

That thread did exist and it was explained.

and it was explained

I always miss the important parts...

I looked back and the post was from three years ago Link to post here but in my somewhat limited mind, it doesn't really explain how to go about it.

In my idea, the story would start with something along the lines of

"My head was pounding and I really needed to piss, so I slowly climbed out of bed and headed towards the bathroom. I ran the sink tap, washed my face and looked at myself in the mirror.

(option A) A male with bloodshot eyes looked back at me.

(option B) A female with bloodshot eyes looked back at me.

(option C) A thing with tentacles and way too many eyes looked back at me.

Please choose an option to continue.."

The reader makes their choice out of A,B, or C (or whatever) and the story then branches to the next chapter. That's how I see an interactive story working.

Now the issue is that potentially the start of the 'story' is only thirty seven or so words long before the next chapter. I could make it somewhat longer, if I reduce the choice available to the reader, but I am loathe to do that, as I would wish to give the reader the choice of the protagonists sex/other (after all, it's supposed to be interactive/ a chose your own adventure).

I looked back and the post was from three years ago Link to post here but in my somewhat limited mind, it doesn't really explain how to go about it.

I was referring to this thread from January:

How to post an interactive story?

Where guidence was provided.

Where guidence was provided.

Guidance to a certain extent was provided by Laz, but when that guidance consists of :question by Quasirandom:

When you add a chapter, how do you indicate which previous chapter it branches from?

:Answer by Laz:

Yes.

One has to ponder the effectiveness of the guidance...

I did one interactive story about a year ago, and it was an interesting experience. If I were to try another it might go better, but with the support to be discontinued, I'm not sure it's worth it.

One of the reasons I did an interactive story was to find out reader preferences, but it turns out the stats do not show downloads by chapter.

Another potential issue is that readers don't have an opportunity to score the story until after the last chapter. But branches ending before the final chapter don't provide the reader an opportunity to vote. Possibly this could be circumvented by linking all the branches to a final chapter which consists perhaps of nothing but "The End."

Possibly the most important issue has to do with timing. You can't submit a subsequent chapter until the previous chapter has been posted. This could be a problem for a reader who wishes to make his way through the story without having to wait. It also could be a timing problem for the author in scheduling the subsequent chapters. I imagine it could be a problem for the host if there were more than a few chapters to be posted. A long, complicated story might have dozens of branches. In my little story there were only three branches from the initial chapter, but I suspect trying to coordinate dozens of branches would be stressful.

One feature which could be useful: a way to mark a story invisible to all but the author until the author marks it visible. I have no idea how difficult that would be to implement.

I agree with pretty much everything you have written. In fact, I'm pretty sure that writing such a story would only work if it was all organised before hand (very difficult given that the majority of us here are enthusiastic beginners) or there was a function to 'hide' the story until it was finished. The obvious issue is that, the time frame between starting and finishing might be year or more, or even worse, never.

Laz has to weigh up the pro's and cons (and the financial implications) and decide which is the best result for the site as a whole. As he has stated, there is not much interest for it at the moment. Could that be because both reader and writer do not know of it's existence? I don't know. Could that all change with the addition of some well written interactive stories? Again, I do not know.

since she had to stop writing (and the only new story on their own website was not up long enough to be noticed by the Wayback Machine before the site vanished

Velvet Wood passed away on March 22, 2017 of throat cancer.

She and her husband, dstar, were a husband-wife writing team, and her passing was announced on their website, The Worlds of Pele's Playground, which as you noted is no longer accessible. Her author account has also been removed from SOL.

I am in the process of updating her Contributor's Page on the ReaderInfo website.

Just for clarification. It is my understanding that:

1) If an author's account contains stories cowritten by 2 or more authors, the stories will be retained by one of the author accounts and the stories will be removed from the other author accounts.

2) If the removal of multi-author stories from an author's accounts results in the account having no stories listed, the account will be removed.

No. She was his wife.

I think what Lazeez is saying is, dstar, not his wife, asked that the Velvet Wood account be created.

So, coming in late, yes. She actually _didn't_ ask for her account to be created, and (as far as I know, I could be wrong) never even bothered to log in. I just wanted her to be credited for her contributions.

Something I'm still glad of, even after six years after I lost her. Lazeez did the right thing; I'm fairly sure, but I can't remember after all this time... but I think she asked me to have him create the account. Almost positive, in fact, but it's been so long, well.