Literature Forum News!

[Andromeda]

Hello everyone! As you have very easily seen the forum upgrade have brought in quite a few new things for TFF. Something that I was working with Merlin was working on improving the visibility and communication with the Literature Forum, specifically written works we post here.

To that end, I want to let you all know that we've setup specific categories for posting written works if you wish to do so in the "Blogs" section of the forums. Merlin has create categories for these that you'll want to use when posting your work so that it is grouped correctly. It still falls under the "Blogs" section, but organization has it separated.

The advantages of using the Blog area over the forum is that it is faster to access and comments can be made on your chapters/poetry without interrupting your writing. Plus readers can post comments individually on chapters even long after they have been posted. So you can easily get directed feedback and you can respond easily to your readers in there. This should help improve communication and interaction with everyone.

If you're interested in this I'll walk through the steps here on how to use it.

When you look at the "Blogs" you'll already find some of my stories posted, meant as an example. So you can look at those if you get lost or wondering on methods for setting things up, but it is pretty straightforward.

The posting/creating part is very easy, you go to the "Blogs" tab at the top of the page and select it. This will take you to recent postings and on the right you'll see the button for "Create New Post". Click the button and enter your poem or chapter into the field. Before confirming the post you'll want to do one more thing.

This part is for the categories that Merlin created. He made basic ones that everyone will use, you can make personal ones that you use only for yourself to aid readers in finding all chapters part of one story.

Scroll down the page to additional options, where you'll find at the top "Blog Categories". The ones you're interested in will be the Literature ones (note that there are art ones as well as we're testing that out to see if it might be useful for artists as well). Selecting the check box for one of those with Literature to group it into that category. Also, when you create your own categories they will be place in "Local Categories" under the "Global Categories" Merlin made. Anyone selecting these categories will find your story.

However, if you have multiple stories you will probably want to make some of your own. To do this you will want to go into the "Blog Settings" link at the top where is says "My Blog", "Recent Entries", etc. From the "Blog Settings" page you will want to go into the "Manage Categories" link found near the bottom of the list on the left side of the page.

This is the page you'll be adding new categories. When you want to add a new one, click the "Add New Blog Category" (found near to the lower right side of the page) and it will take you to a new page. Here you need to enter the name of the category, a description if you wish, choose if you wish to parent it to another category and the order you want it in the list. Name and description are easy to follow so I will go into the other two.

Parenting is for when you want to add a new category as a subset of an existing category. You can only do this with your own personal categories, not the ones that Merlin created. So the first time you make one it won't have anything to select. The thing to remember when you're posting your writing and selecting categories, if you select one that is parented, then the category it is linked to will also be added even without you checking the box.

The order number will arrange how you want the categories to be seen both for you and your readers. As when they are on your profile page in the blogs they'll see your categories and can navigate to your writing that way. So order the categories how you want them to get the attention what you feel is important. Just remember parented categories will always be underneath the linked category so you can't have it at the top, you need the linked category at the top if you wish it.

If you have any questions about this or concerns let me know and I'll be happy to answer them.

I hope this will help everyone out. Any feedback or ideas on how to improve this please post or send me a message. We may not be able to do everything asked, but I want to try to make it work for everyone and improve things.

[DragonHeart]

Just out of curiosity, does that mean the lit/art forums will eventually be phased out and replaced with the blog categories? If not, it might be worth the while to see if stories posted in blogs also automatically were posted as threads in here, like news articles from the main site. And if possible, maybe export existing story threads into blogs, like journals supposedly will be in the future.

Just a thought, I'm not all that familiar with the new features yet.

[Andromeda]

Yeah I know you can convert posts into a blogs, but I'm not sure if you can do the reverse. I know by default blogs don't make posts in the forum. Merlin would probably be able to have a better answer on if it is possible to do the reverse.

For now, I want people to test out and see if they like the layout that the Blogs offers. If it doesn't work out, we still have the Literature and Art forums to fall back on. I'm still going to be using it for Shift, since it is way too long right now to put there. I'm mainly put up some examples and will be bringing back my old stories that got deleted. But I like that it has a little better visibility and linked with specific individuals, so if you what you read you can find more of their stuff without going too far.

I think there's a lot of pluses to it, but I want to let everyone decide how they feel rather than enforcing a change. Right now it is just a new avenue you can choice to post your writing to. If the writers we have agree that it's not helpful or they don't like it we'll stop using it and stay with only the forums. If it becomes popular and people like it, then the Literature Forum probably would be used solely for discussion books and things you've read while creative works would be found in the blog area. Because there are two sections to the Literature Forum I can't see it going away completely.