Ace_Arriande
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2019
- Messages
- 256
- Points
- 133
I would love to see this site succeed in the long-term, so here are my suggestions to try and cover all areas. Since the site is going to mainly have readers if it’s successful, I’ll start with that.
Reader Suggestions
Author Suggestions
Reader Suggestions
- Better branching of comments rather than all comments being tied to a single parent.
- Personally, I believe that making the “Latest Updates” section smaller and adding rotating sections for trending fictions in certain genres would be better than having the Latest Updates box take up such a huge amount of the page. What I mean by rotating sections is like, perhaps one week the front page shows the most trending/best-ranked stories for the Action, Fantasy, and Isekai genres. The next week, it shows Romance, Sci-fi, and Sports.
- Visible covers for new releases by default. I get that the current method allows more novels to show up since they’re not taking up as much space, and some covers might look “bad” or have no cover at all, but many people get their attention drawn to covers. Even if a book doesn’t have a cover, it has a larger chance of catching their attention than just being one name in a list of many. It’s also important to keep in mind that most people have a very short attention span. They want to see big visuals upfront right away.
- Make longer titles available to read instead of cutting them off.
- More sections under the “Read” category such as: Latest Updated and Random/Surprise.
- “Favorites” honestly seems kind of pointless to me since it favors a large quantity of chapters over quality. “Favorites” should be tied to stories rather than individual chapters, otherwise it’s essentially another version of readers but specifically for stories with an abundance of chapters. Two people favoriting every chapter of a story with 500 chapters (1000 total favorites) is going to make it look like more people love the story than 50 people who favorite each chapter of a story with only 10 chapters (500 total favorites).
- From what I can tell (since a certain somebody didn’t listen to me when I told them not to submit a troll review), it seems like reviews have to be manually approved in the same way that new stories are. While this will certainly help cut down on the amount of low-effort/troll reviews that are on the site, I believe that it would be better to let reviews automatically go through and then allow authors/other readers to report them if they are breaking any rules. Just the knowledge of reviews needing approval can open up a ton of potential drama, and if the site gets big, it’s going to be a lot of moderation work to go through all new submissions and reviews.
- Allowing people to sort series by the highest rated stories, and having a section on the front page potentially dedicated to this, is great for drawing in new readers since they can get drawn in by what the most popular stories are. People want to know what the community considers to be the best of the best, and it can also give potential writers a good idea of what sort of audience to target.
- The “Series Finder” page, as it is right now, is going to be intimidating to anybody new to the site. Not only is it just a long list of one option after the other, but you have to manually input the numbers yourself. I wouldn’t be surprised if many casual readers open up the page and immediately give up upon just seeing a large list of empty fields they have to fill out. If anything, everything below “Genre” should be moved to the top with all of those advanced fields being available but hidden by default.
- This was already in another thread, but combine the profiles for SH and the forum. This allows people to easily check on profiles to see what others might be reading or writing and will cause less confusion for newcomers. The easier the site is to use and the less effort people have to put in to use it well, the more the site will grow.
- A method to follow and rate the story at the end of the latest chapter available for it, or at the end of every chapter. Most readers aren't going to remember to do something like that unless it's right there in their face. The vast majority of my reviews/ratings/favorites/follows over on Royal Road were from me having to remind everybody to go and do it while including links. Give people the ability to easily do so right from the end of a chapter and more of them will do it. Furthermore, putting the similar series below the latest chapter rather than on the series' homepage should get more use out of that.
- This is for readers and authors, but an easy and obvious way to contact support somewhere on the front page of the website.
Author Suggestions
Better tables. Right now, tables can have different cells, columns, rows, etc, but no borders show up between them. For example, this is what one of my "big" tables looks like in Word where I make them. This is what it looks like on Royal Road after a bit of editing. This is what it looks like on SH. Now, I know that this is more of a problem with WordPress because that's how it was on my own WordPress website. My programmer was able to get it looking like how it did in Word, but unfortunately, it seems like WordPress did something and now it's back to looking like it does here on SH even on my own site, so I can't use that as an example. Anyways, not having borders inside of tables looks messy and makes information harder to understand from a quick glance.- The ability to add polls to chapters for readers with accounts to do.
- Explain what authors can do with the glossary by giving them examples of items to add to it.
- Hover-over descriptions for all of the genres when submitting stories. Right now, there's no way to tell what the difference is between Adult, Mature, Smut, Ecchi, etc. People need to know what SH's standards for those genres are. This could also be applied to tags, but I really only think it's important for the genres.
- The ability to preview chapters before posting them.
- More obvious links on how to support authors such as by having buttons at the bottom of each chapter that lead to an author's PayPal or Patreon. Just like how readers aren't as likely to rate/follow a story if they have to go back to the series' main page, they're not going to be likely to donate to an author if they're expected to go and click a tiny drop-down menu on the series' main page or on the author's profile. The more obvious these things are, the more support the authors get.
- Having multiple default covers to choose from in the event of the author not having a cover of their own would be great. Also, previewing the uploaded cover instead of just showing its filename when uploading a new story.
- For authors' sake and moderations' sake, make the link to the content guidelines more obvious and put them right at the very top of the page when submitting a new fiction. Probably link to them again at the bottom.
- Clarify the content guidelines in general. One part says the age of consent is 16, implying to the average reader that it's alright to write sex scenes involving people below the age of 18, but 16-year-olds can consent to having sex while still being guilty of child pornography if they were to take nudes of themselves, for example. So, only one of these is needed. Is it "16-year-olds and older can have sex," or is it "no child pornography allowed?" If it's the latter, there's no point in having the former since it's only going to confuse people and send the wrong message. IANAL, and I'm definitely not familiar with Canadian law which the site seems to be going off of, but it seems like the age of consent doesn't matter since Canada still considers sexual materials involving anybody under the age of 18 to be child pornography regardless of age of consent.
- To build off of the previous suggestion, make it clear whether shota/loli content is allowed. Let's face it, there are going to be people wanting to lewd the lolis by having 500-year-old dragon lolis or 2000-year-old loli vampires. It doesn't help that a loli and shota tag are both available to choose from when tagging stories. If no characters who appear to be under the age of 18 are allowed to be sexualized, regardless of their "real" age, then that should be stated. Even something like "bestiality," which is already prohibited under the current content guidelines, could go for more clarification. Does that include real-world animals, fantasy animals, or both? What if the animals have human-intelligence and the ability to clearly consent? What about monsters such as orcs or hybrids such as centaurs? I suggest clarifying it just enough to be a bit more specific while still being vague enough to give moderators some room to work with in any future cases. Context is obviously important, and there are going to be people upset no matter how these matters are clarified, but making it more obvious should hopefully prevent some future drama.
- "Porngraphic stories" could also be clarified a bit better. At what point does something get considered pornographic? How much plot is required for a story with sex scenes to be seen as non-pornographic? Heck, a slice of life story could technically have 50 chapters without any plot at all and then have 1 chapter of sex. That would be "porn without a plot" depending on how you look at it.
Last edited: