Ace's Many Suggestions

Ace_Arriande

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Jan 2, 2019
Messages
256
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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
  • 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.
 
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Ace_Arriande

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 2, 2019
Messages
256
Points
133
Community Suggestions
  • More channels in Discord with moderation to keep them on-topic. Media sharing channels, a channel to ask for recommendations (not to shamelessly self-promote unless relevant), announcements channel, a channel for posting user-creations such as covers and art, etc. Speaking of Discord, include an obvious link to it somewhere on the front page such as in the banner. Everybody who I've gotten to join the Discord had no idea that there even was a Discord until I told them, and I didn't even know myself until I was told. The only way to know one exists is to actually read the entirety of the email confirmation, and let's face it, not many people are going to do it. They (myself included) just want to click the confirmation link and get it over with. So, I'm a living example of how short the average person's attention span is.
  • To continue with Discord suggestions: a bot to automatically link SH(F) accounts to Discord accounts in order to save on the role-assigning work, more rules such as disallowing political/religious/social debates, and I don't really see any use in the #arrivals and #updates channels. The #updates one would be better off for brand new stories to bring attention to them rather than just posting the latest chapters of stories.
  • Achievements. It seems like the forum might already have trophies(?), but site-wide achievements would be great to promote overall activity. Reward people for posting enough words (but not individual chapters/stories), reaching a certain amount of total followers/readers/views/favorites, for posting comments/reviews, for posting in the forums, for getting likes on comments/reviews/posts, for being able to reach the top of any category, etc. A "best ranked" achievement to the #1 story on the site could also encourage people, but I honestly think it'd be fairer to the community to give more people the chance to get such an achievement by getting to the top of a particular tag/genre/list. Then there could also be achievements for both participating and completing/winning contests. There can also be achievements for writing/posting every day, have daily/weekly goals/"missions," and more. There could also be varying tiers of achievements with the highest-achieved tier being the one that shows up, and make achievements visible on profiles and series' pages. Even readers could maybe choose to display one or two comments whenever they comment.
  • Perhaps an "artist" section and role where authors and readers alike can look through user-submitted art to get in touch with and commission artists for covers, (fan)art, etc. They can even get achievements for doing free art/covers for people. As far as I know, no other major fiction website has a section like this specifically for community artists that isn't basically just a forum board.

Monetization Suggestions
  • Premium memberships. Let people have fancy borders around their avatars/comments/posts, some special flairs, achievements for supporting the site + supporting it for a certain amount of time, hide advertisements, special Discord role/channel, maybe access to a special premium-only forum board, animated avatars, etc. There could maybe be a "favorite story" option that allows premium users to represent their favorite story by showing its title + cover wherever they comment/post alongside their own avatar and name.
  • Premium authors can have a special section on the front page that rotates through all of the stories of premium authors, or let premium authors choose a single one of their stories (probably better than allowing them to display all their stories) to show up in this section.
  • Premium authors could also get access to more statistics regarding their stories such as customizable fiction headers/footers/backgrounds, what countries most of their readers are from, referrals, views/comments/ratings per day, etc.

EDIT: Mobile App
  • I forgot to mention this, and this is obviously something for the (far) future, but a mobile app. People love reading from their phones and it would bring in a huge surge of new users.

EDIT 2: Chapter Sorting
  • People don't like spoilers. Sorting chapters by the latest first means that people might get spoiled through chapter titles. It's also one extra step readers have to go through if they want to start from the beginning of the story. It should be a user option to decide between whether they want chapters on series' pages to be sorted from the last to first or first to last, but it should be sorted from the first chapters showing up first by default.
EDIT 3: Ratings
  • As it stands right now, once you rate a story and then refresh the page, there is no visual indicator to tell that you rated the story. There is no way to remove the rating either from what I can tell. I rated my own story to test and now I feel dirty for it since I can't remove it : (. But yeah, there's no way to tell that you actually rated a story unless you left a review and there's no way to completely remove your rating.
Alright, I think that's all for now x_x. I hope that at least a few of these might be useful!
 
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kohlth

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Jan 8, 2019
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Scrapbook_1546464727766.png
love the suggestions, can't wait to see what happens from them.

p.s.
maybe have a way to tap and jump to the next portion of text or flip a page for those who get tired to scrolling down on large chapters
 

Tony

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  • 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.

You're right. It is intimidating. I'll hide most of the options by default with an "advanced" link to show all options.

  • 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.

That's a good idea. It's better to make it as easy as possible for users. Here's a link to rate/review at least: https://www.scribblehub.com/series/3147/the-queens-hound/?tab=review_helpful#comments <--- Basically just add "?tab=review_helpful#comments" to the end of your story URL.

As for a direct link to follow, that's simple to implement so I can do that.


  • 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.

You can already add borders. Here's an example: https://www.scribblehub.com/read/3371-test-novel/chapter/4706/

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  • The ability to add polls to chapters for readers with accounts to do.
  • 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.

That's planned.

  • The ability to preview chapters before posting them.

If you save as draft first, you can preview the chapter. A "preview" link will appear.

  • 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.

That's easy. I can definitely add this.

  • 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.

loli is more of describing someone that looks like a loli. loli is fine while lolicon being sexualized is a no.""bestiality" is just real world animals. I'll clarify all of this tomorrow. As in I'll fix the content guidelines. It's late here :(

  • "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.

I meant the whole story being porn without plot, not a chapter or 50% of the story. Your stories seem fine though so I wouldn't worry about it.

  • More channels in Discord with moderation to keep them on-topic. Media sharing channels, a channel to ask for recommendations (not to shamelessly self-promote unless relevant), announcements channel, a channel for posting user-creations such as covers and art, etc. Speaking of Discord, include an obvious link to it somewhere on the front page such as in the banner. Everybody who I've gotten to join the Discord had no idea that there even was a Discord until I told them, and I didn't even know myself until I was told. The only way to know one exists is to actually read the entirety of the email confirmation, and let's face it, not many people are going to do it. They (myself included) just want to click the confirmation link and get it over with. So, I'm a living example of how short the average person's attention span is.

I'll summon @Aster for you since I can't take care of the discord server. I need to spend all of my time improving and growing the site.

Monetization Suggestions
  • Premium memberships. Let people have fancy borders around their avatars/comments/posts, some special flairs, achievements for supporting the site + supporting it for a certain amount of time, hide advertisements, special Discord role/channel, maybe access to a special premium-only forum board, animated avatars, etc. There could maybe be a "favorite story" option that allows premium users to represent their favorite story by showing its title + cover wherever they comment/post alongside their own avatar and name.
  • Premium authors can have a special section on the front page that rotates through all of the stories of premium authors, or let premium authors choose a single one of their stories (probably better than allowing them to display all their stories) to show up in this section.
  • Premium authors could also get access to more statistics regarding their stories such as customizable fiction headers/footers/backgrounds, what countries most of their readers are from, referrals, views/comments/ratings per day, etc.

I'm not thinking of any monetization at the moment. I don't even have ads on the site at the moment. Thanks for the suggestions though! I'll have to read it again once I'm ready and if I want to go that route.

I'll re-read this thread again @Ace_Arriande when I have time to sit down and implement things. I know I missed a lot. Thanks for taking the time to write everything.
 

Aster

Moderator
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Dec 23, 2018
Messages
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More channels in Discord with moderation to keep them on-topic. Media sharing channels, a channel to ask for recommendations (not to shamelessly self-promote unless relevant), announcements channel, a channel for posting user-creations such as covers and art, etc. Speaking of Discord, include an obvious link to it somewhere on the front page such as in the banner. Everybody who I've gotten to join the Discord had no idea that there even was a Discord until I told them, and I didn't even know myself until I was told. The only way to know one exists is to actually read the entirety of the email confirmation, and let's face it, not many people are going to do it. They (myself included) just want to click the confirmation link and get it over with. So, I'm a living example of how short the average person's attention span is.
In the works:
Media Sharing Channel
Recommendation Channel

Questions!
Announcement channel for what? Author announcements?
Would it be better to only have a creations channel on the forum? Discord isn't exactly a good place to be organised.
To continue with Discord suggestions: a bot to automatically link SH(F) accounts to Discord accounts in order to save on the role-assigning work, more rules such as disallowing political/religious/social debates, and I don't really see any use in the #arrivals and #updates channels. The #updates one would be better off for brand new stories to bring attention to them rather than just posting the latest chapters of stories.
I'm no tech expert so there isn't a way for me to implement bots that do more specific tasks. It's really not that time consuming adding roles to members manually. Perhaps in the future there will be more mods but for now it's manageable. The #updates channel was a request from other members on the discord and it got created because of that. The bot is linked to SH rss feed which shows all updates on SH regardless of their newness.

I'll add that rule in. Is this because of something you saw? If it was, you can always ping me and screenshot anything that makes you uncomfortable.
Premium memberships. Let people have fancy borders around their avatars/comments/posts, some special flairs, achievements for supporting the site + supporting it for a certain amount of time, hide advertisements, special Discord role/channel, maybe access to a special premium-only forum board, animated avatars, etc. There could maybe be a "favorite story" option that allows premium users to represent their favorite story by showing its title + cover wherever they comment/post alongside their own avatar and name.
Whatever Tony said take precedence!

Thanks for your suggestions! I just need to implement some of them...sometime today.
 

Nahrenne

Pure and Innocent Maiden~
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Keep up the good work, everyone~!
X
 

Ace_Arriande

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Joined
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Messages
256
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133
In the works:
Questions!
Announcement channel for what? Author announcements?
Would it be better to only have a creations channel on the forum? Discord isn't exactly a good place to be organised.

Discord and website related "official" announcements. For example, @everyone announcements for official contests, major site updates, or anything else that is "important" to either the Discord server, forums, or the main website. Like, if important news that people should read gets posted on the forums by Tony, then the announcements channel could @everyone with a link to the forum thread.

As for the creations channel (assuming that you're referencing what I was talking about with user-creations such as art/covers), there could be a Discord channel for it and a forum board for it. It might be as important to have it on the Discord server since it seems like both NU and now SH have really active forums, and I'm not used to that, honestly. This is probably the first forum that I've posted on more than once in like... at least a decade. When I think of Discord channels for things like user creations, though, I imagine artists sharing any art (whether finished or WIP) there. There could even be a certified artist role so that everybody can see the channel, but only people who have proven that they're artists can actually post in there to prevent it from getting cluttered. There could be a separate channel then where anybody could actually discuss the art.

But, like I said. The forum seems active already and like it's going to get even more active, so it might be better to just leave that for here. I'm used to most people being on Discord servers and forums being dead = P.

As for the rule regarding political/religious stuff, there's pretty much nothing that could make me uncomfortable, but I just believe it's a good rule to have since those conversations always get spicy fast. If there are three things I've learned to never talk about on the internet unless you want to start drama, they are: religion, politics, and social issues. In my opinion, it's better for communities to outright ban those topics or contain them to specific boards/channels than to hope that only mature and respectful people try to discuss them.

Now, in regard to suggestion channels, they're good but I don't really think they're going to be too useful in their current state. In my opinion, suggestion channels work best when they serve as a place of discussion for somebody seeking a story to come and ask, "Hey, I'm looking for X, Y, and Z. Any recommendations?" Otherwise, channels like these turn into self-promotion channels a majority of the time, and self-promotion on forums/servers usually just serves to clutter the place up with little return. That's also why I'm not a big fan of the sh-updates channel. It clutters up the channel list and I can't honestly see many people actually going to stories through those links. The shf-updates channel is now even more guilty of just being extra clutter = P. There is also the problem, especially with the sh-updates channel, that it takes people directly to the latest chapter linked. What if there are spoilers right away and somebody is only checking the story out for the first time? This is why I think it's a good idea for brand new stories, but not to link every chapter from every story. Anybody who is actually following these stories is likely going to be following them on the website itself and can get a notification there, and anybody who isn't already following these stories risks getting spoiled.

But, I'm a minimalist who likes to try and keep designs simple, so take what I suggest with that into consideration. For my own server with about 500 people in it now, I only keep the bare minimum of channels: rules, announcements, a channel for people seeking help or advice (mainly with stories), a media sharing channel, and a voice channel with an associated "no mic" channel so that people who are in voice chat but are unable to speak can send their voice-chat-related messages/media there. Then I have discussion channels for each of my main stories, a channel specifically for other people's stories, and that's it.
 

Aster

Moderator
Staff member
Joined
Dec 23, 2018
Messages
50
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Discord and website related "official" announcements. For example, @everyone announcements for official contests, major site updates, or anything else that is "important" to either the Discord server, forums, or the main website. Like, if important news that people should read gets posted on the forums by Tony, then the announcements channel could @everyone with a link to the forum thread.
Oh yes! An "official" announcement channel is a great idea! I'll try and implement that soon.
As for the creations channel (assuming that you're referencing what I was talking about with user-creations such as art/covers), there could be a Discord channel for it and a forum board for it. It might be as important to have it on the Discord server since it seems like both NU and now SH have really active forums, and I'm not used to that, honestly. This is probably the first forum that I've posted on more than once in like... at least a decade. When I think of Discord channels for things like user creations, though, I imagine artists sharing any art (whether finished or WIP) there. There could even be a certified artist role so that everybody can see the channel, but only people who have proven that they're artists can actually post in there to prevent it from getting cluttered. There could be a separate channel then where anybody could actually discuss the art.

But, like I said. The forum seems active already and like it's going to get even more active, so it might be better to just leave that for here. I'm used to most people being on Discord servers and forums being dead = P.
The forums are fairly active on NUF and it will most likely be the same for SHF in the future. We have the artist subforum up now so hopefully people will start using them in the near future. Perhaps in the future there will be a artist channel on the discord, but let's try it with the forum and see where it takes us.

Thanks for deciding to join both SH and SHF! We really appreciate more people joining both authors and readers. Without either one, there wouldn't be much of a original novels site at all.
As for the rule regarding political/religious stuff, there's pretty much nothing that could make me uncomfortable, but I just believe it's a good rule to have since those conversations always get spicy fast. If there are three things I've learned to never talk about on the internet unless you want to start drama, they are: religion, politics, and social issues. In my opinion, it's better for communities to outright ban those topics or contain them to specific boards/channels than to hope that only mature and respectful people try to discuss them.
Too true! Or they could take it to a private pm. I think having too much spice isn't good for casual chatting in a public server related to original novels. With a lot of people, comes a lot of responsibilities ^-^;;;
Now, in regard to suggestion channels, they're good but I don't really think they're going to be too useful in their current state. In my opinion, suggestion channels work best when they serve as a place of discussion for somebody seeking a story to come and ask, "Hey, I'm looking for X, Y, and Z. Any recommendations?" Otherwise, channels like these turn into self-promotion channels a majority of the time, and self-promotion on forums/servers usually just serves to clutter the place up with little return. That's also why I'm not a big fan of the sh-updates channel. It clutters up the channel list and I can't honestly see many people actually going to stories through those links. The shf-updates channel is now even more guilty of just being extra clutter = P. There is also the problem, especially with the sh-updates channel, that it takes people directly to the latest chapter linked. What if there are spoilers right away and somebody is only checking the story out for the first time? This is why I think it's a good idea for brand new stories, but not to link every chapter from every story. Anybody who is actually following these stories is likely going to be following them on the website itself and can get a notification there, and anybody who isn't already following these stories risks getting spoiled.
Hmm that's true, I didn't actually want the sh-updates channel because most people follow the author of the novel they're currently reading. But on the other hand it's pretty much the same as the front page of SH just that you can't filter out genres. (which convinced me to implement it...)

We'll see if it's useful or not in the future, otherwise it may just stay up for those who like it and others can mute the channel.
But, I'm a minimalist who likes to try and keep designs simple, so take what I suggest with that into consideration. For my own server with about 500 people in it now, I only keep the bare minimum of channels: rules, announcements, a channel for people seeking help or advice (mainly with stories), a media sharing channel, and a voice channel with an associated "no mic" channel so that people who are in voice chat but are unable to speak can send their voice-chat-related messages/media there. Then I have discussion channels for each of my main stories, a channel specifically for other people's stories, and that's it.
I dislike clutter but the need to balance everyone's opinions helps improve the server for all users (even if it's just a little bit!)

Thanks again for taking your time to write everything down! Having suggestions is good for further improvement and growth.
 
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