Chapter Nesting into sections [Author Feature][Reader Help]

[Chillfire02]

I will keep this brief and simple.

Allow Authors to organize chapters into lists in the table of content.
This simple feature would help with organization and navigation efficiency so much.

Just imagine having lists inside the table of content, just triangle icons, that you can click to expand and show the chapters in them or click again to collapse. That way the Table of contents on any book home page would change from being a list of chapters to a list of sections(i.e Arcs) that the reader can click to expand and see the chapters under each one.

[ table of contents ]
- x Chapter 1
- x Chapter 2
- x Chapter 3
- x Chapter 4
- x Chapter 5
[ table of contents ]

---would become---

[ table of contents ]
- > Arc 1: (expanded)
- - - x Chapter 1
- - - x Chapter 2
- > Arc 2: (collapsed)
-
[ table of contents ]

This way Authors can organize their work better on the site and readers can navigate the story way easier.
Anyways, I just wanted to put this idea out there :) [also, there is a poor paint concept 'art' in my comments below]


Thank you for reading, have a nice day~

 

[AliceShiki]

This wouldn't help productivity at all... >.>

It's also kinda unnecessary when the releases are already split into multiple pages and stuff. If all releases were in a single big list like they are in Syosetu, then I could kinda get your point (which is why there is arc separation on Syosetu, though not by anything clickable), but that's not how things are handled on Scribblehub.

Overall, I don't see a very good way of implementing this without overhauling the novel page in its entirety tbh. Which seems like... Totally unnecessary.

 

[Chillfire02]

This wouldn't help productivity at all... >.>

It's also kinda unnecessary when the releases are already split into multiple pages and stuff. If all releases were in a single big list like they are in Syosetu, then I could kinda get your point (which is why there is arc separation on Syosetu, though not by anything clickable), but that's not how things are handled on Scribblehub.

Overall, I don't see a very good way of implementing this without overhauling the novel page in its entirety tbh. Which seems like... Totally unnecessary.

I don't understand why you need to overhaul the novel page in its entirety when your scope of work would be just the table of content, generally.

What I'm saying here is that on the table of contents in any novel page, instead of having all chapters listed one under the other while leaving the organization to the author by naming chapters(such as chapter 1 would be: Arc 1: Chapter1:) you could simply add a child object to the table of contents that is nothing more than a bunch of arrows, that way the user could navigate quickly, especially on mobile.

Anyways, I just wanted to put the idea out there, nothing more and nothing less.

This is a quick mockup on paint, excuse the poor quality :p

 

[GDLiZy]

I do like the idea of having the ability to divide the story into arcs (or volumes, whatever), but I think I remembered Tony saying he doesn't want to do that.

I might be misremembering things though, it's been a long while.

 

[yansusustories]

Just for clarification: @Chillfire02, are you talking about the Table of Contents in our author dashboard, the Table of Contents on a story's detail page, or both?
Because it sounded like you might mean both and I'd agree with @AliceShiki that this shouldn't be necessary for the detail pages or would be a good idea. Over there, you can either have a full list with all chapters or pages with 15 to 50 chapters per page. That should already make navigation easier.
Arcs would complicate this unless novels were set to always show all chapters. Otherwise, what if you have, say, 10 arcs but each has a varying number of chapters? What happens then? Do we get tons of pages added and retracted as we open arcs? But then, arcs also shouldn't be mandatory so if somebody just has 500 chapters or so without arcs, that'd be a nightmare to scroll through and now readers wouldn't have the chance to revert back to pages (since, again, those would clash with the stories that do have arcs).

On the other hand, I can see where this might be a good (optional) feature for the ToC in our author dashboard. Over there, we don't have pages so, at a certain number of chapters (e.g., I have stories with several hundred chapters where I definitely notice this), it becomes a chore to scroll down if you are looking for something. If there were collapsible arcs, that would make navigation easier. Especially if a collapse all or open all button or something were added along them. Basically, it should just be a sorting feature for us that doesn't translate to what the readers see. I'm not sure if that would be easy to do though.

So, TL;DR: I'm against this for the ToC the readers see but am in favor of this for the ToC on the author dashboard.