random stories

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I love the random story generator, its a great way to find stories I had not seen. But I wonder if there could be something for serials as well? just a thought.

I'm sorry...

As I started reading your comment, I thought you were referring to some sort of "computer program" that "generated" random stories with TG themes. LOL

My thought on series is that it "might" be useful, but it needs some thought, and they're (at least the active ones) typically less in need, as each time a new episode comes out they act as reminders.

Annette

Random 5erials...

Just like Random 5olos, we could have Random 5erials.

Of course, there's a fair chance that most which would turn up would be episodes of Bike—not that I'd be complaining.

Prefers Serials


Bike Archive

I've thought about doing random title pages

erin's picture

Most of which belong to serials and some to authors. So, it's not a bad idea.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Two problems

Two problems I can see:

  1. Firstly, as Erin pointed out recently, there is only a finite amount of space at the top of the home page. You can only insert something new by pushing something else further down the page.
  2. Secondly, there exists the problem one gets with any search - the huge number of episodes with some serials will swamp out all others. If there were five random serials shown, probably four of them would point to Wuthering or a Gaby. With absolutely no disrespect to either of those two excellent series, do we actually need to devote front page space to point at those? Only if the random series were to point at top level titles only (in which case, each serial would get equal opportunity, regardless of number of episodes) would this be effective. And if that can be done, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do it with the other searches (such as category) as well, since they suffer exactly the same problem. One cannot find the excellent range of stories because the search results show page after page of different episodes of the same serials, with little benefit to anyone.

Pont two

erin's picture

Using advanced search you can limit searches to title pages, but that would leave out stand alone stories. Hmm. I could make a category search page for each category but that would not actually work that well either, too many categories and each one would have to be a separate partly hand-coded thing.

I'll do some thinking on this. If Drupal had a proper database query form, that would make it easy to program. Nothing much like that yet.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

How about an option to

How about an option to display only part one of multipart stories similar to the checkbox in storysite's category search form?

Though I'm still unfamiliar with the random story function on this site, something I shall look into. ;)

~Que Sera~

~Que Sera~