There is so much good work on this site that I have long been frustrated by my inability to discover it, primarily because of the problem of not being able to see the wood for the trees.
If I went into a bookshop and asked to see, say, Romantic stories, I'd be led to a place on the shelf and shown perhaps a few hundred books. Search on Romantic as a theme on this site and there are 3171 entries. But wait, that's not 3171 stories; it's mainly a list of story chapters which have been given a romantic theme. There may be a few people who like to read an isolated chapter of a story, but I suspect most people prefer to read the whole story. So why isn't there a way of eliminating individual chapters from the search?
Perhaps there is, I simply don't know how to do it, or perhaps this is so difficult technically, it's never been done. If the latter, wouldn't it be possible to exclude any result with a number in it, other than "1", thereby eliminating Chapters 2-999 (sorry, I was forgetting Angharad so make that 9999)?
I realise that the search wouldn't pull up individual chapters which have a Romantic theme, and that story titles with a number in them would be excluded, but the reward is that readers would get hundreds of complete stories which they could browse and enjoy.
Comments
The problem is completion tags.
More specifically, people remembering to use them.
At the bottom of every story there's an option for "ongoing" or "completed." Theoretically when a story is finished that tag should be flipped (by readers or the author themselves) to indicate such. When done correctly, readers can search for completed stories -- or at least see a listing of all completed stories -- and be assured that what they see is a story they can finish, which on its own significantly reduces the stories on call given how often incomplete serials are left on the site.
It's important to note that nothing the site uses for tagging stories is auto-generated: all tags regarding content are handled by the creators of that content themselves, including series completion and the like. You want more effective tag searching, then the rest of us need to step up our game on maintaining 'em :)
Hope that helps at least a little!
Melanie E.
Not really
I have tried using searching on completed stories, but as you point out, hardly anyone uses them so you see only a small fraction of the results.
The other issue is that some authors (myself included) enter the Completed tag for each chapter, to show that the story is complete if someone happens upon one of the chapters in the search. So you're still likely to see the same ratio of stories to story chapters.
It's a bit cumbersome but...
I just tried it. If you do the search you suggested (romance) the first story that comes up on my search (I'm not sure how the search determines the order presented) is "Tommy - The Trials and Tribulations of a Girl? - Chapter 206". Then clicking on the link takes me to that chapter of that story. On the right side of the page is a list of stories by that author. I scrolled down to that tittle and clicked on chapter one. At the bottom of that chapter is the link to the next chapter, which will have a link to the chapter after that. It so happens that story also has an index page, or is that table of contents page - whatever.
So that's one method. Simply skim through the 3171 stories in your search, find one you'd like to read click on the chapter, skim the stories by that author and select chapter on of that story and read.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
You hit the nail on the head
You hit the nail on the head, Patricia, although I would probably use "incredibly" in place of "a bit", and I generally browse on my smartphone rather than a computer so I don't get the sidebars but instead use the link to the Organiser page, and then to Page 1.
So let's put some meat onto that and take "Tommy - The Trials and Tribulations of a Girl? - Chapter 205" as our example (and I want to stress I'm using this simply because it is currently the first in the list and I don't suggest anything about its content).
I click to Chapter 205, click to the Organiser Page, then scroll down and click to Chapter 1, which takes about 15 seconds and loads 3 pages. If this doesn't inspire me, I press the Back button three times and revert to the list of searches.
Out of the ten chapters listed on this page, another four of them relate to the same story I have just looked at. This is not at all unusual, sometimes, I'm lucky to find more than two different stories on the same page.
If the other five chapters don't interest me, I click on the Next link, and on the second page there are another three links to Tommy, but not only that, there are also three chapters of stories I saw on the first page, so on this page there are only four new chapters. When I get to page three of the search, there are only two chapters of stories I haven't seen on the previous two pages.
And so it goes on, often with diminishing returns. Each time I see a chapter which might be interesting, I take 15 seconds to load three pages to get to the start. Despondency often kicks in, and I more often give up the search than find a good story. How much more delightful browsing the shelves of a bookshop and what a shame, we can't encourage our readers to enjoy all the tremendous writing in the same way as that bookshop. Can you imagine a bookshop throwing all the chapters of every romance story into a big bin marked "Romance" and saying, "Find something in there if you can!"
Follow the “looking for a story” posts
I made it a habit to check the “looking for a story” posts to see if the story sounds interesting for myself.
Also, I usually skim all the new stories appearing here to get to know “new” (to me) authors I’d like to read.
Anne Margarete
I guess many of us do the same
I guess many of us do the same, Margaret Ann, and this site is superb at promoting new stories. My problem is that the thousands of wonderful older stories are lost to us, simply because of the difficulty in finding them.
Search suggestion
Yep, it's a problem. You can search for books or serials that have organizer pages by entering the following in the search box:
"Organizational: Title Page" "Organizational: Series Page"
You can then refine that by picking a TG theme, but many authors don't include them when creating organizer pages, so it's hit-or-miss.
Kris
{I leave a trail of Kudos as I browse the site. Be careful where you step!}
That's pretty impressive
The search on Organizational: Title Page appears to be just what I need. It's very impressive. It does still bring up some chapters in my Romance category, but I suppose that is because authors have wrongly classified a chapter as an organizational title page.
I'm not really certain what an Organizational: Series Page is supposed to do. Doing a search brings up a real mish-mash of chapters and stories so I think I'll stick to the Title Page search.
One final comment: It would be good if this could be included in the "How to Search" section, or even (as it seems so essential to me) to the right of the Search button on the Home page.
Thanks Kris for this absolute gem. You have transformed my reading capabilities.
Charlotte