Improving the story archive

12 posts / 0 new

Thu, 05/29/2008 - 21:32

RenegadeKamui

The archive on this site is one of the biggest and best inflation story repositories on the net. That said, it could be substantially improved. Here are my ideas:

* More categories: The types currently used aren't very descriptive, and only one can be assigned to a given story. Overflowingbra.com is a good example of a multiple-category system. Besides categories for the inflated shape (breast, belly, butt, other (i.e. head or foot), full body/spherical), there could be categories for size (big: but realistic, huge: up to body size, wow: up to house-size or beyond), and other special features (floating, popping, water/juice expansion, clothing inflation, male inflation).

* Better organization: Currently, the only way to browse the archive is to sort it in some way, and then page through it. Even then, you can only browse by page number, so if, say, you want a story starting with T, you have to guess which page number the T stories start on. There should also be some sort of filter so that you can search for a particular author or combination of categories.

* Random story feature: When a story falls of the list of 20 recent submissions, unless someone knows to look for it specifically, odds are it'll never be read again. Sticky-Site.com has a brilliant solution -- every time you pull up the story page, you are given a link to a random story from the archives. This exposes readers to stories posted before they joined, which they might never have read otherwise. Either one story could be randomly chosen per day, or every time the page loads.

* Ratings/reviews: There are a lot of stories in the archive, and some are far better than others. A rating and review system, such as the one already in place for images, would let the good ones stand out from the dreck, and allow the writer to collect feedback from his readers.

I don't know much about the mechanics of the story archive, but plenty of other websites use these sorts of features, so it couldn't be that hard to implement them. I'm good at picking up programming languages, so I could try to help. Adding new categories would require recategorizing all the stories, and I could pitch in with that too.

If anyone else has any ideas, please post them, and I'd like to hear what Luther has to say about my suggestions.

Fri, 05/30/2008 - 02:50

doubleintegral

If memory serves, LVK coded the story archive himself.

I agree that these features would be nice, but I don't think new stories are posted often enough to justify your ideas at this point. The story archive has been around for over 10 years. Surely by this point most people have sifted their way through it and plucked out their favorites.

Stories I have written

Fri, 05/30/2008 - 07:02

bostoncowboy

agreed.

Fri, 05/30/2008 - 08:29

LutherVKane

To Notsosupersaiyan:

Don't worry about mechanics when requesting new features. If it's feasible and appropriate, I'll implement it. If it's not, then we'll have to wait for software advances. Regardless, feedback and suggestions are good.

I've been working on a complete site revamp on and off for over a year now. I've put a lot of thought and effort into revamping the story archive. It's actually pretty far along, and I'm pleased with it. Some of what you've suggested is already in place. Regarding your suggestions:

More categories: Yes, definitely. I currently have categories for sexual content, popping, male/female inflation, and inflation type (breast inflation, belly inflation, etc). I'll probably add a free-form keyword category as a catch-all for miscellaneous things people might search for, e.g., floating, clothes bursting, cheerleaders.

Better Organization: Yes, kinda. You can drill down through categories. For example, clicking on an author's name will bring up a list of all stories by that author. Sorting and paging works better and the search function will work on stories (there's currently no way to search the story archive).

Random Story: Good idea, but not yet implemented. See below.

Ratings/Reviews: This is potentially several significant feature requests, so I'll break them up.

Reviews: I don't intend to put in place any kind of formal structure for reviewing stories, primarily because I don't have any reliable reviewers on staff. Me being the only person on staff has a lot to do with it. If there were enough interest in gathering a posse to perform in depth reviews on stories, then I'd look into it.

Comments: This may be more what you had in mind. Members will be able to post comments on stories very much like they currently can on pictures now.

Ratings: This is a big one, and moderately controversial. I'm conflicted on ratings for stories, primarily because of what I see going on currently with the ratings of pictures. Certain artists and themes tend to dominate, and a dominant position is self-perpetuating. The tyranny of the majority rules. Generic ratings are only useful to you if your own tastes coincide with those of the majority of people doing the rating.

This problem can be solved by implementing a customized rating system. It's like the system Amazon has in place. When you view an item, it'll list "People who bought this also bought..." Ideally, when you view story ratings you wouldn't get recommendations for stories that everyone else has rated highly. The system would recommend stories that were rated highly by people who had given high ratings to stories that you also liked.

I'm building the new site on a software package called Drupal. There's a Drupal module called the Content Recommendation Engine that looks promising in that regard. What's most promising about it is that it can generate recommendations based on what you've already rated. So the random story feature suggested above wouldn't just pick any random story. It would choose a story that you haven't already rated that was rated highly by people whose previous ratings tended to agree with your own.

This would eliminate the problem of authors being discouraged if most people aren't into what they're writing about. Lots of people aren't fans of male inflation, but there is a subset of the community that does enjoy it. There's a difference between "I don't like this story because it doesn't cater to my particular flavor of inflation" and "This story sucks." But in the regular rating system, both would show up as one-star ratings. With a customized system, the ratings would be used to direct people towards the stories that they're most likely to enjoy and wouldn't devolve into a general popularity contest.

In conclusion: I'll only implement ratings if I can get the custom recommendations to work. I don't see much value in continuing to use the current system in place for pictures.

Thank you for the suggestions, they're quite useful. If anyone has any more ideas, I'm happy to hear them. Feature that will help people find the content that they want are the most helpful.

To Doubleintegral:

Yes, the current story archive is a module I hacked together myself. It gets the job done, but there's plenty of room for improvement. I halted work on it when I decided that the software that the site's currently based on, CPG Dragonfly, wasn't a good long term solution. It's a long boring story filled with ideological conflicts, and not really on-topic for this post.

Bodyinflation.org has been around for a decade, but the current story archive has only been around for three years. I first started the site primarily so I'd have a place to make my stories available, so I'm strongly biased regarding the importance of the story archive. Updates can be infrequent, but if the archive were more capable I think we'd see more frequent contributions.

Twitter | DeviantArt

Fri, 05/30/2008 - 18:27

deleted_20091014

Reviews: Sven was keen on having a writers guild a while back so that writers could critique each other's stories with a more professional bent than general comments... perhaps this could be worked into the commenting system.

As well as the general commenting system there could be another one, exactly the same, but only available to writers guild members (someone, perhaps Sven could regulate membership so that only writers with a certain number of stories can join). That way people could search for critiques in the story archive, rather than just comments.

It would also be good if there were more people moderating submitted works... ideally enough so that any new work submitted will likely appear on the site the same day if accepted.

Finally... it would be good to see the picture gallery and story archive merged into a single system so that one search could find both stories and pictures... I think sound files is another potential growing field which could be included.

As for videos, it would nice to see them here, but you probably don't have the bandwidth... perhaps people can just post youtube feeds.

Idea for the moderating system. I'm sure we could get together 25 or so regular members of the site who can be trusted to uphold Luther's values and not let personal taste interfere in objective moderating. Even then a picture won't appear on the site until it's been checked as OK by 2 moderators. And Luther reserves the right to remove anything from the site, even after it's been passed by them.

Fri, 05/30/2008 - 19:10

LittlePumpkin

Is there a way to allow more languages? Example: someone writes a story, the writer or someone else translates it into another language and you can see it in a translated version. I can read English, but a whole story in English is too long (that's why I didn't read the replies over here)

Fri, 05/30/2008 - 19:20

RenegadeKamui

LutherVKane wrote:

More categories: Yes, definitely. I currently have categories for sexual content, popping, male/female inflation, and inflation type (breast inflation, belly inflation, etc). I'll probably add a free-form keyword category as a catch-all for miscellaneous things people might search for, e.g., floating, clothes bursting, cheerleaders.

Good to hear. However, my experience with user-supplied keywords is that users always find a way to screw them up. They either don't use them consistently, use close synonyms (i.e. "clothes ripping" instead of "clothes bursting"), make typoes, or forget to use separators so all the keywords run together into a huge one that doesn't match anything. That's not to say they're entirely worthless, but the more you can standardize keywords with common terms like "floating" and "popping", the better.

LutherVKane wrote:

Comments: This may be more what you had in mind. Members will be able to post comments on stories very much like they currently can on pictures now.

That is what I meant, reviews by users, not staff.

LutherVKane wrote:

Ratings: This is a big one, and moderately controversial. I'm conflicted on ratings for stories, primarily because of what I see going on currently with the ratings of pictures. Certain artists and themes tend to dominate, and a dominant position is self-perpetuating. The tyranny of the majority rules. Generic ratings are only useful to you if your own tastes coincide with those of the majority of people doing the rating.

After some consideration, I have to agree with you here. This may be why most of the story sites I've seen don't allow you to sort or search by rating. A comment system should be sufficient to provide feedback, without the need for a numerical rating.

LutherVKane wrote:

This problem can be solved by implementing a customized rating system. It's like the system Amazon has in place. When you view an item, it'll list "People who bought this also bought..." Ideally, when you view story ratings you wouldn't get recommendations for stories that everyone else has rated highly. The system would recommend stories that were rated highly by people who had given high ratings to stories that you also liked.

This sounds really interesting. However, it sounds like it would be biased in favor of stories that contained more categories or keywords. So a simple inflation story, no matter how good, wouldn't be pulled up much, because no matter what categories or keywords you developed a preference for, they wouldn't appear in the story. Likewise, a mediocre story with lots of gimmicks would show up for almost everyone. For this reason, it would still be nice to have a way to bring up a totally random story, just to be exposed to something you might not otherwise see.

One more idea I forgot to mention is a short summary for each story, like you see on overflowingbra.com or Sticky-Site. There's only so much information you can convey in a title, and adding a description really helps sell your story. We should let the original authors write their summaries if they're still around, but for the ones who aren't, they'd have to be written by the community. Again, I volunteer to help with this.

I disagree that bodyinflation.org is some sort of insular enclave that doesn't want or need fresh blood. We still get about one new member a day, and any one of them could be the next Carnatic or Sievert, if only we provide them with a system that encourages them to write. When a community stops growing, it starts dying. There are examples all around you.

It's great to see that there are still new things in store for such an old website. And thank you, Luther, for investing so much of your time over the years keeping things going.

Sat, 05/31/2008 - 03:30

darth_clone19

That would be awesome LV. That'd be refreshing and encouraging to our community.

A small step for inflationists, a giant leap for...oops, she floated away XD

- Read my stories: darth-clone19.deviantart.com

Sat, 05/31/2008 - 07:04

SvenS

I humbly and tardily rescind my "Writer's Guild" idea. Coming up with grandiose ideas is fun, but the harvesting of the fruits of such idle chit-chat can often best be described as easier said than done (Oh - and I just noticed that I misspelled "grammar" in that "Guild" post - heh).

Writing a thoughtful, observant, and relevant review is time consuming and can take quite a bit of creative effort in and of itself. I've only written a few reviews since posting that idea and most of those I only shared privately with the authors involved. Luther actually has a mechanism in place for feedback, namely the Writer's Den and, uh, the Feedback forums - both of which are underutilized (and I include myself in that assessment).

It's been noted before that, as a group, we are a notoriously selfish bunch and are unwilling to give any feedback. What is given trends toward the sentiment of "post more free stuff tailored to my whims, pronto". I think that attitude goes to the heart of the problem, frankly. My solution to the problem was to finally get involved and to quit being a leeching lurker. I am glad that I made the decision to de-cloak and regret that it was not made earlier.

As to Luther's idea of building a team of reviewers: I think a little structure in that regard may be helpful. Sometimes it's easier to get something like that done when it is "assigned". So, I'll go on record as volunteering for some such thing and to try it out if you, Luther, ever want to give it a go.

Let me just say that probably the best thing the community can do for itself to encourage more output is to participate in the effort and to support those already contributing with meaningful feedback. Adulation is always welcome but that one, rare thoughtful bit of constructive criticism counts for many notes of praise. I don't think there is anything more discouraging to an artist or author than comments like "make her bigger" or - even worse - absolute silence in the comments section in the face of a large hit count for a piece. And if you are a contributing artist or author, take it as the compliment it is when someone spends the time, thought, and energy to point out where you can improve.

Sat, 05/31/2008 - 11:55

#10

deleted_20091014

Well what i was thinking when I suggested incorporating the writers guild into a review system wasn't necessarily to obligate writers to leave high quality feedback, but to allow this high quality feedback to be easily differentiated from the more basic 'I love this' or 'Do more!'

Sat, 05/31/2008 - 11:59

#11

deleted_20091014

notsosupersaiyan wrote:

any one of them could be the next Carnatic or Sievert,

*flattered

Sat, 05/31/2008 - 17:56

#12

SvenS

Quote:

Well what i was thinking when I suggested incorporating the writers guild into a review system wasn't necessarily to obligate writers to leave high quality feedback, but to allow this high quality feedback to be easily differentiated from the more basic 'I love this' or 'Do more!'

That was the gist of my original Idea, but I got too carried away with it in trying to create some sort of organization. I should have just stopped at suggesting a general structural guideline to use for reviews.

Improving the story archive

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