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Is it spring yet?


DemonGoddess

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Guest Inked_4_Life

hello there, i'm an avid reader on this site, granted i cant write for diddly, i'm more of an artist in the fact that my main hobby is tattoo design. I just wanted to let you know that i dont mind the new layout and the kittens are adorable. The only problem i have is minor and in no way will make me look for another site for my reading. The text on the new layout for chapters seems kind of smashed together, that may just be a small formatting issue. Otherwise, the color and such are nice because they aren't blinding. So honestly KUDOS on the newer layout, and thanks for putting so much work into the site! :)

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@Lucy

In the future, we will have selectable skins, including the old and (IMO) very ugly and dark plum/purple monstrosity. Sorry, but that killed these older eyes. The darker it is, the harder it is for many of us to see, well, anything. I'd rather work in an environment doesn't trigger a migraine after ten minutes due to eyestrain. However, that time is not yet. We still have other fish to fry, and all of it has to do with FUNCTION. Like I've said many times, function FIRST. I can sit there and make all kinds of color changes, but if things still arent' working right? What is the point? It's still broken.

@linked_4_life

Thank you! What device are you reading on where you're getting smashing? There are things we'll have to address once we actually get to selectable skins, for things such as mobile devices, as they handle display formatting very differently from a desktop. Now, we've tried to make it as friendly as possible for it without making that additional skin yet, but, there are definite issues in a desktop skin using a mobile device. I think it may actually be a font choice that'll help more with that. But not sure, yet.

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Guest Inked_4_Life

@DemonGoddess

I'm currently using an 11 inch tablet and to fix it for me i simply requested the desktop site along with using firefox instead of google chrome. It seems to display it better. But i dont have that issue with all stories, mainly ones where they are done in extensive chunks of text at a time. and whole heartedly agree with the dark colors making things hard to read. the current color scheme is much better.

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Guest Inked_4_Life

@DemonGodess

It looks like that would be the best fit, and yes for the most part generic fonts work best. Granted the fonts currently used on the desktop site work just fine, they are perfectly legible. Just be careful of the ones that are thin lined. Some fonts are easier to read bold. so in most cases its easier if you use a font that is already a bold style font for the mobile skin.

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thank you! See, I've had suggested in past that we make an app, but you know, the forum does it with a SKIN. Given that we have a broad base of users, most of whom don't actually USE mobile devices to do this, I think a skin will be our best option for the archive as well.

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Latest listing needs some form of division between the stories I think, yes? Is that what you're looking at?

I'm not entirely sure. It's hard to explain what it is exactly.

I only know that with the old design/layout I could easily read through the latest stories and see what interested me; just scroll down and look.

But now I have to focus much more and I still often have to read it again.

I think it would help if this portion: "Located : M through R > Power Rangers" (for example) becomes a link again instead of ordinary text. Or at least a different color.

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Or perhaps if we underscore the title to help draw the eye to it? I can see what you mean, Oric, when I compare the old and new layouts.

In the old layout, we had the title alone, and then the summary and tags. Then we had the author and the rest of the stats, and the location within the subdomain. I'm not sure if we can go back to that format. So, maybe if we find a way to set the title apart a bit, or highlight it even more with underscoring, since it it's already bolded, that would be a visual aid.

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First of thank you so much to all those spending so much time and effort for us. I don't care what the pages look like as long as I can read the stories...The only downside bring some authors themselves adding massive page breaks which stretch the page widthways far too much!

Anyway, I did have a question and I may just be a blind eejit but I can't see the search function anymore. Had this been moved or removed? If removed, will this handy tool be making a return?

Many thanks,

Mary x

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Hi, Mary,

The Search function is one of those things that was disabled when DG and manta were rewriting busily, and it's not back yet. I haven't seen an update on when that will return, but I'm sure it will be back! :)

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When you're in any archive, above the category listing, is search archive.

As to the page break, yes, I agree. I really wish they'd opt to use the horizontal rule instead. It's the icon next to the text formatting. If they don't choose to do that, fine. LIMIT the amount of nonbreaking character line to say, 40 characters, and the stretch will disappear.

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This eejit thanks you! Love the new location of the search too -the number of times I clicked into things I didn't want when trying to search on my tablet is stupid x

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I do have a quick question regarding the search feature - I've noticed that the search function only comes up with a selection of stories containing the word being searched, rather than all stories in an archive. Is there another more exhaustive way of searching the site without resorting to using an external search engine to look through the site? I've had to use the external search engine approach before and it's frankly exhausting sorting through for the good results in a sea of bad ones.

Mary x

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Our archive is already sorted into subdomains, and within the subdomains, it's broken into categories. Those categories, where warranted, have an additional level of subcategories, so I imagine you could view all stories within a subcategory as a more comprehensive sort of thing.

For example, under Harry Potter, we have have four categories: General, AU/AR; Crossovers, and Canon paired with OC. Taking the main category, it is broken down by General, Round Robins, FemmeSlash, Het, Slash, and Threesomes/Moresomes. Under the FemmeSlash, Het, and Slash subcategories, the archive divides by pairings. That's a faster way to narrow down a search while still being able to see all stories allocated under that level of the archive.

Of course, in the smaller fandoms, those without an extensive number of stories, you won't have those levels of subcategories, but you can find all the stories for a given fandom in the same manner.

I'm not sure if that's what you were looking for, but if you can give me an example as well, I'll see if I can help a little more.

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One example is looking for a story I vaguely remember - I know it was a harry potter story and the summary contained the word Toys. Searching the summary for the word toys only brings up 100 results, none of which are the story I'm looking for. With the majority of authors putting the 'kink' or multiples kinks which are included within the story in the summary it would make sense to search for a story using those words eg toys, slash, anal, pwp etc. Unfortunately this isn't always neat even with the sections you have noted in your reply. I hope this makes sense?!

I know there are times when I'm looking for a specific kink but not in a specific section or with specific characters so 100 can be a limiting sample.

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I know there are times when I'm looking for a specific kink but not in a specific section or with specific characters so 100 can be a limiting sample.

By specific section I mean within harry potter but not under a specific subdomain

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Ah, I see what you mean!

We're planning on moving the story codes to a separate, searchable field at some point in the rewrite process, That will allow for a more targeted search, I think.

I'm pretty sure that the 100-item limit on a search is a general limitation. I've had that on dozens of sites, like doctor/provider searches for my insurance.

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The 100 item limit is the boolean search limit from MySQL itself. One of the things that will be incorporated is the sphinx search engine, that 's already installed, but that the code does not yet support. Harry Potter is actually a subdomain, by the way. How the search works, and I expect this will be maintained, is that you can only search in the subdomain you're in. For example, if in originals, you can't search buffy stories. You have to be in buffy to do that. Having the story codes within their own separate table and fields will make it so that a FILTER can be written, so that will certainly help for the tags.

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Lol, can you tell I don't know the lingo for what I'm talking about? So glad it's you lot in charge and not me! Fortunately I'm not interested in searching over more than one sub domain - I hadn't actually considered doing that although I supposed it would be cool.

The 100 item limit is a shame given the vast number of stories on the site and in a section which could be searched for. Perhaps this was only brought in when there were far less stories? I can only imagine the thousands of stories over the whole site. Looking forward to seeing any changes!

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The boolean search is basic search in MySQL. It's been the default search since the site started, yes. This is why we have installed the sphinxsearch engine, as it's much more powerful. Unfortunately, as I said, the code does not yet support sphinx. Once it does, then yes, we'll be able to do more with search. Having said that, however, in order to not bog down the database itself, it's a common practice to LIMIT your results anyway. I expect we'll experiment with that, and see where our upper limit will be for the search once we have sphinx ported in. I DON'T expect to be able to search thousands at a time. Dedicated server or not, that'd kill the database for query load, and crash the site.

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