New Lit Control Panel Testers - Info, Updates, Reports & More

The next generation Literotica Control Panel has been in BETA testing mode for several months now (thank you to everyone who has helped out so far). As of today, we are happy to open the testing up to more members. If you added your name to the previous Lit Control Panel Testers thread, you should have access to the BETA Control Panel by the time you read this message.

We appreciate everyone helping to test the new Control Panel. Here are the two most important bullet points:


Even though we've done quite a bit of testing, we fully expect there to be issues that we've missed. One of the hardest things to get right with responsive design is cross browser compatibility. The site might work great for 99 people and be totally broken for the 100th. Every bug report from you early adopters is important, so please send them early and often!

The best way to send a Control Panel bug is by clicking the "Report a Problem" link in the bottom right of the Footer of the new Control Panel.

There may also be a lot of things you want to discuss that are not technically bugs. For example - if we missed a feature, if the new system doesn't allow you to do something that the old one did, if something seems slow, or if you think we should improve the user interface. If you have those types of comments, suggestions, or questions, feel free to post them directly on this thread.

But remember for real bugs - things that are definitely broken - the Bug Report form in the footer is the best way to make sure that those issues get taken seriously.

There will always be a list of open bugs and things on which we're working. I'll try to keep this post updated with a list of "Known Issues" so that you don't have to report the same thing over and over again.

For now, here is a small list of known issues:

1. Editor's Program is not launched yet in new Control Panel.
2. No warning when you try to enter more than 10 tags on New Story page (should be a friendly warning).
3. Page auto-scrolls when you click the Bookmark icon to add a story to a Reading List (this is not supposed to happen and will be fixed).

Thank you again to everyone helping with this, and we're looking forward to reading all of your comments and suggestions!

Interesting it reminds me of a twitter page. Looks good like the new and more detailed activity updates including what I've faved and commented on recently.

I'm impressed.

Looks really nice!! See my initial comments here.

Thanks much - very promising, well done! (Though I've not tried any new bells and whistles.)

Looks interesting. It's a lot to take in because there's so many features.

I'll really really really miss:

1) The way the activities list appeared before, it seemed much clearer, and I liked that the past 24 hours showed up all at once, instead of having to keep loading the list to see all the activties for the day. It'll especially be an issue when a "popular" story comes out.

2) I'll also miss the "views" page, in which you could see your story performance stats all on a single list. Because if I have a new story out, I'll now have to dig through the pages on "works" and find out how it's doing.

3) The clean view of stats. Before, you could see the number of votes clearly, updated each second, and you can clearly see the views which updates every 15 minutes. Now, all the data appears much smaller scale, and the views don't appear to be exact (it seems like more of an estimate now).

But I do like:

1) The modern look. The "old site" which we currently use appears kind of out-dated, especially when compared to other mainstream websites.

2) There's more incentive for people to sign-up to the site

3) It helps promote authors and new stories.


Overall, I like the appearance. It looks fresher and new. But I'll sorely miss the old "activities" page along with the "views" to see the updated stats on a single page.

First impression: Don't like at all. Not dense enough; waste of screen real estate. I hate scrolling endlessly to see only a little info. Will the old CP stay up? I will not use the new one.

Another thing that I love: The "Explore" feature is pretty cool. Helps promote the necessary features of the site which leads to more views.




I've also just submitted a story with the new panel.

As a note, when I previewed my story on the new panel, the bolding or italics didn't appear. I was able to see the <><> tags on the preview page, and I submitted that.

To make sure, I checked the old panel, accessed the submitted story, and I saw that the bold and italics works.

So as a note, I'm wondering if the fully redesigned site will require new ways of bolding or making italics.

thanks,

heyall

Playing

I'm still playing with the new page and features, I think I will Ditto what Hey_All said and add,

I don't like that we can't just go to the comments sections of a story to see a new comment directly or not that I could see. I had to go through the story link. The easy to navigate activities link will be sorely missed by many I think.

It's a nice modern feel though and I am sure we will all get used to it in time. Old habits are hard to break but I don't believe his one is as user-friendly for the authors.

I am looking forward to using the draft page, I like the idea of that. Time will tell if my idea's of what it will be and what it actually is are compatible when posting up a story.

Thank you for the opportunity to look at the beta.

I like it. Will play around with it over the next few days and see how it goes.

Hypoxia said:

First impression: Don't like at all. Not dense enough; waste of screen real estate. I hate scrolling endlessly to see only a little info. Will the old CP stay up? I will not use the new one.

Click to expand...

Agreed. Don't like this new one. Too much work for me. I'm back to the old look.

I like compressed info, don't like scrolling through screens.
The "My Home" tab is a bit misleading, when really its "Latest Activity"
Activity - you can "Load More" but you can't shrink it again
Like seeing the number of followers. What would be nice would be to be able to see who those followers are

Further comments:

Likes:
- Like the published stories summary. Nice feature
- Like being able to see My Activity
- Like the New Story tab and being able to save as "draft". Great.
- The modern look. The "old site" has an out-dated look, especially when compared to other mainstream websites. Trouble is the new look is not user friendly. Too many gotcha's.

Dislikes
- Too much wasted screen space - story titles are way too large for example. I don't want large text when I'm working on this in a public space. Not good.

- Needs a Logout button right on the top right hand corner. Some readers may need to logout real quick (cough) and having to go to a dropdown is an inconvenience that could cost you users and views... just sayin'

- Activities List - don't like having to keep loading the list to see all the activties for the day. I want to know what comes in every day to make it easier to manage and respond.

- Stats: Do not like the rounding out to the nearest hundred. I like the exact #'s of views and being able to see this #'s creeping up. Very frustrating if I can't see that in the summary

- Do not want to page through screen after screen to find my newest story. Either all stories on one screen (and shrink the size of the text) or give the option to order by newest first. It'll be so frustrating . I have 4 pages to work through now, with only 31 stories. I can't imagine what it's like to writers with a couple of hundred stories.

- view stats. Before, you could see the number of votes clearly, updated each second, and you can clearly see the views which updates every 15 minutes. The rollup to nearest thousand would be a show stopper for me.

Overall
New look not user friendly. Too much work scrolling through pages. A lot of white space and way too large text for titles and way too small for stats. Insufficient stats detail. I'd say smaller text for titles but bold it, and larger text for stats, unbolded.

Conclusion - I'm back to the old

Is there a eay to integrate the current Activities List and the story Views page with the new design???

First impressions:

Yeah, font for title is way to big. Zooming up is not a problem but it would be better to put more than 10 stories to a page. With my story list that is 23 pages. Way to much paging on my end. Too much wasted space that could be better used.

legerdemer said:

Looks really nice!! See my initial comments here.

Thanks much - very promising, well done! (Though I've not tried any new bells and whistles.)

Click to expand...

I've spent a bit more time with the new control panel and have some more specific comments:

- I really like that now, with each story, all of the data for each story is collected right there in one place.

- I like seeing my favorite authors' activities a lot - I can book mark new stories or poems I want to read, and I am alerted as to their activity. But for readers who favorite a lot of authors, especially those who are really prolific, this might really crowd their in-box so to speak. Oh well, can't please everybody, and I like this feature a lot.

- I don't mind the larger fonts at all - it helps with my eyesight. Smaller would be fine, and I see the point of those who mentioned that the information takes up too much room now, but I don't see it as a big deal. On the other hand, I'm often on a computer or iPad screen and hardly ever on a phone screen when I access Lit.

- For each story's setting, I don't see much reason to have to access a different screen simply to toggle comments and voting on/off. That information could easily be added where the story title appears. We can now see the comments to each story with one click just as before, so I'm not sure about an earlier complaint about that.

- I preferred seeing the actual number of views rather than the rounded off number - in particular, I liked seeing the difference in popularity of different stories, which is a bit harder to get at now (lower resolution, as it were).

- I like seeing my followers easily! Nice add!

- I also love seeing the comments I left on others' stories.

- I like the Explore drop-down menu available right there, accessible on my author's page.


Issues:

- I submitted a poem and added some formatting: tried to center, italicize, and block some text. Previously, any formatting that worked (centering, italics) would come through in Preview. It didn't in this case.

- I made a few changes to my profile but the site did not allow me to save them, and they were lost.

One more comment, if it's easy to add - it would be really nice to have the option of sorting stories by date (both by earliest and by most recent) as well as alphabetical order. Two other types of sorts that would be useful for the prolific authors would be by category, by number of views, by score, and possibly by number of favorites.

Just a thought.

Just my initial thoughts, more to come I'm sure.

~Needing to scroll through my entire story file to find something is a pain.

~Would rather see some better balancing on font sizes...downsize the titles in exchange for upsizing the stats.

~Have to agree on missing the dead-on stats instead of rounded numbers.

~The new daily activity tracking is something I might eventually get used to. I'm spoiled with the old way it worked.

~Took me a little while to figure out the story stats are at the bottom instead of above the titles. Call me anal retentive but the solid lines on the old control panel made it perfectly clear.

On the flip side:

~LOVE the fact we have not only the number of author favs available but also who they are!

~The overall appearance is great!

New submission page looks just familiar enough to make it inviting. I will really miss being able to get an actual preview before hitting "submit" though. I'll reserve judgement and other comments until I see how it works totally.

I'm basically pleased with what I've seen so far.

Yeah, that list of people who have favorited me is nice but at ten at a time, it will take forever to go through 262 pages.

Thanks for sending in the link to the profile. My two cents so far...

1. The whole control panel look could have better.

2. One thing I liked here is that now we can see the latest stories posted by authors that we have set as favorites. That is neat feature.

3. Another good thing is in the Works section where we have separate tabs for submitted works. The old panel made everything look kind of cluttered. So good job on that!

4. One problem I noticed was when I tried to update my profile info. For some reason, I didnt see it save even after clicking on save information multiple times. Needs to be looked into.

5. The accept anon feedback button. I think that is a bit of a mixed bag. A lot of authors would love it, but then there are so many anons that do leave a lot of positive fedback, but atleast the option is there now!

6. Reading lists. I like that we now have an option to read a story later. Maybe we can even get reminder once in a while that we have stories pending in the list?

7. The neatest thing I noticed in the new panel is the Following section. Now I can see the list of my followers. That is really cool.

8. The explore functionality on the panel is another great addition. I clicked on tags, but was disappointed to see that it re-directs me to the tags section of the site. Why not have a built in feature which allows users to search tags from within the panel itself?

So far it definitely looks better than the last control panel, but I think there are improvements that can still be made. I know this is still the test phase, but I do hope that you guys will make it better!

Thanks!

UPDATE!

- One thing that is kind of stressful is, just like others have said before me, is that I have to dig through my works section just to see the latest story I posted. I think we really need to have some sort of sorting feature for this. It just helps save time to see stats.

- Another issue with the stats is that with the old panel, I could just hit refresh and see the numbers updated. Here, I dont notice that at all.

Thank you for the early feedback!

HeyAll said:

I'll really really really miss:

1) The way the activities list appeared before, it seemed much clearer, and I liked that the past 24 hours showed up all at once, instead of having to keep loading the list to see all the activities for the day. It'll especially be an issue when a "popular" story comes out.

Click to expand...

Is this issue in regards to all activity, or activity specific to your stories? There is a filter "Works Activity" that shows only activity on your submissions. The new system is setup to allow sharing of a lot more notification types in the future, so I see what you mean about it being noisier. In a way, that is by design. In the future, we plan to allow members to turn on/off specific types of notifications so that you can tailor your feed to only the type of data you are interested in. In the meantime, we added the "Works" filter on the activity tab to try to give quick access to data that we believed authors might be interested in filtering out from the full view.

The "Load More" button is there because as we add more data, we don't want to flood everyone's browser/screen with huge lists. It's possible that we could show more data before the Load More button appears. The number of listings is an arbitrary number and could be changed.

HeyAll said:

2) I'll also miss the "views" page, in which you could see your story performance stats all on a single list. Because if I have a new story out, I'll now have to dig through the pages on "works" and find out how it's doing.

Click to expand...

Can you expand on what is missing here and how you think it could be improved? Is this a problem with the pagination on the Works list? Using the new system, there is a quick way to jump to any story in your Works list. You can simply type part of the Story Title in the search box and it will appear instantly (no page reload needed). See this attachment to see the way it works:

HeyAll said:

3) The clean view of stats. Before, you could see the number of votes clearly, updated each second, and you can clearly see the views which updates every 15 minutes. Now, all the data appears much smaller scale, and the views don't appear to be exact (it seems like more of an estimate now).

Click to expand...

In the new system, we round some of the stats (1,850,567 views becomes 1.85m) to fit the data on narrow screens. The logic behind this decision is based in the fact that on small screens, every pixel is valuable. For readers, we are pretty sure that round numbers should be good enough to help them make decisions (there is little difference to a reader between a story with 450,500 views and one with 450,750). However, if most authors are unhappy with the rounding, it wouldn't be very hard to bring that data back to the Control Panel and leave the rounding to the public pages.

Thank you again for the feedback. It's critical for us to understand how authors see the difference between the old system and the new one so that we can fix anything that we missed between the two systems.

I think I'm going to submit my Halloween contest story through this page, see how it works.

save profile updates

Tried updating my profile details but the save button does nothing. The message telling me I had unsaved changes came up, but still there was no response from th save button.

Positive first impressions:
-I really like the over all look of the site
-the explore and control panel features seem very user friendly
-I like how usernames, story titles, categories etc. are all embedded with links on every page that they appear on to make searching easier
-love seeing number of favorites, and what your average score is out of on the Works page
-love the idea of a reading list, and that you can mark stories to read for later
-I like that you can see users who are following you without having to visit their page--seeing the user pictures are a nice touch

Wishes:
-to have the stats of stories appear larger on the Works page. The 'hot' button sticks out due to it being the most contrasting image on the page---maybe the graphics (the heart, bar graph, and star) for the other stats could be colored in as well to help them pop?

-could the favorites stat under each story on the Works page also become linkable to a list of those users who have favorited the stories?

hfernandez1983 said:

4. One problem I noticed was when I tried to update my profile info. For some reason, I didnt see it save even after clicking on save information multiple times. Needs to be looked into.

Click to expand...

legerdemer said:

- I made a few changes to my profile but the site did not allow me to save them, and they were lost.

Click to expand...

I was able to change my bio section, and it does state on either the new or old panel that I did make changes to my profile this morning. So, I did not see this problem, but I did see where there could be some confusion.
First did you both complete each section with a red asterisk? Both the biography and date of birth--you can set age privacy-- sections need answers before changes will save.
You will still see the declaimer: Answers to these questions are shown on your public profile page. Please remember to click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page or changes will not be saved. on the bottom of the page even if changes have been saved.
The profile sections on the new panel are different than the old one, so the only answers that will change, are sections compatible on both panels.

I couldn't save my profile until I'd put in a birth date, and then selected "Don't show my age." You might point that out on the spot where birthday is entered, or just by selecting, "Don't show my age," permits me to save my profile without entering a birth date.

Like several other comments before mine, I find the large text to be a waste of space on my computer screen, but on a phone, large text is necessary to be able to read it. Is it possible for the reader to select the text size? That would accommodate most of your readers' needs. I'd prefer to read more than about ten items on one screen. Being able to scroll up and down with a mouse, the full length of list would be much appreciated.

I like the ability to see new stories posted by authors whom I'm following, and to see those readers who are following me.

With the new control panel, will we still have the ability to find a story which includes a particular word or phrase? Likewise, will we retain the ability to search for a particular user name from the control panel? Is it there, or did I miss it?

Overall, I like the new control panel, and expect the changes suggested by others and myself will have a positive impact on the new design.

Thanks for taking the time and effort to make Literotica a better web site.

Several authors have mentioned that it can be daunting to try to take in all of the data available in the new system. We understand that, and we are reading all of your comments (public and private) looking for ways to improve the system.

One thing that I didn't mention in the first post in this thread is that we had intended to launch the My Home section with a "Quick Stats" graph above the Activity Feed. The graph did not make it into the first version for various reasons, but it is in progress now.

For active authors with a large number of works, it can be hard to get a quick idea of how you are doing on Lit. You can dig down into the stats for each story, but what about overall reads on all of your works this week vs last week? We hope that a simple graph with key stats attached will make it easy to understand how your entire body of work has been doing.

Another feature which is mostly done, but not quite ready for public testing, is the manual Series Management interface. In case there wasn't enough to confuse you yet, there is lots more to come!

Thank you again for all of the comments, suggestions, and bug reports. Please keep them coming!

Hi Manu & Laurel,

Thanks for the replies. I really think that the new design is a great step in the right direction, in terms of expanding the readership by making the site 'newer.' But as lovecraft68 would say, the favs/views/stats are the "payments" for the authors here.

Here's what I mean by that, to help clarify what I've posted before.

1. The ability to see Activities

On the old feature, Favorites are sorted by 24 hours, then past 7 days, then past 30 days.

So let's say I have a story being posted on October 1. For an author, it's like Christmas morning. What an author will do is check that Activities list in the morning, in hopes that there's a long list of activities. On a single page, I can see all the stuff that's happened. And I can see it easily at first glance, meaning everything is clearly marked. Comments have a big white bubble. Favorite author has a certain look, so does favorite story.

In other words, the old system of Activities is simple, big, clear, and very straight forward.

The new system makes that harder. It's a chore on the eyes, a little. There's very little difference between getting a favorite author, favorite story, or getting a comment. It all looks the same. And the "load more" feature is a bit of a hassle, because if the story is popular, then I may have to do a bit more "loading," instead of getting all of the day's activities at once.

It's especially problematic if, let's say an author was on a trip and hadn't been able to access their stuff. Then the author would have click load many times. Whereas with the old system, a person could just click "7 days" and see their activities for the past week.

Bring the hearts back!!!

2. The ability to see clear stats

One of the joys of being an author here is the clear stats you get. Again, if I have a story coming out on October 1st, it's Christmas morning.

I can't wait to check my data and see this, in big clear letters that give you instant information:

4.59 605 43421 (views)

Instead, with the new system, we see this, in TINY letters that an author would have to take a moment to decipher:

43.4k (views) 4.59 / 605


Again, the stat numbers on the new site are TINY. The old design gives you the information easily. But most of all, the fact that the number of views in the new site are rounded takes away from the "payment" that authors get. We want to know how our stories are doing. Not an approximation.

Also, I saw where you mentioned "search story" to find any given story. That makes it a lot easier, thanks.


Overall:

I hope I'm not being overly critical. Like I said, I think this is a great step for the future of the site. But the suggestions I've made have also been reiterated by other authors.

Personally, I wish the design for the old Activities List and the Story Views could be incorporated onto the new site. But I'd understand if that's not entirely possible.

thanks,

heyall

New Control Panel

These are what we find (just our impressions):

https://www.literotica.com/my/#/works
- Has a lot of dead space on it and some duplicate information, like a link and a count display for comments.
- The information authors care about is too small and truncated.
- The paging for multiple stories is probably the most difficult aspect of this page.
- The buttons that say PUBLISHED or DRAFT take up unnecessary space on the page.
- There are no links or displays of awards.
- The look is nice and modern, but authors probably care more about functionality and visibility of their data

https://www.literotica.com/my/#/user
- The user information omitted COUPLE (so we are sad.)
- The information cannot be updated without a birthday, which is also odd for a couple.
- The ICQ and AIM IM are okay, but since Lit is now on Twitter, maybe some other options should be available.

https://www.literotica.com/my/#/works/stories/drafts
- Love this!
- The preview on the submission doesn't render HTML tags properly <i></i> etc. This is very necessary as we need to know if there unmatched tags that format the entire story incorrectly.
- Again DRAFT button takes up unnecessary space. If it doesn't do something it should be removed.

https://www.literotica.com/my/#/lists
- Love the new Read Later feature. This should eliminate users using Favorite/Unfavorite.

https://www.literotica.com/my/#/lists/read-later
- Once on this, there is no link back to favorites.

https://www.literotica.com/my/#/following
- This is a good improvement too.
- It would be better if it listed authors most recent stories (maybe with optional date range 1month, 3month...) This would cut down request for "Please e-mail me when you release Chapter #"

https://www.literotica.com/my/#/followers
- Like this very much. Needs to be more compact and sortable.
- Would be nice if you could have the same for stories.

https://www.literotica.com/my/#/activity/all
- Looks nice, but again needs to be more compact.
- Miss the date ranges.
- It doesn't appear to include unfavoriting.

Numerous pages jump off into old style Lit pages... We know there is probably more coming. Overall impressions are positive. The SINGLE thing preventing us from using it would be the numbers for votes, views, favorites, comments being truncated with 1.x K instead of the actual number. How will we know if people are reading/voting?

Thanks for all the hard work!
-MM