New Lit Story Page Preview

[ElectricBlue]

I knew it was based on length. I could tell after looking at the numbers attached to my stories. I just wonder where they go the estimated words-per-minute figure.

Do you see 39 minutes when you click on the story in my post above? If so, then it's most likely a (fairly fast) reading speed used in a simple calculation. If not, then there's some cleverness going on that looks at your typical reading speed. Unless, of course, you read at the same speed as me, but what with penguins and Suzie, what's the likelihood of that?

 

[RejectReality]

Really like the new pages. The universal header is convenient, and one of my favorite things about the updates. Having tags available at the top of the story is something we've needed for a while. Having the bookmark feature available to everyone should eventually cut down on favorite listings being used for that purpose.

Checked the time to read vs. the same on another site, and Lit has it as 28 minutes vs. their 31 minutes on "At Heaven's 'Bate" so obviously there's competing numbers on how many words per minute the average person reads — and the story has a closing note here, which it doesn't on the other site, so a few more words are part of Lit's calculation.

I hope that once the forum gets upgraded that the universal header is also integrated into it. That would make it a much more seamless part of the site.

One little quibble. There's no way to obtain the story's database number from the new pages. Makes taking advantage of the forum [story] bbcode impossible until you receive a comment, at which point you can get it from the "edit comments" link on your Author CP.

Alternately, if you want to keep that # in the background as much as possible, a bbcode that allows use of just the unique part of the URL representing the title and automatically generates the rest of the Lit story link from that is a fair compromise.

I just like the current version of the bbcode because it cuts out a lot of characters from my signature code.

 

[RelentlessOnanism]

Hello Lit Authors!

We are getting ready to roll out the public BETA of the new Literotica Story Page.

If you would like to see it and give it a try before we make the official announcement, you can do so right now. The page is not quite ready and there are several open issues, but we figured you might want to take a look before everyone else since you actually wrote the stories that are being shown on the page.

If you would like to see the new Story Page, please login to your Lit Control Panel and go to Options then My Options. On that tab, you'll see the following option:
Participate in early site feature versions beta-testing

If you turn that on, you'll immediately start seeing the New Story Page whenever you browse the site. All other pages should remain the same. You can also switch back at any time if you want to.

There are several open issues, and the speed is not as fast as it should be yet, but what you see there is very close to what we plan to launch to users in 2020. Your feedback will help us make it better before the launch.

Please send us email feedback, post here, or click any of the "Send Feedback On This Page" or "Report Page" links to let us know about any issues you find.

Thank you!

I don't seem to be seeing anything different, although I'm not sure where the new story page is. Everything looks exactly the same to me.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I don't seem to be seeing anything different, although I'm not sure where the new story page is. Everything looks exactly the same to me.

If you join as a beta then click on any story, you should see the changes we're talking about. The changes are in the way stories look, not how the Control Panel looks.

Maybe run through the sequence Manu gives, again.

 

[RelentlessOnanism]

If you join as a beta then click on any story, you should see the changes we're talking about. The changes are in the way stories look, not how the Control Panel looks.

Maybe run through the sequence Manu gives, again.

Yeah, I see it now. I wasn't entirely sure what pages were supposed to look different. Now I do.

 

[ThisNameIsntTakenYet]

Do you see 39 minutes when you click on the story in my post above? If so, then it's most likely a (fairly fast) reading speed used in a simple calculation. If not, then there's some cleverness going on that looks at your typical reading speed. Unless, of course, you read at the same speed as me, but what with penguins and Suzie, what's the likelihood of that?

That would be my guess too. If I were to program a feature like this, I'd just grab the average words per minute (a stat easily found using google) and just use the wordcount of the story to figure out how many minutes that would be at said speed. I highly doubt they're tracking individual reading speeds for all users, especially since a lot are anons anyway. Besides, that becomes inaccurate really fast. Like what if you walk away for a few minutes to grab some coffee, for example?

 

[SimonDoom]

Do you see 39 minutes when you click on the story in my post above? If so, then it's most likely a (fairly fast) reading speed used in a simple calculation. If not, then there's some cleverness going on that looks at your typical reading speed. Unless, of course, you read at the same speed as me, but what with penguins and Suzie, what's the likelihood of that?

I get 39 minutes as well. But by my calculation that's quite a bit slower than 250 words per minute. Closer to 200 words per minute. 39 minutes seems slow to me for a story that's just a little over 2 Lit pages.

As TNITY points out, it would be difficult or impossible for the site to know how fast you're reading, because it doesn't know when you're taking breaks. I do that all the time. I'm an easily distracted reader so the site's calculation of my reading pace, if it could actually do that, would be much slower than actual reading pace.

 

[ThisNameIsntTakenYet]

I get 39 minutes as well. But by my calculation that's quite a bit slower than 250 words per minute. Closer to 200 words per minute. 39 minutes seems slow to me for a story that's just a little over 2 Lit pages.

As TNITY points out, it would be difficult or impossible for the site to know how fast you're reading, because it doesn't know when you're taking breaks. I do that all the time. I'm an easily distracted reader so the site's calculation of my reading pace, if it could actually do that, would be much slower than actual reading pace.

First result I found on google when I searched for it said that the average reading speed for English-speaking adults is around 200-250 words per minute, with college students being a bit higher than average, at around 300 (the article suggested this might be because they are required to process large amounts of text in short timespans). So I guess the site might use the low side of that average, or they got a different number from a different source.

PS: you can just call me Taken, most people do

 

[SimonDoom]

F

PS: you can just call me Taken, most people do

Oh, Thanks. I know I've seen that before but forgot.

 

[ThisNameIsntTakenYet]

Please send us email feedback, post here, or click any of the "Send Feedback On This Page" or "Report Page" links to let us know about any issues you find.

Thank you!

I just tried it out, and my first impression was really good. Much more modern and readable than the old one for sure, I had to rely on a custom stylesheet to make it pleasant to read for me in the past.

Also a huge fan of the story info box. It's great to see right away what the stats on a story are when you open it.

One really minor thing I noticed though: In the share box on the last page of a story, the sharing link to Reddit has a tooltip that says "E-mail this" when you hover over it. Kind of found out by accident as I moused over the sharing links, haha. The others are all labeled correctly, including the identical message on the email link.

 

[SimonDoom]

I noticed that the first page of the chapter of a series, there is a "Series" icon, which, when you click on it, reveals "created" and "updated" dates.

For now, the dates are the same: Dec. 5, 2019. I assume that reflects the date that this new page went online and that this information was generated for the first time, but that in the future these dates will reflect the dates of the first chapter and most current chapter. Is that correct?

 

[Maeven_quinn]

I just tried it. I love it. It looks great and much more 'modern' for lack of a better word.

 

[JPGmvny]

I just tried it. I love it. It looks great and much more 'modern' for lack of a better word.

What she said. Thanks Manu and Laurel.

 

[Manu]

One really minor thing I noticed though: In the share box on the last page of a story, the sharing link to Reddit has a tooltip that says "E-mail this" when you hover over it. Kind of found out by accident as I moused over the sharing links, haha. The others are all labeled correctly, including the identical message on the email link.

Nice catch! We totally missed that. I just created a fix for that, it should go live within the next few days.

Thank you for the other feedback too!

 

[Manu]

I noticed that the first page of the chapter of a series, there is a "Series" icon, which, when you click on it, reveals "created" and "updated" dates.

For now, the dates are the same: Dec. 5, 2019. I assume that reflects the date that this new page went online and that this information was generated for the first time, but that in the future these dates will reflect the dates of the first chapter and most current chapter. Is that correct?

Thank you, we are working on updating the Series dates. It was an oversight where they were supposed to be variables and we somehow left them as static text. It's an easy fix.

 

[OneAuthor]

Now that I have commented on a story for the first time since switching to the new Lit Story Page layout, I've noticed there isn't a place to enter a title for a comment. It's not a huge deal to me, but it may be to some.

 

[Manu]

at a first glance, the only thing i would recommend would be a thicker line underneath the current page number at the bottom. With the low profile font on the numbers a slightly thicker line would pop a little more.

Thank you, I am working on the Pagination tonight. Google agrees Pagination font colors need to be made darker. Also, the clickable page numbers should be blue and the page you're on should be black. Somehow we reversed that, but I'm fixing it now. Hopefully it will be updated early next week and you can check again and see if it's better. If not, we can always try again.

 

[Manu]

Now that I have commented on a story for the first time since switching to the new Lit Story Page layout, I've noticed there isn't a place to enter a title for a comment. It's not a huge deal to me, but it may be to some.

We made the decision to get rid of comment titles to simplify the commenting process for readers. You can always use the first line of the comment as a title if you would like to. In the future, we'll allow bold text, @username, and some other markup in comments, which will mean that you can bold the first line like a title if you prefer.

We did not remove the historical comment titles, we simply added them to the new comment format as a bold first line. That way, it's seamless with the new comment format.

Thank you for the feedback and for testing the page.

 

[OneAuthor]

We made the decision to get rid of comment titles to simplify the commenting process for readers. You can always use the first line of the comment as a title if you would like to. In the future, we'll allow bold text, @username, and some other markup in comments, which will mean that you can bold the first line like a title if you prefer.

We did not remove the historical comment titles, we simply added them to the new comment format as a bold first line. That way, it's seamless with the new comment format.

Thank you for the feedback and for testing the page.

Thank you for letting us beta test.

Regarding comments, that makes perfect sense. I like the idea of being able to bold some of the text, if I want to emphasize something.

 

[SimonDoom]

We made the decision to get rid of comment titles to simplify the commenting process for readers. You can always use the first line of the comment as a title if you would like to. In the future, we'll allow bold text, @username, and some other markup in comments, which will mean that you can bold the first line like a title if you prefer.

We did not remove the historical comment titles, we simply added them to the new comment format as a bold first line. That way, it's seamless with the new comment format.

Thank you for the feedback and for testing the page.

I think this was a good call. Speaking for myself as a reader, the title option was an unnecessary wrinkle. As an author, I've never relied on a title, and its presence makes me no more or less likely to read the comment.

 

[gordo12]

Very much like the upgrades. Everything the reader needs to know is right there. The enhanced Stars, favs and feedback at the bottom should deliver more response.

I did notice you dropped the blue lit logo on the page background (or I'm not getting it). Also on a full screen the story spreads right across the page rather than the old format where it was contained. With that I prefer the contained version.

Overall, a very good look. Well done

 

[UsuallyPresent]

I think I like it, on first glance


Only change I'd suggest offhand is the link page. If you want to make that available, fine, but I'd suggest that you make the symbol you currently use for the link page (the 3 dots and 2 bars in a 'c' shape) for a copy of the URL, and a different symbol for the links page.


I say this because I for one would be reluctant to log in via a page a third party popped up for me, and have taken steps to reduce the chances that credentials in one window are reused in another.


For what it's worth, the 'dark mode' in the current Opera browser leaves the page white on PC (Win 10), probably a pretty low priority fix given Opera's market share

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

I agree with those who have already posted, that this looks better than the old version and has some worthwhile new features.

I read from a laptop screen, and I appreciate that there's less wasted space and what I believe to be, in effect, a larger typeface (although I've never liked sans serif body type, on paper or on screen). I haven't seen any comments specifically about how the text appears on a phone screen, so I gather that the text adjusts to any display's parameters.

A couple times when I back-buttoned from a story to the index, I got a cached index that didn't include today's stories. This may be a Firefox thing, because that happens sometimes with other sites as well. A page reload corrected this, as it has done with the other sites.

The reading time estimate is helpful for short-attention-span people like myself. I'm aware that the conventional wisdom here is that long stories are received more favorably than short ones, and I would never discourage anyone from giving a story as much text as the author believes it needs. A reading time number, combined with bookmarking, may help readers finish stories on which they might otherwise give up. I might even be encouraged to check out a category I have thus far avoided, novels and novellas.

 

[gordo12]

I read a story. Average time shown up front 88 minutes. My mind went whoa! Do I have 88 minutes? It was only a 5 pager and I read those all the time. But that made me hesitate.

I'm not so sure that's a good feature now.

 

[SimonDoom]

I read a story. Average time shown up front 88 minutes. My mind went whoa! Do I have 88 minutes? It was only a 5 pager and I read those all the time. But that made me hesitate.

I'm not so sure that's a good feature now.

You'll probably mentally adjust to it soon. If it's based on a roughly 200 words per minute pace and you read faster than that, it's not hard to calculate the adjustment. 200 words per minute means over 18 minutes per Literotica page, which is far slower than I read. The Literotica total gives me a good idea of the upper bound of what it might take to read, including coffee refill breaks.