BTW, didn’t know about the Cafepress products until Redhat mentioned them. Nice!

As an aside, I’m going to buy one of those shirts for my dog, though. I’ll probably be buying a batch of shirts at some point soon and give one featured author each month a t-shirt.

Dave (redhat)

Nick, Ganga reminded me of something I thought would be cool. What if you allow the original author to delete a branch that no one has written yet, after at least one branch has been written? That way you could make parts of the story linear, and still branch in different directions at key points.

I’m excited about the group feature; It sounds like it will spice it up nicely.

I think sort of ‘Note Board’ system next to the story would be great as a way to see the direction the original author intended and as a way to help progress the story forward. Currently I seem to be using the tags for this. Yesterday I found a story that I was interested in adding a branch to, I saw one of the tags was ‘Cloverfield’ and realised that this was the direction the author wanted to take the story.

A message board or forum would also be a great way to help develop the community, share ideas about stories, get literary advice and just have a chat.

I also like the idea of being able to switch between Linear and Branching mid story. I also like the idea of having the original author or a narrator to help progress the story(mainly linear stories) in a set direction.

Finally Nick I would like to say thanks for a great site. I love the atmosphere on this site, it feels very welcoming and laid back, and it was this atmosphere that made me feel welcome to contribute to the site.

We had a fairly large number of writers, and often a large overarching plot that was left just vague enough that it could accomodate a lot of creativity in how each author contributed. We also often had smaller subplots that were created by smaller groups within the main group. We would make plans in a general way via email or postings on a members-only board hidden from the public. It could be very intensive collaboration or fairly loose, and everyone was open to “Well, what if we take it in this direction?” suggestions. We did have something of a moderator, whose main participation in the stories we wrote was to give narrative nudges if we seemed to be stalling, or to haul us back on track (again, through a narrative he wrote in the story) if we wandered too far afield from the main plot. Since most of our collaborative fiction was military in flavor, it was easy for him to post as the supreme commander of the military and issue orders to his officers in order to get things rolling again. Our sideplots, which could grow sometimes as complex as a main plotline and go on for months or years, would carry on merrily side-by-side with the main plot. The sideplots might involve anywhere from two people to eight or ten, rarely more than that. Lots of email flew as general plotlines were hammered out, and some of it was even sometimes roleplayed through some IM client or other if someone wanted to include a conversation but wasn’t sure that they’d be able to keep a character someone else had invented true to the intended personality.

Obviously something like that would be easier in a group with a story closed down to a particular set of writers, since an entirely open story could have someone come alone and throw a major monkey wrench in the works of some carefully thought-out plotline. The more free-wheeling open story has its joys and challenges, and is great fun. But so can deeper collaboration be. Especially so if your co-authors are people whose writing you enjoy and whose approach can spark new ideas for you.

I’m accustomed to that kind of deeper collaboration, and have greatly restrained myself from firing off email to other people saying, “Hey, what if this happens, and then this? Want to plan something?” I’ve written to one author because I had an idea for a chapter that would either kill a character he introduced, or at least heavily imply the death of the character. Writing seemed like the polite thing to do. I haven’t gotten a response, so that chapter is on hold currently. But still, the potential is there already through email, if we’re all bold enough to start writing each other with our thoughts, suggestions, and plans.

To preface my comments with a bit of a caveat, Protagonize is an ever-evolving creature. It’s very organic, and though I do have a long-term roadmap for larger features, the smaller ones tend to be developed a bit more haphazardly and I prioritize based on (a) what I think the site needs to make it work more smoothly, mostly in terms of polish, and (b) what I see people asking for on a regular basis, or things that are obviously hindering their use of the site.

With that in mind, at a high level, the ability to allow original story authors to guide a storyline (within reason) is definitely of interest. I think that the new groups feature coming in may alleviate this slightly, as group moderators will have some basic administrative-type abilities, and each group will have the option to be locked down tightly to a specific style (or it can be as open as the current system.)

Additionally, there’s already the obvious option for the original author to add a comment on the story if they want to provide input to other authors.

I’m toying with the idea of adding some kind of sidebar where the original author can comment or provide notes/guidance on the story separately from the comments, but I don’t know if providing moderator-style controls to every story author is the best way to go. It could definitely cause some chaos if authors get a little overzealous about moderating or pruning their own stories.

Along the same lines, Vulgrin had emailed me a while back with the suggestion that we should allow multiple versions of the same branch of a story, and users could vote on which one they felt was the best. The highest rated branch or chapter would be shown as users navigated through the story, but then alternate versions could still be viewed, kinda like a Digg-style “below your threshold” style view where you’d have to manually expand the alternate branches to see them. The problem I see with this approach is if someone posts a follow-up chapter or branch, and the parent suddenly gets voted down (and in turn, another branch is surfaced), the story could become totally disjointed, or worse yet, make no sense at all.

Allowing for some kind of area where the original story can write a brief outline that can potentially be edited throughout the life of the story (and is visible at all times if the user wants to see it) could definitely be done, though.

Redhat also makes a good point about comments sometimes being a bit hard to follow. I’m hoping that the combination of a few features will address this problem:

- Email notifications; these are working now across the board, and I think they’re helping keep conversations going quite nicely.

- On-site notifications, which I alluded to in last week’s roundup blog post, are coming very soon; they’re basically a recap of all the notifications that have been sent to you since your last login.

- Merged comment view; this is sort of like the “wall-to-wall” that you see on Facebook. Between this and adding a better overall view of all recently posted comments, conversations should become a bit clearer between various parties.

- Groups, which will feature some basic message-board style functionality (utilizing the existing comments system with some modifications); this should work somewhat like the way Flickr does their comment threads within groups.

Again, excellent feedback so far. I’ll put together another blog post later this week based on the comments here and see if I can filter things down to a more specific list of changes and requests.

Nick – Agree with your observations on linear and non-linear stories. I thought I was more comfortable with organized linear writing since some addventure-type stories seemed to be spreading out in too many directions, but I guess that’s the fun part of it!

I’ve found many great stories, with excellent starts. Maybe I was trying for things to be too perfect, but I still wouldn’t mind some times seeing an ending to a story! I know, the fun part of protagonize is not the end product, but the journey. Nevertheless.. (Is there an option to end a story if we thought a certain closure has been reached?)

As for linear stories, I agree that one wouldn’t have the patience to scroll through 100 chapters unless they were involved since the early stages.

From my limited observation:

- Linear stories seem to work very well with small teams who understand and complement each other very well, and have been participating in the process from the early stages. Serious stories are probably better written linear, I think.

- Non-linear stories seem to work very well for more light-hearted stories where it is “anything goes” – like a WWF mania if you will, for lack of a better analogy ;)

One more thought – once we categorize a story as linear or non-linear, it looks like we can’t change it. Can we have the option to change this on a chapter by chapter basis – ie., can the author, when posting a chapter decide if they want the next branch to have only one chapter, or have multiple branches?

I like Rachel’s and Redhat’s suggestions about control for the story – the owner providing an outline of what they have in mind about this story. For instance, Rachel put forth her thoughts about what she was expecting to see in “Death in a Singsong” when she started that one, and everyone followed suit.

Rach, one alternative for more control might be for a story owner to publish a rough outline of how they want the story to progress, and people could write parts that flesh out the outline. I don’t know how that would look on a website, but maybe something like a flowchart diagram that the story owner defines major plot lines and some general ideas. It kind of takes some of the spontaneity out of it though.