Do We Want A Website?

[Chaos]

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/readingexcuses.com/Dashboard

That's I think the link you want.

[stridera]

You can also go to mail.readingexcuses.com

[lethalfalcon]

Since somebody actually necro'd this thread already (causing me to notice it), I was wondering what, if anything, was going to be done about this. I think it would be great if RE had a site. I also think it would be great if there was a better way to send out submissions than through a mailing list. As it is now, it only takes one person getting a virus on their computer to harvest their address book before we're all in a world of hurt. I'm surprised it hasn't happened already, honestly.

That said, I'm willing to offer my services to help set something up, if anyone wants it. I have two T-1 lines running into my basement, hosting two fairly nice servers (with full battery backup for about 4 days, nightly disk backups offsite, etc.). I use it to host a few of my clients already, but the lines are barely a quarter used at present. I highly doubt RE would be pulling in 40GB/mo. on its own, even if it *did* have graphics (40GB/mo. is about 1k unique visitor per day on a fairly graphics-intensive site). I'd also be willing to write some code if it was necessary--that's what I do for a living anyway, and I doubt RE would be high maintenance. I wouldn't even have a problem setting up a VPS and giving out the access to people who wanted it, if someone else wanted to take the reins.

I've been working on a site for about a year now that's geared toward writing, as well. As I progress on it, I'm actually gearing it more toward a writing collaboration/critiquing site anyway, so when I'm all done, I'll see if perhaps I can help RE that way. Think of it like a forum board mixed with something kinda like Google docs, but with a lot more control over who can see it.

I will let everyone know that one thing I cannot do is design. I can't draw worth beans. I can take any photoshop/ai composite and make it work really well in HTML/CSS though, which is what I spend half my day doing (the other half is making the sites actually *do* something).

Anyway, that's my rant on the subject.

[ryos]

That's a risk with all email, not just our mailing list, as I've discovered to my detriment. I'm extremely careful with my email address—nobody gets it except people I know in the real world. Everyone else gets aliases. Even with all that, SOMEHOW the farknards got ahold of my actual email address. Either they guessed it (by sending to a bunch of common first names @ a known domain name), or someone I know got a filching virus.

Fortunately, I don't get more than 1-3 spams a day from it. Yet.

I have a couple of problems with moving to a web site, the first larger than the second:

• With emails, I have a permanent archive of everyone's submissions that I control. A member-hosted web site could well be gone in a year, or even a few months, but if we stick with the list, it's less likely to get orphaned. (No offense intended to you with that, Falcon; it's just the pattern I've observed many times over in communities on the Internet.)
• A web archive would be harder to use than my email client. It would make the submission process clunkier, as well as the process of browsing the archive. IME, desktop apps nearly always have better UIs than web apps.

Lastly, I don't really see what problem you're trying to solve with an RE web site. What will the proposed site do better than our current system?

[lethalfalcon]

One of the big problems that it would solve is the ease of being able to go back and get past submissions, so you A) don't have to dig through your emails to find it, and B) don't have to ask them to send it if you're new to the group.

As for your first point, I could get around that easily. When a piece is marked for critique, I take a snapshot of that document and send it to you in email (the system supports revision control, so you can easily get to your old versions in case you want something from an old copy). Your email address is never made public to *anyone*, even the other list members. As it is, the second you send a submission to the reading list, everyone else gets your address. By the system sending you an email, you now have two ways of getting it: the old way, or through the site itself (new way). I personally dislike using email. I have well over a dozen accounts I have to actively keep track of, and even with filters I sometimes get things lost in the noise.

As for the submission process being clunkier, I'm not quite sure I can agree. Right now, you have to submit a document via email (which you have to pull out of your big document already, unless you actually create new documents for each chapter, which I know I don't, at least), and then you have to come here and create a new thread to discuss it (although sometimes other people end up creating your thread, but that's just pushing the burden on to someone else). Compare this to copying your chapter and just pasting it in a box and hitting submit. All formatting is preserved, a thread is automatically created, and you don't have to worry about whether everyone in the list will get it or not (which is apparently a problem for some people already). Even if they didn't get the email notification, logging into the site would show the same notification and they could access it that way. Even better, you'd have the ability to access your own works when you weren't at your computer, as long as you were at *a* computer with internet access.

As for the browsing process, I don't know how difficult it would be for you to find someone's submission when there's a group dashboard window that lists all the group members, and likely their recent submissions. It wouldn't be any more difficult than finding the thread to post on in this forum for a given chapter by a given user. The thread itself would be attached directly to the submission page, similar to how deviantArt has comments below the piece. Comments would be tracked by revision as well, so you would know that a given comment is/is not part of the current revision you're looking at. Almost all of this is transparent to the user (unless they want to see their past revisions).

I'm a big fan of open document formats, too (I can't stand Microsoft, et al for creating proprietary systems). At any time, you'd be able to pull your documents off the list (probably in RTF format, since it's the easiest to generate programatically), and you could always restrict your external access to "private" to prevent anyone from seeing any work you wanted to.

Now, I'm sure I don't have all the answers, and I honestly don't know whether it's right for RE. I'm building it anyway, because *I* already use it for a lot of my writing, and it already supports collaboration so that my friend and I can work on the same book and see what we're each writing. If nobody uses it, I'll live, but I do get warm fuzzies when I find that something I did has a valid use outside my little world. At some point, I'll consider the site ready for outside beta testing and then I'll create a thread on it to gather feedback. At that point, we could discuss shortcomings, features that are needed, and *possibly* make it something that RE (and other writing groups) could use to make their lives easier.

And then I'll go on to solve world hunger.

[stridera]

Lethalfalcon, I think I mentioned a lot of these issues before when I originally offered to setup the site.  I liked the idea of having people post to a group's version of Google Docs.  That way, everyone can view them, you get them fully archived, googles not going away anytime soon, etc.

I think the main problem is that this way everyone would have to get a login/password and actually go to an external source to view submissions.  If I understood everyone's opinions correctly, this was the main issue.

[lethalfalcon]

Personally, I'll never trust any data of mine to Google. They have a very... lackluster approach to data security with regards to their indexing (they *are* a data mining company, first and foremost). They also have a tendency to randomly go down, which I attribute mainly to the massive system they have to keep running (a smaller site is *easier* to keep up). They also *do* cancel projects from time to time, especially if they're losing too much money. Google as a company may not disappear, but their services are not set in stone. Google groups in general also have *huge* issues with spam, to the point where a good number of groups have left because of it.

That said, I can understand the same issues with regards to me setting up a site for others to use. It's all about trust. Certainly, I know that the data is as safe as I can make it, and I know I won't be giving it out to anyone else, but I have to convince everyone else, which is much harder.

If the main issue is really that people don't want to have another account, I find that a little sad. I probably create one or two accounts per week to sites. There are more and more places that are going to login systems as it is, because it's more secure, and you have greater control over the content. You have to have a username/password for your email too, and that's very likely different from the one you use here. What do people do in that case? My guess is that they just save the password. Any additional site wouldn't be much different.

Also, I'm not quite sure Google Docs has the functionality that RE needs. The only thing it would change is Google Docs + TWG instead of email + TWG, or Google Groups + Google Docs (which really isn't that well integrated at all). What I'm proposing is actually moving over the entire system to a single solution. Document posting + revision control + integrated forum.

Google Docs also doesn't have a very fine-grained permissions system in place to deal with different levels of access. My alpha site already has these permissions: private, write-collaboration, read-write collaboration, members, and public. This is on a per-part basis (a part is a section of a work, be it a chapter, act, etc.). So you can work on anything you want on the site and mark it private, and no-one can see it. When it's ready, you can either mark it to another level, or you can use a special function called "publish for critique", which will flag that revision as group-readable and make it available to whatever groups you're a member of. It sounds complex, but to the user it's just two buttons. [Save] and [Publish for Critique] at the bottom of your editor. All the grunt work is handle by the revision system. If you make changes, you're free to publish a new version to overwrite the old one (although I'd have to put some sort of limiter in there to prevent people from spamming the group with publish notifications--probably something like once per week per (person|work|part)--which would be configurable by the group moderators).

I've actually been thinking about this site for a lot longer than I've been in this writing group. The group has given me new insight into functionalities I want it to have, though.

[ryos]

Knowing that you're already building it anyway changes matters. I'm certainly willing to give it a fair shake when it's ready. I'd even contribute some code if you need it (I'm a CS student/web developer by day).

[stridera]

I registered the domain name and I'm more than willing to point it wherever the group wants me to.  I would just make sure you get the approval of everyone before moving on past the design phase.

[lethalfalcon]

Heh, I'm a graduated business information systems major by day (slacker), web developer by night (I work better then). I've actually written my own framework to use for the site, already (I can't stand existing frameworks; they're too bloated). I'll let everyone know when it's... field testable. Unfortunately, it's a little lower priority than my normal work, but I build things from time to time for my clients that I end up able to migrate over to it, so I get paid indirectly for it.

[stridera]

I'm a programmer by day, and a writer/gamer by night, so I get paid directly for the web stuff... It's more fun when it's a hobby.

[lethalfalcon]

I get paid for my web development as well. Have my own company and everything. Work out of my house, make my own hours, etc. Couldn't ask for a much better job... but yeah, programming as a hobby is much more fun, I'll agree.

[Silk]

Alright, this is my last attempt at something productive(ish) before I go to bed, so forgive me if this is a little bit scattered; I'm more asleep than awake and mostly responding to things as I thnk of them.

I'm open to submission formats other than a mailing list, of course; it's just proved to be our most efficient method of critiquing so far.

I'm not sure whether this was really being discussed or whether the discussion over moving to a "critiquing" site of some sort was purely about the submission format (sorry, end-of-semester lack of brain functionality), but I'll just toss this out here:

I wouldn't really want to move the actual Reading Excuses discussions away from TWG, especially since the TWG admins were kind enough to set us up with this space in the first place. I like the community here, and I like that other members of the TWG forums who aren't a part of RE feel like they can occasionally pop in and contribute to the discussion. It's also our primary source for RE members: It makes us visible and we're easy to access for members of the TWG forums.

Time permitting, I would also be happy to contribute code (html and CSS, that is; I'm totally NOT a programmer) to whatever we wanted for a website, if indeed we wanted something at all. I am also not a designer, however. In fact, I'm not much of a developer either. But let's just gloss over that, shall we?

We've talked before about the ability for people to go back and get older submissions. We've found that not only do people not mind sending their submissions to new group members, but they prefer it that way; they like knowing who their material is going out to and when.

And now that I have nothing else to say, I'm just going to bring this post to an abrupt halt. Sorry I didn't respond to this sooner. Last week was very, very hectic.

[lethalfalcon]

I'm a little confused by your argument, Silk. You say that you don't want to move RE away from TWG because people can pop in and contribute who aren't members, but I don't really see how that's possible, if they aren't getting the material. Sure, there are a few scattered threads that don't pertain directly to submissions, but those are few and far between. The bulk of the threads here are on submission critiques, which no one but those on "the list" can really talk about.

As for the ability to get older submissions, you state that people prefer knowing who their work is going out to, but in essence, a new person could get added to the list with only you and Chaos knowing, and then they get all new material without others really knowing (unless they first post in the welcome thread and people read it). I'd actually prefer *not* to have to dredge up material to resend to someone who's new to the list. If they were accepted to the list, someone trusts them to get my material anyway, whether I like it or not. I can't choose not to send to a new person simply because I don't know them. A more fine-grained permission system would notify existing group members when a new member was added, and optionally have an opt-in system for that new user to see existing users' works, on a per-user basis. This would prevent old users who no longer wanted to have their works available from having to worry about them being made so--of course, they could also just cancel their account or mark all their works as private and go invisible, too.

Honestly, without the TWG admins' support and their contribution of an API of sorts to access the data in the forums, there's no way to set up anything easier and more streamlined without moving it all off of TWG. Or, they could actually implement a document submission system of their own, but either one requires significant coding on their part (the site I'm working on to act as a full group critiquting system is already over 2k lines of code, and that's just the PHP, not counting the couple dozen HTML templates and stylesheet files).

If we just want a front-end for a door mat, I'm not really sure it matters. The whole point of RE is submissions--the forum does a pretty good job illustrating that.

[Silk]

We actually have had people pop in to contribute to the discussions; I've seen people give query letter advice, advice on book length, etc--so not contributions to the critiques, but more general stuff. It doesn't happen often but it does happen.

Regarding older submissions: That's what people have said; we've had this discussion before and a few people objected on that basis. I'm not really voicing my own objections with this one; I'm actually sort of ambivalent on that topic. I actually do try to encourage any new members to drop by and introduce themselves etcetera, even if they don't want to start submitting right away, so that everyone at least knows when we've got someone else on the list. This is obviously far from a perfectt solution but it does seem to work most of the time.