Anti-BookThreads Thread

[Corenat Rovarnus]

In another inappropriate thread, my fellow administrator Vroop introduced a burgeoning new software platform for content creation called BookThreads that might be used to emulate the Myocardial Infarcation writer's game we had some time ago.
It can be found at BookThreads.com.
I will now proceed to tell you why it sucks and you should just play your story games on this forum for now.

• It's called "Book Threads". You know what shows up when you Google that? A whole bunch of unrelated crap. The name's too generic.
  
• Their community is as tiny as ours. They have a total of ten stories on the entire site. They don't even have a forum, meaning any concerns have to be directly emailed to the creator! I'd rather that they join us than us join them.
  
• Underdeveloped interface. Don't be fooled by that HTML5. They forgot to slap a beta sticker on their logo, it's obviously not done yet. Here's the big things I noticed:
  
• There's no "previous chapter" links
  
• The thread connections aren't delineated clearly on story diagrams. Drawing lines isn't hard!
  
• The editor is just a blank text field, there's no options for indentation, bold, underline, italics, pictures, or any special formatting whatsoever.
  
• A dialog box saying "Sorry, call failed. Please refresh and try again!" pops up for a split second whenever I try to view a chapter. This is worrying. I would never leave something like that showing in a finished product.
  
• Did I mention they don't have a forum?
  

[Zhu Yang]

All fair criticisms.
1. I agree their name sounds, and not too descriptive. Can't think of a better one at the moment though
2. Yeah their community is pretty puny. The top viewed story only has 204 views. It'll be interesting to see if it catches on or not.
3. A beta sticker would help. The frontpage implies that the program is already in full swing
4. Good complaint. Their reader interface isn't very polished either. The normal scroll-bar sticks out from the rest of the slick looking interface.
5. Their current chapter web looks like this:

Selecting an unconnected thread looks like this:

Selecting a connected thread looks like this:

I'm not sure if drawing lines everywhere will help, especially if there are a lot of submissions. Designing an interface that makes all the connections clear at one glance would be a good project. Maybe a combination of color coding and numbering?
6. lol
7. Yeah, that's kinda weird. Don't know why that happens, especially since it only comes up for a split second. Loading dialogue boxes look tacky on webpages
8. You could volunteer to be their forum