Feel free to comment about what you like, or don’t like about this latest evolution in forums. I’ve found that while it may seem confusing at first, there are a ton of great features and little surprises that probably make it the best of all.
Most importantly it’s 100% ours so no one can abandon it.
I will say I’m not a super-fan of some of the design choices but I’ll see what I can do to fix it. The app is still in its initial stages (though close to reaching 1.0 status) but should improve over time.
What I don’t like about it is that it’s not obvious how to get back to the top level of the forum. (You can’t just click “back”.) Often you just want to go back to square one to get re-oriented.
Yeah, navigation here is pretty counter-intuitive. The things I should be able to click on to go back to the home page don’t work that way.
Part of that has to do with my super lame “Dramatica Discussions” logo at the top. It’s way too small. I’m going to make it super big and have it say “Discussions”. Right now it’s kind of hard to tell how to go back unless you scroll down and see the Dramatica logo.
It’s funny – I wasn’t super happy with it at first, but the more I use it the more I can see how much better it is over a typical forum.
Yes, navigating will take some getting use to. What I do not like about the google+ forum is that once a topic was out of site it was virtually gone. It looks like here that keeping a topic alive if you want will be much easier.
Not a suggestion: I’m noticing that I’m not always getting alerted when threads I’m posting in get new comments. I thought I was supposed to?
A Genre umbrella, somewhere, is needed. I know Dramatica is beyond genre, but I want to write a Comedy screenplay with my husband, the donator of his life experience for it. I might have questions about storyforming expectations for comedy, etc. I saw an interview on TCM with Ed Solomon, the screenwriter for the first Men in Black. He was talking about a writer having to determine a genre, for a successful pitch to the producers and a successful tool for the actors. As an interesting aside, he learned with this film that if an actor cuts lines, the actor was usually right. From my acting experience, I could see the writer, providing tons of dialogue, gives the actor beats and insights, which might be more effective with looks or body language. It might need a different title than Genre, though. Maybe, different titles like Comedy, Action, Mystery, etc. would work as well.
What I’d like to do is wait and see if topics like this gain traction and then create a separate category for them, if needed. This site has a great search/discovery aspect to it so I don’t want to over-categorize posts. But feel free to post whatever in the “uncategorized” category and if more and more posts tend to veer in that direction I’ll set something up.