I wanted to create a community story (and not series), a story where people could edit the text and add, but the checkbox doesn’t seem to be there when I create a new story. Is the functionality gone?
1 Like
It’s not supported anymore, as it was hardly ever used.
Admins can still activate it though. But at your own risk. It should work, but I haven’t tested it for a while.
2 Likes
I had the perfect story for this, but if it’s not used, may not be worth it.
Don’t say that. I removed the option because it was hardly ever used and I felt like the whole dialog is way too bloated anyway.
But if you have a story you think other people might like to contribute to, please go ahead. The mechanism should work just fine. Just ask an admin to enable the Community Story flag for you.
1 Like
I was always curious about how they worked. Does the story owner get approval over changes? Or you totally give up control?
Because at one point, I wanted to open up one of my stories to community editing, but my idea was: The beginning is written. I know what I want to happen in the end. It would be cool if people added their own ideas in the middle, but then I would give up control if someone wrote something that conflicts with my planned ending. So I gave up on the idea.
Possibly my case wasn’t the best example, since I had an ending in mind.
The mechanism is working like this:
With a community STORY, every person sees an Edit button on the story. They can make changes which will be stored as a revision to the story. This way, multiple revisions can be made by multiple persons at the same time.
The OWNER of the story can also edit a revision himself (to fix changes he doesn’t like) and eventually submit a revision for approval.
Then it will go to the approval queue and the edit gets approved.
Problem: It counts as a normal edit, so the story won’t be pushed back to the top of the list. You’d have to use other means to keep a level on attention to your community story.
A community SERIES works differently, as you know, as it just allows anyone to add chapters to a series, which again, have to be published by the series owner. And each chapter will push the series back to the top of the story list.
1 Like
BTW, it’s always possible to share the work on a story before it’s ever been published. The “edit” link at the top of a story (visible to its author only) can be shared with anyone. Any person with that link can add edits (which end up in revisions), regardless if they are the author or not, even if the story is not yet published.
So a scenario where you share beginning, middle part, sex scene, conclusion etc. between different authors is always possible in the confinements of GSS.
Of course, using Google Documents or sth like that is probably an even better solution.
1 Like
Thanks. Good info. I might create a Community Series (with help from the mods) one day, just to see if I can. I love experimenting with different techniques and sometimes want to write something just to see if I can do it, and what I learn from it.
Same applies here. I’m tempted to create and curate a Community Series just to see if I can.
That is actually an issue outside of community stories. Most revisions to a story (community or not) are minor. But some are more major, and there’s no mechanism to advertise them. You don’t want to publish a different story because you don’t want to lose the ratings and comments and other stats, but no one knows the story has been revised. I just made a major revision to my story The Start Up, but no one knows unless they scroll down to it, and that I added a “(Revised)” to the title.
The admins CAN manually push it back to the top. It’s just nothing that should be done automatically with every edit, for obvious reasons.
Also, any story can be pinned at the top spot for a given time. So if one would want to start an experiment for a community story, which is then kept at the top spot for the whole time while people make further additions, it would technical be doable.
I’m only talking about the technical aspect, of course. You’d still have to ask @Nu-and-the-Nus and the others if they would do that.
1 Like
I think a community series takes more faith in our fellow man than i’ve got 
, but you should definitely give it a go! Just give a mod a heads up if you have any issues.
I do wonder if they rapidly devolve into chaos