When I finished my first series at GSS, I made it a community series so that other writers could add to the concept if they had new ideas. Nothing really came of that, so I moved on to other stories and concepts.
A week ago, I took a look at my list of stories to see that three newly created accounts had each added the same trollish, low effort, two word long chapter to my old series. I deleted them right away when it was clear it was just a trolling maneuver, but now I have to scroll past those three identical deleted stories when I check the list of what I’ve written.
I was wondering if the site owner might add an option on the “Your Stories” page for an author to show/hide stories that they’ve deleted. As it currently stands, deleted stories just linger on the list and clutter up the flow of stories. I’d also just like to no longer have to be reminded of those bad-faith trolls every time I check on my list of stories.
I’m grateful to be able to use this site nevertheless, but I’d like to know whether an option like this is practical or not.
Ok, just to make sure I understand correctly:
Someone has added chapters to your series (whatever the contents and intent). You should have received a notification for each of these. Didn’t you get them?
As for hiding deleted stories - I just recently made a change that deleted stories are visible to their owner (which in case of a community series is always the author of the original story). I made this change to make it easier to the author to manage his own stories and to revive them, if he likes to.
As for now there’s no way to delete a story once and for all - once it’s submitted it’s simply there to stay.
I have to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of hiding deleted stories to their owner. I understand why you don’t like to be reminded of those tolls, but hiding deleted stories might also not be ideal.
Any opinions by other people perhaps?
One possibility might be to make a distinction between “hidden” stories, where only the owner can see them, and “deleted” stories, where they’re removed from the site outright. In cases like the OP’s, perhaps he could only tag them as hidden, since he didn’t actually write them himself, but then you have the option as site owner to come along and say “yeah, these are trollish, I’ll delete them completely”.
Another flag and another set of UI functions to handle them… Sigh.
I understand if that’s a lot of hard work for you. It’s your site, and you can run it how you want. I’m grateful to be able to post here at GSS regardless.
The change I’d be most in favor of is a toggle option to Show/Hide deleted stories on a user’s account, so that despite still existing, deleted stories don’t have to be visible on a user’s “Your Stories” page forever.
The thing that most bothers me about the issue is that I didn’t even write the stories in question, but as chapters added to the community series I created they still show up when I navigate to my account’s “Your Stories” page.
Also, I’m not sure if this is the place to report such things, but the user who submitted the same chapter (which for the record, consists only of the words “teen sex”) to my community series three times under three author names in the span of ten minutes left their email address visible. If you think this kind of behavior warrants disciplinary action I can share the address of the account in question.
I guess an easy compromise would be to hide deleted stories by default but add a check-button “show deleted stories” on the “Your stories” page.
I think that should accommodate anybody’s preference and it’s easy enough to implement.
I wonder if that guy was trying to discriminate you or to blame your stories for containing teen sex.
In any case, there are always assholes, especially in comments, who want to force their view of right and wrong on other people. If they get a nuisance and don’t stop their harassing, I simply delete their comments, but I won’t do anything else. Blocking an email address is not even worth the effort, as it’s too easy to create another address.