Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Thank you for the author limit increase! I've been gleefully going back and completing the credits for lots of anthologies :-) Of course, that means I end up browsing and finding new-to-me anthologies, so my to-read shelf gets bigger and bigger!

The following is something of a brain dump that has been gathering since I started editing months ago. I don't want it to seem like I'm all complaints, but I do want to try to help to make the system better, so I figure I might as well speak up.

Unfortunately (?), I hit the 50-author limit tonight :-) Now that I've seen it, I have to agree that the book pages is very cluttered with so many authors - see the book I was working on as an example.

How about listing the first 3-5 credited people for a book, with a "click for more" link just like we have for book descriptions and so on? That lets people see at a glance whether or not a particular book is what they're looking for, but doesn't overwhelm them with ALL the people who contributed to a big anthology. It's a little like only seeing the stars' names on a movie poster as opposed to seeing ALL of the credits.

After the layout issue is resolved, is it actually necessary to have a limit on the number of authors?

I've been working on anthologies, and I really have to wonder if all the page reloading is kind to the server.

Let's say I need to add an editor to a volume that already has one editor and 28 other contributors. I add it, save the changes, then start trying to get the new editor moved up the list to the right place. That's 28 times that I'm going to hit that up arrow, and 28 times that the server has to save the little change and reload the page.

Instead of doing that, would it work to have a field next to each item so that the editor could enter the place to which she wants that particular author moved, like "2"? I think Netflix does something like that with re-ordering queues now.

(My brain is actually messing with something about ordering items in general, but it isn't quite ready yet. Maybe it'll be in a future post.)

Could we possibly edit the authors/roles that have already been entered? That would make it much easier to add role information to or correct credits for books that have been in the system for a while, and it seems to me as if it would also lessen some of the load on the server. Right now, if I see that someone misspelled an author name, I have to delete the author, wait for the page to reload, re-add that author and his role, save the changes, and then go through the reordering rondo. Why can't I just pop a missing letter in, hit save, and be done with it?

This is much less important in the grand scheme of things, but is it possible to allow disabling of that annoying "help us keep this field consistent" pop-up when you click in the role field? I understand the need for the reminder, especially for new librarians or people who are adding a book manually--but for people who have been librarians for a while, it's just a nuisance. Making it optional would be great - just tell me where to turn it off!

With or without the pop-up, how hard would it be to fix the tab order in that area? If I enter a role and hit tab, I get to the "close" thing on the pop-up - that's fine. I hit return, then tab--and I'm not quite sure where I am, but it definitely is NOT in the next author field.

I've done data entry and such since way before most people had ever seen a "mouse" that wasn't a rodent :-) So I tend to use the keyboard as much as possible, and tab order is really important for efficient data entry.

Hi Cyn,

All excellent points. Re your suggestions for improvements & such, you might want to consider also posting in the Goodreads Feedback group in the questions and suggestions folder. It now might be sufficient to post here; Goodreads staff will likely see your ideas, but they will for sure in the Feedback group.

Edit: I do like your idea for clicking more for authors and for then not having a number limit on authors.

I think that's an awesome idea too! Maybe soon we'll see it implmented! Great idea Cyn!

I'd like to 'second' this section of Cyn's post:

Let's say I need to add an editor to a volume that already has one editor and 28 other contributors. I add it, save the changes, then start trying to get the new editor moved up the list to the right place. That's 28 times that I'm going to hit that up arrow, and 28 times that the server has to save the little change and reload the page.

Instead of doing that, would it work to have a field next to each item so that the editor could enter the place to which she wants that particular author moved, like "2"? I think Netflix does something like that with re-ordering queues now.

I've been working on my collection of sci-fi anthologies myself, and have noticed that it doesn't seem to matter whether or not I fill out the author fields in alphabetical order, they seem to appear semi-randomly when I save (not sure what's causing that, and am currently searching the Questions forum in another window to see if I can find another thread about this issue). For anthologies with just a few authors it's only a minor pain to do the clickydance to get them all arranged alphabetically, but for anthologies with a lot of authors...well, at the moment, I'm not being quite as diligent as perhaps I should in reordering everyone.

I have to admit that I'm not a diligent about it as I should be, either. I will be very happy when that ordering bug is fixed. I want more contributors even more than that, though :-)

Well, that bug still isn't fixed.