Fantasy Buddy Reads discussion

I've broken my spreadsheet and I have no idea how. Line 146, I just inputted the data as normal but got weird errors. If anyone could take a look I'd greatly appreciate it!

I think it fixed itself?... I didn't see any errors when I looked...

Thanks Iain!

I know, I know, I'm being impatient, but I can't wait to 2020 be over, so: will there be a 3rd edition? :D

Saar The Book owl wrote: "I know, I know, I'm being impatient, but I can't wait to 2020 be over, so: will there be a 3rd edition? :D"

Yes, I'm going to post the sign-up tomorrow! :)

Yay! All these new challenges for 2021 popping up everywhere makes me so happy :D

Saar The Book owl wrote: "Yay! All these new challenges for 2021 popping up everywhere makes me so happy :D"

The sign-up and rules are up! All 2020 threads except this one have been archived to avoid confusion. I'll archive this thread when the spreadsheet gods make a new tracker :)

Saar The Book owl wrote: "Yay! All these new challenges for 2021 popping up everywhere makes me so happy :D"

Oh yayyy! Thanks for mentioning it! Can't wait to sign up for 2021 ^^

Haha, you're welcome, Katie :)

Iain (or whoever is doing the Team Tracker for 2021), I just wanna say that I'd like the same setup that I have now. What do we call it? The fancy tracker sheet? Plus all 12 months for the tallies.

Thanks in advance!

I’m generally planning to just copy over the current sheet with people’s custom setups... wipe book data, make sure nothing has 2020 validation... only completely new people will get the default template...

Keeping it simple... hopefully make setup manageable by anyone for future years (like Rob)

If I can, I'd really like the month divide that Soo has.

Sha, if you don't mind, can I basically just steal your sheet? I love all the added data points, being able to track the percent of re-reads etc. I also think the death tally is hilarious.

Melissa wrote: "Sha, if you don't mind, can I basically just steal your sheet? I love all the added data points, being able to track the percent of re-reads etc. I also think the death tally is hilarious."

The reread tracker does sound fun. My reread percentage is especially high this year; 37.5% so far.

I liked the sheet that I used for this year, so it can stay.

Hailee wrote: "The reread tracker is fun. My reread percentage is especially high this year; 37.5% so far."

Oh, same. Not so high as yours, but I reread 20 books this year (15%), as compared to last year, which was 4. Definitely seeking some comfort in familiar favorites I think. If I keep this up, rather than scrolling through my shelves, it'd be nice having a record in the sheet. :)

I'm new in this but I've taken a look at the 2020 tracking sheet and if it's no bother I would like to have a tracking sheet like Anni but with another graphic that shows the genres. and about the column of challenge: do we have to request a page to write book goals to count?

Melissa wrote: "Sha, if you don't mind, can I basically just steal your sheet? I love all the added data points, being able to track the percent of re-reads etc. I also think the death tally is hilarious."

Oh wow, that does look great. Can I get this template too?

OK... so I've loosely started working on the 2021 sheet... made a copy of the 2020 sheet, copied permissions, some people who had full control of the 2020 sheet probably got emails to get into the 2021 sheet early...

Fiddling around now... even I don't know how everything worked in the 2020 sheet... I left most of the implementation to Virginie, as she was learning more and more ways to do things...

Example: half of what we did with the 2020 sheet was make it easier to add people in the future, removing most of the work involved in adding people... at the same time, we realized some of what we were doing would create excessive formula calculations, so Virginie figured out how to trigger certain calculations once, then disable them... but I never learned... and it kinda just seemed like Black Magic, in the end...

Turns out, that's because some of those results were later hardcoded, removing the conditional formula... re-copied formula, and now I have some things working again...

Saved me so much time, too, since this formula grabs people's sheet tab URLs, so you can easily travel from participation data or the leaderboards to people's specific sheets...

Let me know if you want a tester for seeing if stuff works. I guess I should decide which sheet type I want.

Thanks for working on this!

Timelord Iain wrote: "OK... so I've loosely started working on the 2021 sheet... made a copy of the 2020 sheet, copied permissions, some people who had full control of the 2020 sheet probably got emails to get into the ..."

Here to help as well.

Rob wrote: "Timelord Iain wrote: "OK... so I've loosely started working on the 2021 sheet... made a copy of the 2020 sheet, copied permissions, some people who had full control of the 2020 sheet probably got e..."

I'm hoping it's a simple update... and when done, I'll specifically make a 2022 sheet while there's no book data...

I'll look at the requests once everything else is setup... for now, I'm loosely deleting all the people that didn't sign up from the Participant Data, and hiding their 2020 sheet until New Year's, when I can delete to cut down on formula calculation overhead... shouldn't be too hard to re-add late signups...

Paula wrote: "I'm new in this but I've taken a look at the 2020 tracking sheet and if it's no bother I would like to have a tracking sheet like Anni but with another graphic that shows the genres. and about the ..."

Generally, yes... the easiest challenge to get credit for, is the one to make progress and finish/catch up on ongoing series...

Soo wrote: "Let me know if you want a tester for seeing if stuff works. I guess I should decide which sheet type I want.

Thanks for working on this!"

I mostly just copied 2020 for now (literally copied)... biggest help from you might be wiping your sheet :D

With 1000 books and headers breaking it up, it's a bit more involved than most sheets other than my own...

Here's a link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

The sheet title says 2021, if you're worried you might be accidentally wiping your 2020 sheet :D

Leave 1 book in, or 1 for each month if you want... I'm leaving a minimal amount of book data in, for testing purposes...

Hahah I already deleted everything but I can throw something in to make it not blank.

Soo wrote: "Hahah I already deleted everything but I can throw something in to make it not blank."

It looks like you literally deleted rows... I just wiped the book data from the book name to the star rating columns in other sheets... it'll be fine, but you'll need to be pretty good at copying formulas when you inevitably run out of rows and need to add extras...

Generally, that just means unhiding the rows on the far right, and drag copying the formulas all the way down the page, and rehiding the helper columns... that's where most bugs arise...

I copied some stuff over and put it in each month for Stats.

I broke January. XD

Tried a few copy, drag, etc and it fixed some things and did not fix the count for January.

Everything seems to be coming together... I deleted 90% of the book data, added Paula's sheet as a copy of Anni's for now, and everything seems to be working... there might be more errors/fixes this year, if I miss anything, but it doesn't seem like it'll be too bad...

I can probably start fiddling with requests tomorrow, and recolor people's tabs and shuffle things around, once teams are assigned...

I thought there was a bug with the team rankings on the front page, but it turns out queries don't delete, just because you have fewer participants... wiped some data and reloaded, and the new query fixed everything... it was including data from deleted team members... had that stroke of brilliance, from what I learned with the Calculate GID trigger...

Soo wrote: "I copied some stuff over and put it in each month for Stats.

I broke January. XD

Tried a few copy, drag, etc and it fixed some things and did not fix the count for January."

Yea... it was a formula error caused by adding and deleting rows... sometimes that causes an issue, because Google Sheets is designed to dynamically fix formulas when you fiddle with rows/columns/etc... and the fixes aren't right 100% of the time...

That's where Find & Replace (All) are your friend... especially with the include formulas checkbox... I was able to replace about 300 formula entries from [LETTER]$21:[LETTER] with [LETTER]$17:[LETTER]... did that with A to O, but the problems were mostly with EFGHMNO... you might have seen this cause a new problem, because some formulas used $O$21:$O... did one extra find and replace for that to 17, and everything seems to be working again...

Could have probably tried replacing $21: with $17:, but that would have been riskier, and more likely to change things we didn't want changed...

*fingers crossed* Here's to an easy transfer & updates. =)

I just found Virginie's to-do list for the 2021 sheet... might try and implement some of those, too... they definitely include some QoL stuff, so there's less need to complete requests, or update things between years... not sure I'll get to it all, tho...

Didn't make much progress today, but the todo list doesn't look too bad...

I worked on the future-proofing changes, putting the current year and today's date in a single location that can be copied inside formulas...

Found the location in player sheets where this is relevant, and working on making all sheets usable all 12 months of the year, but only counting points/etc until Halloween for Participant Data... the year including November/December data probably won't look as pretty, since it's only tracking Books/Pages and Shorts/Novellas/etc if your sheet has that... points and pages/day are either irrelevant or buried in that SWITCH formula, and seem like they'd bog the sheet down in calculations...

I also wrote down people's requests... there aren't as many as I thought, since I just copied the 2020 sheet over anyway, and most people just want what they had...

Yanique & Manju might need to double-check their sheet more than most... I can't recycle data as much in their sheets, since their summary section has text strings in the number areas at the top...

Re:rereads... I did over 100 re-reads this year... I kinda burnt myself out on re-reads, for the most part, actually... that's around 20% of my yearly reads, I think... I started the year strong, then hit a bit of a brick wall... for awhile, I could have given Soo a run for her money, and she's closing in on 1000 books...

Dropped back down to 2x reading speed, for the most part... less book racing, more book savoring... or something...

Thank you as always for all the spreadsheet wizarding on our behalf!

Iain, I need to look at your and Virginie's sheet. See if I want the fancy one.

I think I'm most interested in the Re-read column & count.


And YAY for enjoying the books for cool stories. =)

Soo wrote: "Iain, I need to look at your and Virginie's sheet. See if I want the fancy one.

I think I'm most interested in the Re-read column & count.


And YAY for enjoying the books for cool stories. =)"

I didn't realize before what you meant by fancy... the re-read stuff is pretty easy to add... half of what Virginie did is complicated, and actually runs counter to the usual formulas, since she did a bunch of stuff to avoid her custom short story anthology ebooks from clogging her spreadsheet tallies...

The overlapping graphs at the bottom of Virginie's sheet looks cool, but I'd probably have to learn some stuff to copy it...

Replacing the Graphic Novel column with something like Genre isn't too hard, either, if you don't read graphic novels and don't need the 25% point math in your sheet (or are willing to do it by hand when inputting pages)...

Melissa wrote: "Thank you as always for all the spreadsheet wizarding on our behalf!"

I do what I can... I've kinda fallen away from GR and Buddy Reading this year, as time passed... trying to make this sheet 100% copy-paste for 2022+, unless Virginie returns and wants to go hog wild on improving it...

Don’t tell me we’re going to lose you :(

Olivia wrote: "Don’t tell me we’re going to lose you :("

Nah... my participation is just way down...

I still haven't read/finished Age of Madness 2 or Stormlight 4 or Dawnshard... big BRs...

I pop into Soo's freeform BR chatrooms and the Mystery Book Club quite a bit, tho...

Iain, I have get the same Tracker Sheet like yours? I like those tallies you have for each month, etc. That's handy. You can leave the Useful Links the same and I'll update them to what I need.

Thanks!

Iain thank you so much for all your effort getting this ready. It's MASSIVELY appreciated! If it were left up to me, we'd still be reporting pages to captains because a spreadsheet on this scale makes me want to hide lol. Dark Magic indeed...

I’ll copy my sheet once I fix a couple things on it...

If we were still doing manual math and reporting, I wonder if it would have stuck around for 4 years and counting...

Sure. Challenges of all sorts have been around for years. Maybe the Team Challenge would have slightly different rules for points, etc but I can see it lasting.

I dunno... I haven't seen any other challenges/competitions as intensive as ours around Goodreads... and I remember all the rule changes in year 1 to simplify, because we were going down the rabbithole with page counts and things...

Rob swooped in quick with a simple spreadsheet... then people started customizing... we didn't make all the extra stats official until year 2... and refined it in year 3... but even from the beginning, the idea of tracking all the data in thread comments would have required alot of time... which would have been especially rough this year, with how busy everyone has been...

Luckily, the spreadsheet basically runs itself, with a bit of occasional Tech Support...

Tracker for the win! The first year I did the Team Challenge, my competitive side definitely came out more than I wanted. That did make reading more of a chore vs fun at times.

I worked on making the Challenge more about having fun with books and sharing it with BR's/random chats. That was a better mind frame for me.

Now I look at the Tracker as my silent reading sidekick that lets me track stuff & plan as long as I put in the data. =)

Any news on when the Teams will be made & announced?

If it's like last year, it'll be very last minute... I haven't even heard if all 4 mods are sticking around as Team Leaders... or mod pairings are changing... or Angela is tagging back in (was too busy this year)

I don't think the sheet colors are going to match the new team assignments, since i just copied last year's sheets... I can easily make the tab colors sorted and matching, and add teams... changing the color scheme is a bigger undertaking, I think... more freedom to customize, I guess... I can just color code the Team Name Cell...

Timelord Iain wrote: "If it's like last year, it'll be very last minute... I haven't even heard if all 4 mods are sticking around as Team Leaders... or mod pairings are changing... or Angela is tagging back in (was too ..."

You are right on it going to be last minute. :)

We wanted to give people who wanted to sign up a chance to see the sign-up, and I also just started my Christmas vacation so it'll be my project for the week :)

Thank you all for the work you put into this competition. Y'all make this the best group on GR. Have a happy holiday everyone!

yeah, thank you everyone for this and have happy holidays!