Feedback and suggestions

Recently i completed publishing my first (modern) fatlovesex novel online. I did so across 5 sites. In alphabetical order:

* Curvage
* DeviantArt
* Dimensions
* Fantasy Feeder
* My own purpose-made site jigglejunkie.com

This post is a comparison of the ease of publishing and fidelity of the final results (relative to author’s intent). It is meant to be informative and further discussion, not to be critical in any negative/pejorative way. Each site has advantages and disadvantages.

The reference story is my Unforgettable Cruise. I provide direct links to the start of the story on each site, for comparison purposes.


jigglejunkie.com (start page of Unforgettable Cruise)

Advantages:
+ Total control over formatting and content: only limits are legal and limitations of HTML and CSS themselves
+ No word/character limits for chapters, high or low
+ Decorative section breaks as in a printed book (i believe the prettiest of any site, but then of course i would because i made them)
+ Visually obvious distinctions between story text, transcripts of broadcasts, emails, text messages, and other types of fictional content
+ Media embedding (e.g. site-hosted song samples, external YouTube videos)

Disadvantages:
- Labor-intensive to convert from master document RTF format to HTML, even with automation
- Readers may not wish to go to a whole other website just to read a story
- No mechanism for comments/feedback beyond emailing me (intentional design choice)

Most people are not going to make their own website to present their stories. I mainly present it here as it is the canonical reference for how in a perfect world my stories would appear across all sites. It is a new site and can likely be improved upon, especially since i made all the design choices in a vacuum with no feedback from others.


Curvage (Unforgettable Cruise)

Advantages:
+ Easiest (lowest-friction) site (currently) for publishing
+ Most extensive formatting support of any site other than my own:
+ Italics and Bold are preserved upon paste
+ Centering is preserved upon paste
+ Tabs are preserved, at a tighter spacing than my original source
+ While there are no controls on their system for (some of?) these attributes when typing in a story on their platform, certain aspects of horizontal rules and font formatting are preserved upon pasting in content. (Big Yay!)
+ No (known) character/word limit! Yay!
+ Line spacing is handled elegantly, though imperfectly (see below)
+ Hyperlinks and certain media links are allowed

Disadvantages:
- No font face (family) options
- Object width attributes are ignored. E.g. boxes originally filling say 50% of the viewport width always fill 100% on the Curvage platform
- Pasted-in font size and strikethrough text is not preserved (may be specific to the user’s WWW browser/pasting source platform)

Of all the sites surveyed in their current forms, Curvage is far and away the fastest and easiest to use, and at the same time produces the best results. If someone force me to pick only one site upon which to post my stories (other than my own site), i’d pick Curvage.

Posting on Curvage is especially easy when using my own website’s rendered pages as the pasting source. Due to Apple’s bugs, i do need to do some time-consuming manual line spacing adjustments. This is true for all sites mentioned (other than my own, where i’m uploading actual HTML rather than pasting in content). I have yet to find a satisfactory workaround.

Could they improve? Yes they could. The improvements apply to all sites including FF, so i’ll discuss these at the end of this message.


Dimensions (start of Unforgettable Cruise)

Advantages:
+ Decent range of formatting options:
+ Italics and Bold
+ Many useful font sizes
+ Range of different font faces (more below)
+ Text centering
+ When direct pasting proves unworkable (due to Apple’s line spacing bug), BBCode is a viable fallback
+ Hyperlinks and certain media links are allowed

Disadvantages:
- 10,000 character limit is insanely low: major time sink/pain to chunk up stories
- Having to build an entire workflow to convert from my source to BBCode text then process each chapter this way is a time sink (more posting busywork, less time for story creation)

It is difficult to convey what a Major Pain the character limitation is. I discuss this further below. Other than that and my dislike of having anyone’s stories presented just like any other message post in terms of page formatting (apparently a limitation of the Xen Foro system Dimensions uses), posting stories there isn’t too bad.

The

Seriously? I’m well under 10,000 characters for this message and it just cuts me off with no warning?

Alright. Gimme 10 minutes to repeat-reformat the next part of this multipart message.

The biggest improvement they could make is getting rid of the character limit (or raising it vastly, vastly higher). Seems like a built-in limitation of their software, unfortunately. Next most important would be adding richer formatting options (discussed above and below).


DeviantArt (Unforgettable Cruise chapter 1)

Advantages:
+ No (known) character/word limit! Yay!
+ Easiest tagging (e.g. SSBBW, fat gain, romance novel) of any surveyed site
+ Clear, informative system for precisely marking exactly how a story is “mature content”, making it possible and easy for readers to system-automatically algorithmically filter out stories with specific content to which they find objectionable, whilst leaving in other societally-consensus “objectionable” material
+ Supports copy/pasting formatted text
+ Italics and Bold
+ Text centering support (but - lost upon pasting)
+ Tabs are preserved, at a tighter spacing than my original source

Disadvantages:
- Limited formatting options:
- Only 3 font sizes
- No font face options
- Line spacing is problematic
- Each chapter has to be its own separate “deviation”, making it in effect impossible to present the chapter title phrasing: only Chapter 1 (etc.), else no one will be able how to figure out how to read the story in proper sequence.
- The combination of poor line break support and inability to handle alternative formats like BBCode, RTF, or HTML as pasting/upload sources leads to a major posting time sink (for at least some source platforms such as my Macintosh and macOS version)

I have somewhat of a love/hate relationship with DeviantArt: love the lack of any known character/word limit, which makes posting easier. Hate that there’s no way i have found from my particular system to easily post. I can either post formatted and spend an hour adjusting line breaks for nearly every paragraph, or post best-i-can plain text which preserves line breaks but loses all formatting, then spend that hour manually resetting the formatting. Neither is a decent choice.

Given that DeviantArt is all about the visual arts and not literature, it shouldn’t be a surprise to me or anyone that their text support is suboptimal. It does and should speak volumes that even they have managed to have no (or a very high) character/word limit. Much as i like the exposure to the DA audience, given the amount of work and time necessary to post there and limited formatting options, i’m not sure whether i’ll post any future stories there.

Fantasy Feeder (Unforgettable Cruise chapter 1)

Advantages:
+ Visually distinctive separate Stories section
+ Prominent cover art (improves story recognition and “visual branding”)
+ Ability to shift chapters up and down can be nice (though might be unnecessary with unlimited character support as other sites have, and i found it to be buggy)
+ Line breaks are handled acceptably
+ Core audience for the fat gain stories i tend to/prefer to write

Disadvantages:
- 10,000 character limit is insanely low: major time sink/pain to chunk up stories
- No formatting options, At All
- Forced chapter numbering
- Forced lower-casing of chapter titles
- 2,000 character lower limit (discussed below)

For those who haven’t already read it, see CountingCarbs’s post for possibly more eloquent wording of most of the above-cited disadvantages.

The combination of the character limits (both high and low) plus the forced chapter numbering and lower-casing is absolutely maddening. The character limits alone are nearly a deal-killer. I know we like gain and growth here, but what sense does it make for my 24 actual chapter story to balloon into 87 FF chapters, due solely to character limits?

In terms of the low end of character count, every other site allows 69 word haikus. Not FF, because of this lower limit. I can understand the desire to algorithmically enforce a lower limit for new/inexperienced/lusting writers to commit to something of substance, but i believe baking a hard limit into the system does more harm than good. Everyone knows i’m verbose and write a lot, yet even i have some actual story chapters that of necessity for that chapter in that story are less than 2,000 characters—very rare, but they exist. I can publish these anywhere other than FF, where i’d have to pad it out with nonsense filler or combine it with another chapter, destroying the point of having separate chapters.

It boggles my mind that an active, modern site like FF, which appears to want to promote its Stories section and be known for the quality and quantity of fatlovesex and especially feedist stories, only supports 1980s or 1990s pure plain text in 2020. (Unicode support is noted, and greatly appreciated!) It is even more mind-warping to consider that FF allows limited BBCode (whether officially that or merely similar) and hyperlinks elsewhere on the site, but not in the Stories section.

Recommendations
I’m posting this on FF for a reason: i consider FF my home site in the online fatlovesex realm. Along with many others here (waves and smiles), i’ve in the past invested time and energy to help be part of the team making this site better. It pains me to see the FF Stories section have the worst presentation (no formatting) of any of the sites surveyed and be nearly tied with DA for inconvenience/friction with posting.


Minimal Requirements to Catch Up (with other sites)

* MUST eliminate or dramatically raise the upper character limit

The longest chapter in Unforgettable Cruise is 87,732 characters without any formatting overhead. It is Not the longest chapter in any of my (as-yet-unreleased) stories. (I do not currently know which chapter that is, nor have a character count for it.) A bare-bones minimum would be 10x the current limit: 100,000 characters. I believe that’s still far too low. I recommend doubling that at least, if it’s not possible to eliminate an upper bound. 5x—500,000 characters—would be better. Why not a million?

No author should have to stop and think about whether their latest chapter is too long or too short, nor have to make adjustments/work around system limitations. Is it possible to find out how Curvage and/or DA are handling this? Is this limit in place for site security/technical reasons? Or to force authors to break up their stories at some pre-defined limit for some reason?

* Eliminate the lower character limit
If there are problems with too-short story posts, consider handling them via human moderation rather than purely algorithmically. I’d tentatively be OK with chapters of under 2,000 characters being auto-routed in quarantine to a moderator rather than directly posted (with due notification to the author regarding what’s happening). Maybe just drop the limit altogether and find out if there are (still) real-world problems with no lower limit.

* Basic Formatting
Bold and Italic support are a rock-bottom absolute requirement. The ability to center paragraphs or lines of text is a minimal essential all other sites have. Even next-font-poorest DA allows headline-like bigger text sizing, so this too is a bare-bones minimum.

(Most sites allow underline style. I personally don’t use this because of confusion with traditional HTML hyperlinks, but other authors might want and expect it.)

Requirements to Move To or Near the Front of the Pack
In addition to everything listed above under Minimal Requirements:

* Ease of Content Transfer
Reduce the friction: make it easier to either or both copy/paste in story content and have formatting stick and/or accept RTF, HTML, BBCode, and/or other format file uploads. Curvage already does this acceptably for pasting, DA almost acceptably.

* Sophisticated Formatting:

* A wide range of font sizes
* Several font faces. Some stories portray hand-written notes etc., so a handwriting-like font would be nice. At least one serif and one sans-serif body text font.
* Strikethrough text may not often come up in stories, but sometimes it does. Other sites support this. FF should too. Basic HTML/CSS since nearly forever.
* Font colors can be useful and may sometimes be necessary for differentiating sections of text in stories. Again it’s basic HTML/CSS, so should be easy to add this support.

* Media Embedding:

* HTML hyperlinks
* Inline (in-story) images
* Other embedded media (e.g. videos)

Allowing both images and media hosted elsewhere on FF and externally would be preferable.

Take It To The Next Level: FF as the Leading Fatlovesex Story Site

Note: at least some of these might be easy enough to implement that they could be incorporated sooner than later, even without the more basic prerequisites of a great story site being in place. Anything helps!

In addition to everything above:

* Section Breaks in Chapters!
No idea why no other site (besides mine) has this (yet). FF can lead here. Look at pretty much any paper-printed fiction book, and you’ll see some form of decorative horizontal rule used as a section separator within each chapter. Jumps in time and/or place happen all the time in nearly every story, often thematically within chapters (as well as at natural chapter breaks). There are 9 of these in the first chapter of Unforgettable Cruise alone—common and typical, esp. when moving the plot line forward without getting dragged down into moment-by-moment minutiae.

Other than on my own site i’m marking section breaks with asterisk tab asterisk, which minimally gets the job done. Why not be the site in our community to truly shine in this important regard?

I went hardcore on jigglejunkie.com and did a pure CSS implementation. Here on FF, a nice, pretty SVG or PNG image would allow far greater appearance flexibility and look even more book-like professional. Any WWW browser new enough to support the FF TLS certificate should readily support enough SVG for this (i know this because i’m using Let’s Encrypt for my own sites, so well know the support limitations). As always fallbacks make the experience more robust for everyone. Even a dirt-basic pure HTML horizontal rule is a vastly superior story chapter section separator to what anyone else is doing.

Soon as formatting support is added, whatever interface is built for adding bold, italic, adjusting centering, etc. could easily have a button or icon for this section break visual. If (pseudo) BBCode is allowed, something like [hr] or [sect] could be utilized (one tag: no closing tag).

Let’s have a FF community-wide discussion amongst authors and interested readers to seek consensus on a nice, pleasant, elegant horizontal rule-style chapter section separator.


* Best-Of-Class Easy Content Uploading
Many of us find composing stories in external software easier than directly typing into a site’s text entry interface. This is especially true for those of us posting our stories on more than one site. Reduce the posting friction: make it as easy and effortless as possible to either copy/paste in content or upload from a file, preserving as much of the author’s intent as humanly and technically possible.

All other sites besides FF allow pasting formatted text, with varying formatting fidelity. Why not strive to be the leader in terms of greatest formatting fidelity?


Allowing uploading of properly formatted fully-composed individual chapter files rather than copy/pasting may allow for higher-fidelity richer presentation, as well as work around some platforms’ bugs (looking at you, Apple. Grrrr!).

This is another case where a story author community discussion here may be beneficial, in terms of selecting formats. I would vote against .doc, for example, because i’m an Apple person and that’s not a native format on Apple platforms (and existing support for it is a mess between different app and OS versions). I’m strongly in favor of RTF (another originally-Microsoft format), as its support seems excellent cross-platform (at least Windows and macOS. I don’t know about *nix nor handheld OSes). HTML is another great choice, as it too is cross-platform and there’s all kinds of graphical and textual editors out there for it. Should be easy enough to design the FF system to support as many reasonable HTML tags and CSS as possible, filtering out things which can be abused. Personally i cannot imagine a need to use scripting in story text, so all script tags and content could be auto-stripped, for example.


Any of these options may be quite a bit of work. Consider it a necessary investment. Other sites are already well ahead of FF for formatted content uploading, so whilst going to the effort to support formatted text at all, why not zoom past them and set the new high bar? I certainly want to do my part with QA testing and/or any other way i can be helpful to make a superior FF Stories section a reality, and i suspect others in our community feel similarly.



* Built-In Formatting For Common Story Scenarios
In the real world, people text each other. They email each other. Sometimes they leave voicemail messages. They leave handwritten notes. Some print out letters on paper and send those. Lots of people watch videos (whether shorter-form TV-like content, longer-form movie-like content, modern “influencer” online video content, or other) and/or listen to spoken word audio (podcasts and otherwise).

In addition, some stories need to convey a character r

In addition, some stories need to convey a character reading part of a book in the moment, bringing the story reader into the head of the character looking at the book. In other words: support book formatting as an inset format in a story. Newspaper clippings is another formatting category. Message text on a video screen (black or blue or other solid-color screen aspect ratio rectangular background)—common in real life, found in at least my stories (see Unforgettable Cruise Chapter 24 on my site). Dirt-basic HTML and CSS level 1 makes this possible. How is this not supported? FF can be the first (apart from my site).

All these things happen in stories—at least mine. I submit that each of these disparate events needs its own visual formatting cues, to differentiate it from standard narrator and character text.

Example: for text messages (super common), i’m envisioning a format that looks like texting in iOS and Android OS without infringing on the intellectual property of either (or anyone else): some kind of text bubble things that will be obvious to readers what they are. On jigglejunkie.com i intentionally chose a slightly off-white background for the story pages, so for paper letters (handwritten, typed, printed) i can set a pure white background with a very dim, thin border to hint at paper, then use a different font from the story body text font.


* Indented Paragraphs
How about indents at the start of paragraphs? Standard in actual printed books (and Kindle, etc.), so far missing from sites in our community (other than my own). Decades ago this used to be hard, displayed inconsistently across WWW browsers of the era, and not a standard part of HTML. {text-indent: } has been part of CSS since Level 1, with WWW browser support back to nearly the stone age. Guaranteed that anything that can https connect to FF supports it.


* Richest Possible Formatting
Font sizes, font faces, font colors, positioning, delineating boxes—everything possible for visual presentation. Book-quality stories need a minimum of full paper book formatting, ideally well beyond as technology easily allows.

FF can lead in font faces for stories. At least one if not several fonts that look like handwriting will be beneficial for stories (comes up in multiples of my stories, including once in Unforgettable Cruise in chapter 5). Reason for several?: sometimes different characters are writing back and forth. One of my stories involving a deaf person has this all over the place: her scribbling notes to ASL-incapable people, and them scribbling back. What about fat gain in the Old West? Might an Old West-style font be nice? A medieval font? No other site has these. Amazingly to me, no other site has a big, wide fat font face. On jigglejunkie.com i’m using the Sniglet web font (much as i hate Google/Alphabet). Likely too much for body text, but great for headlines or emphasis. Consider having a monospaced font for old typewriter stuff and/or computer code (Dimensions has one).



Thanks for reading, and for considering these points. Looking forward to helping if it’s appropriate, otherwise staying out of the way and hoping for the best.

This is great feedback and much appreciated. It's a lot to take in, so may take me a while to give you a full response. We're all the time working to improve the stories section along with the rest of the website, so will give all these points due consideration.