Week 14 - Global Variables, Model Attributes, Author Handles, And Much More

Hello everyone!

As you may have realized, for the last two or three weeks, I have been getting lots of feedback from the members of our Discord Server on how to improve Chatfic Lab.

What you probably didn't know is that I am also getting many messages from both our community members who love to read chatfics, AND the chatfic authors themselves.

I've developed a lot of new features and worked really hard to make them as easy to use as possible. I've published them under the new, v1.0.0 version of our open source chatfic-format. (You can find the changelog here although it is a little technical)

Almost all of these features are now public, but let's take a look at each of them to better understand what is going on:

1. Global Variables

I've developed a new feature to address some of the concerns raised by the chatfic authors. This new feature will help authors easily comply with Patreon policies (and terms of other similar membership platforms) while also not compromising the experience they offer to their readers.

To summarize, authors can now make some words in their stories "customizable".

When a story is visited on the Chatfic Lab Browser, it will ask the reader if they want to change any of the customized words. Readers can either change these words or ignore this step to see the story with the author's defaults.

These customizable words can be anything; a character's age, gender, occupation, favourite dessert, relationship to the player, name of the player's school, or just... anything.

In the following days, I believe, authors will create more and more stories using this feature. Which will enhance the experience The Chatfic Lab Browser offers.

2. Model Attributes

Authors now can include model information for every character in their stories! This includes a model name (like, full name, if available) and handles to the model's social accounts. This is a great way for authors to include model attribution in their stories. This information is not yet available in Chatfic Lab Browser. But once it goes live, stories with model attributions will be visible to all readers! Who knows, maybe we can create model pages yet? (We have a #suggestions channel on discord!)

3. Author Handles

Previously, authors could only include a "patreon username" with their stories. When I first created the chatfic-format, this seemed logical because Patreon is the most popular membership platform authors of chat-based stories use. But some authors prefer other platforms to accept support from their fans, which is why now authors can include their handles for 5 different websites (totally optional, of course). This feature is now online, and I believe we will see a lot of stories with multiple author handles very soon :)

4. Photo Zoom & Pan

There is not much to explain with this one. You can now freely zoom and pan story images without an issue (hopefully). But if you encounter any issues, just let us know on our Discord Server :)

5. Patreon Login & Settings Page

I made the Patreon status text a bit more clear, then decided to implement a Patreon Login feature.   Despite Patreon's completely outdated python API library and their questionable approach to scopes and 'fields', I managed to find a way to implement it to work seamlessly. Now if you are a member of our community, and if you decide to support my efforts, you don't need to text me your username to get access to the premium features. If you are in coffee or wine tiers, you can simply go to the new Settings page and click "Link Patreon" button.

You can also access this page by clicking the (Update) link visible next to the "Not Patron" text in the left sidebar.

This new settings page is also where you can view and edit all global variables I've mentioned  at the beginning of this post.

6. Accessing Next Episode

This may seem like a minor enhancement but literally took me 2 days to figure out how to best implement it.

Chatfic Lab Browser users can now access a list of all episodes of a series, without leaving the story page itself. This helps you to jump to the next episode directly when you finish the current episode.

7. Chatfic Lab Editor

This one is mainly for the authors from our community. When I created The Chatfic Lab Editor, I didn't really think of it as the primary tool to create stories in the chatfic-format. This was just an open-source demonstration of how an editor for the chatfic-format can be designed or developed. The code itself is a mess, but so many people reached out to me and asked for additional features for it, and I ended up turning it into a fully-fledged story editor. It is now the main tool authors from our community use.

Obviously, all the features I mentioned in this post are available on the editor itself too. This almost took more time than actually implementing most features for the Chatfic Lab Browser. But it is totally worth it because now authors can use all these cool new features directly, starting today:

I know that during all these updates (believe me most of these were required for what I have in mind for the future of Chatfic Lab!) there were days with no story published. The good news is, since these features are now out, I can focus more on increasing the new content uploaded to chatfic servers. Hopefully, you will have lots of new stories to enjoy for the rest of the week (and March). Just give me two more days for debugging ;)

Have a very nice day, and if you haven't already, don't forget to join our Discord server!
https://discord.gg/3DC7YQvUF8