Hi everyone,

We just launched a new feature - Quotes! We'd love any and all feedback on it. For now, you can find it from the homepage (links under 'my profile') or on your profile towards the bottom (my quotes section).

I think this is going to be a fun one :)

Otis

"My Quotes" is a wonderful addition!

I see that a handful of us have already discovered it and are busy adding quotes at an almost dangerous pace :)

One small problem, and secondly, a request for a future enhancement (in the some day category):

1) there doesn't appear to be a way to edit a quote entered (necessary for those hand fisted typists such as myself, sigh).

2) How about a link from the author page to relevant quotes?

3)there should be a way to add your own tags if you add a quote that someone else has already input

4) could you merge the quotes from Elizabeth's Quotable Quote group into the new facility?

edit:
I just had a quick look... unfortunately there is probably too much variation in input format there to allow automating the process ...
If the Elizabeth (group moderator) thinks it wise, perhaps she could post an encouragement there for people to move the quotes they input there over to the new facility.

Overall, I like the feature. Not sure how much I'll use it once the novelty wears off, but it's clever.

Please add an "Add to my Update Feed?" box. Right now it's adding every quote I select. Which can mean that someone who has both me and a quote originator as a friend will see it at least twice . . .

Oh! I love this feature!

Also, Rivka - thank you for those hilarious quotes :)

Argh! Now you're going to have me digging all through my library for good quotes!

^_^

So possibly adding every quote I select to my feed is not a bad thing. ;)

Although, Anna, I didn't enter any of those. I just nabbed them from the existing list. I'm going to have to dig out some books before I can start entering any myself.

Great feature. Although it could get out of hand as there are so many great quotes!

What's going to happen with the Quotable Quotes group?!: great place to nab quotes. ;-)

And, think would be good to add/not add have choice re update feed. Although, can always x out entries.

I can't seem to "vote." See the so many people liked such & such quote but I see no place for me to vote that I liked it. Can anybody tell me? Thanks!

P.S. And, yes, being able to edit entries would be a bonus.

EDIT: P.S. I've nabbed 2 and added 2 quotes. One of the latter, the author's name is not a link the way the other 3 are links. Otis or anybody, do you know why that would be?

This could get out of hand!!! So many amazing quotes. I have entire books of them! Meaning books of nothing but quotes. Obviously, many books have worthy quotes.

Great idea!

I can't seem to "vote." See the so many people liked such & such quote but I see no place for me to vote that I liked it. Can anybody tell me? Thanks!

It seems that by adding the quote to your personal quotes, you are "voting" for it.

Another request: It would be great if you could see an author's quotes when looking at their page. Or just if they could be sorted by author. And maybe also by how recently they were added?

They're a really fun addition. :) Thanks!

hey everyone,

What a great response! So far we've had nearly 200 quotes added and 364 votes. I can see that there is quite a bit to do to clean up the user experience. Quotes are very exciting for us because they are very relevant to the site, plus the possibilities for fun future features are practically endless!

A few responses to the above comments:

1. Elizabeth's Quotable Quotes group was started as a way to see if there was interest in doing quotes (there was), and also to start building a repository of quotes before the feature was ready. The group may fade out now, but change is not a bad thing :)
2. We definitely intend to add quotes to their authors pages, as well as other places. I think the idea of getting a 'daily quote from from my friends' on my homepage is fun!
3. Quotes can currently be edited by the person who added them or by a librarian (although we need to add an edit link for librarians). We struggled with this, but our goal is a build a database of accurate quotes with a known popularity, and this seemed the best way.
4. I'm encouraged by the number of tagged quotes. We're going to add browsing capabilities soon using the tags.
5. You can prevent the quotes from being added to your feed in the 'my preferences' area of the site. We couldn't find a good way to fit the 'add to my update feed' checkbox, but if enough people want it we'll revisit that. Currently only the last 5 quotes you add will be in your update feed.

I look forward to the edit link. ;) As well as browsing by tags -- that should be very helpful.

And it's good to know it tops out at 5. I was partly concerned that the quotes would take over my feed entirely.

Rivka,

It seems that by adding the quote to your personal quotes, you are "voting" for it.

Yes, I see that now. Thanks.


Love all this. Good to know about the last 5 only though. Think that's a good idea but now will be more careful about making sure the possibly 1 or 2 I enter that I think others will enjoy, I'll add toward the end and not add more for a while.

EDIT: Is there a way to simply transfer all the quotes, with their original poster, from the Quotable Quotes group to the quotes list? Or get them to the list some other rather easy way?

ANOTHER EDIT: P.S. Any way to bump quotes? Most of mine probably won't interest most here. But am thinking of one I entered that might, but it's completely lost in the mass of quotes/my quotes by now.

I'm not sure if anyone's been a big enough English dork to mention this but:

Quote is a verb.

Quotation is the noun.

(it was a huge pet peeve of one of my Lit profs and it stuck in my brain ever since).

That being said, I think the noun form of "quote" just has to be accepted at this point. My Lit prof will have to live with a world with quotes.

Not only does Merriam-Webster disagree, it indicates that the usage of "quote" as a noun dates to 1888. Bartleby agrees.

I have heard the verb/noun claim before. Claiming that it is insufficiently formal seems to have happened quite a few decades after it was in common use.

I entered 1 quote twice (3 x actually but was able to delete one that only I had voted for) and did that because wanted the author of the quote to be highlighted and couldn't figure out how to edit. (See how to edit now.) Anyway, this one quote that's showing twice has different people voting for it.

Is there any way to consolidate/combine identical quotes?

Edit:

Also, Deleted one duplicate quote where I was the only voter but it's still there; it's just that it shows as 0/zero people voting for it. And, did get an error message when tried to delete it...unexpected error occurred one.

Ooooooooooooooh! Wonderful! and already I see some of my old favorites.

Question: when we add a quote to our favorites, does it add to the counter for that quote? Seems 4 people liked one of my favorites, and after I added it, there were still only 4 people who liked it.

I assume if a user puts a quote in their favorites, that it receives a vote. Maybe the counter doesn't advance until I refresh the page?

Lovely function! THANK YOU!

P.S. Okay, I see that adding it to my favorites does advance the counter for the quote. Thank you! (When in doubt, RATS [Read All The Screen])

Kind of already posted about this:

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show_grou...

But would really like to choose which 5 quotes appeared on my profile page vs. just the last added ones and the Goodreads users' most popular ones.

As my above post link shows, I also care about which groups show, and books, etc. as well. But most especially about the quotes.

Thanks for listening.

It would be lovely to be able to organize my quotes so that I will see my favorite quotes when I view my profile. I've added a lot of quotes, but a few are definitely dearer to my heart! Maybe we could have a place in our profile for our favorite quote?

Great new feature!! Love it!

When I've tried to delete a quote (a few times now) because of a mistake or a duplicate (on my part) - now see can & I do edit. But "deleted" quotes do not get deleted.

Get this error page:

"page unavailable

An unexpected error occurred. We will investigate this problem as soon as possible — please check back soon!"

And the quote remains in the database but with 0/zero votes. But, I'm not sure that other people will be unable to vote for these.

Please inform if there's a way to clean up these because I am not seeing it, but could easily be missing the solution. Thanks.

We'll fix the error on deleting quotes with our next release - sorry about that.

And yes, I think a way to better organize one's quotes is in order!

Re the delete fix. Thanks! That will be really helpful.

I also notice that if you don't assign a book to a quote at the time you first enter it, you cannot go back and do so later. Is that right or am I just missing how? Thanks.

Could a rss feed be possible of the quotes feature ?

Hey Rk,

Good to see you are still around? What would you want? Just new quotes? Quote of the day? You can get an RSS feed of your friend updates, which includes quotes they might add, on your homepage (link at the bottom).

I love the quote feature! I'm new to this site and it is really useful. It would be cool if you could create a widget so that you can put one of your favorite quotes on your blog..or even one that will chose a random quote from your favorite quotes everytime someone views your blog. Would something like this be possible?

A new quotes widget is a stellar idea. So stellar that I decided to whip it up this evening - so enjoy it!

http://www.goodreads.com/review/widgets

Yay! That was exactly what I had in mind! I have myspace though so I can't use it :-( Do you think you can make a flash one sometime? thanks so much!! and again...this site rocks...I've been looking for a way to organize all the books I've read and want to read and all the thoughts and quotes I've gotten from them, and this has everything!!

Awesome awesome. I love the responsiveness of you guys!

OK - Love the quotes widget, but the font on the title portion of it is a bit overwhelming (large and bold) on my blog. Can that be changed to the same font characteristics as the title in the My Books widget??

I'd like to put those two widgets next to each other, so the font matching would look much better.

Two questions (comments?):
First, is there a way to combine quotes, similar to how I can combine different editions of a book? Specifically, Dorothy Parker, where her delightful "book to be thrown aside" quote shows up three separate times. I've figured out how to edit and delete quotes, but I don't want to just delete the two with the smaller numbers, especially because people have added them. Am I missing something?

Also, when I look at a list of an author's quotes - say, Ms. Parker's, above - the ones I've already added have a link in place of the "add quote" box that says "in my quotes". When I click one of those links, I end up at a random author profile.

Chelsea & All,

Yes, I've noticed that duplicate quotes are a problem. But I was wondering how to merge. I think the person who entered the quote first should "get the credit" but there's no way to tell who did, although there is a way to tell which version of the quote has gotten the most votes.

I guess some Goodreads users aren't using the wonderful search function before they enter a "new" quote, because the search function does work really well.

But being able to merge duplicates would be a good thing! Chelsea, thanks for posting about it.

Chelsea,

That's because there isn't an "author" entry for Ms. Parker, so it resorts to some random author in it's place. (One assumes it's because you've got a variant "dorthy parker" versus the one-book-having Dorthy Parker in the database.)

I ran into the same problem putting in a quote from a non-author, Philip J. Fry (of Futurama fame).

Otis et al. is aware of it and they're resolving the issue.

- P

Paul,

Maybe I'm just misunderstanding, but there's an author entry for Dorothy Parker - actually, there's two, now that I take a closer look - so I'm still unclear on why that happens.

But if Otis and Co. are aware, than that's all I need to know.

Clearly, the answer to your problem would be for Fry to write a book. Everybody wins!

Chelsea,

He already did, actually. One riddled with "plot holes and spelling errors" called "Fry Tricks The Brain".

(I'm a nerd, yup)

ref: http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/The_Day_t...

Just wanted to say that I really like this feature! Also, agree with many here with the idea of being able to "organize" your quotations in some way! Love the site!

EDIT: Also, would love the quotations linked to the author, which others have requested as well!

Paul - I must have missed that episode! I, for one, would totally read that book.

Quotes are relatively new so we haven't built the combine feature yet - be I know we need it. We'll try to improve the author-link editing too!

Just trying to clean up some of the nonsense that gets transcribed as a quote...

Any news yet on the combine/merge capability?

Geesh, you wouldn’t believe how many people leave empty spaces after they’re done typing; resulting in a “really long quote.



”
;)

I would. I edited bunches.

Merge capability is way overdue, so we'll add it over the weekend - thanks for the reminder!

While we're on the topic: is there any way to indicate that a quote is, um, wrong?

For example, I noticed today that on Roald Dahl's author page, he's listed as the originator of the quotation, "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." Not only did Dahl not originate that quote, but it doesn't even appear in one of his books -- it's recited (ironically, no less) in the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (The quote is actually origianlly from the British poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy. In fairness to whoever put it on Dahl's page, I've learned over the years that a lot of people think it comes originally from Roald Dahl, so poor O'Shaughnessy is probably rotating in his grave.) But there's no way to fix it on Dahl's author page, or, as far as I can tell, even to alert someone that it should be corrected. Is there something I'm missing, and if not, can that feature be added?

Quote combining is now live - I just played with it and it's working well!

As for quotes that are incorrect, that's a good question. You should be able to edit it and correct the author, which I think is the best way to do it.

Quote combining is now live - I just played with it and it's working well!

You tempteth me! *eyes movie she was planning to watch next*

Otis? Rivka? Anybody?

Could you please post instructions? Thanks. I haven't tried that hard, I admit. But not seeing to how combine quotes.

Thanks for any help.

Click on a quote's author. One of the options on the right is "combine quotes"; clicking on it gets you checkboxes.

Have fun. :)

Otis, how about the ability to filter a list of quotes, like when combining books?

Thanks!

Thanks Rivka!