The Seasonal Reading Challenge discussion
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Just curious Sandy.In the future will we say something like:
Above a certain number on the "popular shelves."
They've listed LOTS of shelves.
:-)
What to do if the book wasn't previously chosen but the task requires a genre listing on the main page?Do we go "genre listing on the main page" = "popular shelves" from now on?
Mod
Do we go "genre listing on the main page" = "popular shelves" from now on?"
Kathy G. wrote: "Just curious Sandy.
In the future will we say something like:
Above a certain number on the "popular shelves."
They've listed LOTS of shelves.
:-)"
Just hang on - we were just hit by this this morning - we need to talk about the best way to deal with it.
I was curious also. Is there a place where the powers to be at goodreads make these upcoming changes to format announcements similar to your moderators announcements, or they just do it? If they do I guess I've missed it. In my thinking the popular shelves would constantly be in flux whereas the genres were static.
I think they just make changes. If I remember correctly, before the genres the book pages used to have popular shelves, they then used how books were being shelved to surmise the genres, though I could be making that up!Good luck mods in figuring this out!
Oh good, I thought it was just me! Not the first time Goodreads has thrown a curveball like this...
Mod
In theory, they sometimes announce upcoming changes on the GR Feedback forum, but usually things just happen and we have to make the best of it.
The genres were in flux as well, because they were based on the shelving done by GR users - nobody made any considered judgments about genres, GR just used the way people shelved the books. The difference, I think, is that they tried to aggregate similar shelves into a genre. And, that the listing on the main page didn't include all the shelves like "read," "plan to re-read," "recommended by my sister," and so on.
Mod
that's how I remember it, too. And who knows what will happen next...............
That seems like a mistake to me. It's too freaking long now!The section has always been about the most popular shelves (they only showed a few though) but at some point, GR changed the name to genres.
And anyhow, that info has always been available. If you click on 'Popular shelves', you can see ALL the shelves in which a book is shelved (even if it's done once.)
(I'm in a group where we use those.)
I asked in the Feedback group to see what they say...
I responded to D.G.'s post in Feedback before I saw this, but I'll say the same thing here for everyone who's wondering:This is how things use to be, before Goodreads started to employ crowd sourced genres. Many users wanted to go back to this method, but Goodreads was pretty content with genres overall. I'd be pretty surprised if they chose to go back to it at this point rather than it being a bug.
ETA: I'm not sure what the algorithm that turned shelves into genres is, but it's highly likely that the genre (or a shelf very closely related to the genre, as in the Science Fiction genre a the Sci-Fi shelf) still appears at a very high spot in the Popular Shelves list. If the mods opted to use the top 5-10 shelves, it would probably have a very similar effect to using the genres.
Just to update, Kara responded to D.G.'s post confirming a bug and it should be fixed later today!http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...
Hopefully we should have it changed back quickly so people can report the reads. :)That's why it's always good to ask with these things. ;)
Mod
Great, Sandy!I wonder why people feel like commenting on a thread when they have nothing of note to say. Somebody just commented in the thread I posted in the GR Feedback group saying that nobody uses this feature! I mean, WTH? If you see people asking about it, obviously somebody uses it!
Sandy wrote: "And the genres are back! So we can all just move along and pretend this never happened..............."Ah whew... and fyi, that's how I prefer to live my life, too. ;) (j/k)
That particular member frequently posts in the feedback threads usually about how they are not experiencing the problem, they don't use that feature, they don't want that suggestion implemented or they don't think that should be a priority. It's like her main objective is to make the op feel small.
Thanks for posting the bug.
Thanks for posting the bug.
D.G. ~Shameless Hussy~ wrote: "Great, Sandy!I wonder why people feel like commenting on a thread when they have nothing of note to say. Somebody just commented in the thread I posted in the GR Feedback group saying that nobody..."
The shelves/genres are a HOTLY debated topic, anytime anyone brings it up there are tons of people who make a scene. ;)
Pigletto wrote: "That particular member frequently posts in the feedback threads usually about how they are not experiencing the problem, they don't use that feature, they don't want that suggestion implemented or they don't think that should be a priority. It's like her main objective is to make the op feel small."That seemed to be exactly her aim! I can only imagine how unhappy she is in real life if she's so miserable online.
I told her to take her complaints elsewhere (in nicer language) because I was the OP and my issues had been resolved.
Kathy G. wrote: "YEAH for the genres!:-)"
No kidding! ;-)
Oh man, I missed it, lol. I was curious about the shelving/genre issue myself. I thought for a long time that the genres listed were added by gr with the book info, what you used to find on title pages of books.An error I found was for a book I recently read, listed as HF, so not HF. Has anyone else had that come up? Just curious.
Kristine wrote: "An error I found was for a book I recently read, listed as HF, so not HF. Has anyone else had that come up? Just curious. "Happens all the time because people shelve books in mysterious ways.
I'm in a group where we read a book from a different shelf every month (and the shelves are varied) and we always laugh because we find the Harry Potter books in every shelf we pick, no matter how crazy.
Somebody found it in American History! Yes, Harry Potter.
We're aware of this, and working on the best way to work around it for the numerous tasks in the current challenge that require a genre listing on the main page. For now, if you post a task with a book based on a genre, please note in your post that the genre was formerly on the main page!