SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion
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Rebecca
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Feb 13, 2022 06:55AM
Same here. Had no idea I could save my GR data, will be doing that presently. Thanks!!
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I seem to have the opposite problem - many notifications appear twice on my phone.
By data, do you mean the books that you want to read or other things? I don’t think that GR will shut down?
Allison wrote: "This might be a good place to remind folks we have a Discord server and a group at Librarything! I am not presently active there, but I can be. The mods are actively looking at alternatives should ..."I was looking at Librarything last night as a matter of fact, but then I wasn't certain if I could import all of my books, and reviews, into it in one fell swoop. Is that a possibility, Allison?
Saar The Book owl wrote: "By data, do you mean the books that you want to read or other things? I don’t think that GR will shut down?"I doubt it's going anywhere since Amazon owns it. They will always have members no matter how shoddy this platform becomes.
On this very page I got an ad from Goodreads itself to hire software engineers… sure looks like they need ‘em. It also feels like the trust-busters should have had a closer look when GR was bought.
I just wanted to note that LibraryThing is a really different sort of site than GR. It was originally designed primarily as a cataloguing site, I think. I like many things about it, but it lacks many of the social features GR has. Notifications never break on LT, because there aren’t any. :) You can’t sign up for notifications on threads, people can’t comment on your reviews, and if somebody gives your review a “thumbs up” you won’t get a notification. If you do happen to notice a thumbs up on your review, you can’t see who gave it to you. On LT, people can comment on your “wall” (sort of like sending a message directly to somebody on GR, except there’s a choice to make it either public or private) and you do get notifications about that. Otherwise, most of the social features on LT are done through “Talk” (groups), but it’s a more straightforward forum setup that doesn’t have subfolders, so it wouldn't be possible to create a nicely organized group like the one we have here. I do like the quoting process better on LT, though. You type >[post #] and it creates a clickable link to the post. The touchstone feature is also nice, and a faster way to add book links to your posts. You put a book name in [single brackets] or an author in [[double brackets]] or a series in [[[triple brackets]]] and it creates links for you. For books, if you hover your mouse over a touchstone link in somebody’s post, you get a little pop-up with some info about the book so you might not even need to click on the link. The site is also scaled for mobile and, from what I’ve seen, is pretty readable on both desktop and mobile web browsers, although I sometimes get annoyed at not being able to zoom in on mobile.
Its founder and staff are more active in the forums and, in my experience, the site is a lot more stable. It has some fun stats, way more than you’ll find on GR, and they’ve been enhanced over the past few months. If you’re just dying to know how your books, if stacked on top of each other, would compare to famous structures such as the Great Pyramid, this is the place to go to find out! If your data is accurate, you can even find out how much all your books weigh… useful if you’re planning to move, maybe?! Plus there are a lot more normal stats too. Book formats, publication dates, etc. There’s a nationality map that shows which countries the author’s you’ve read are from. All of the graphs/charts can be adjusted to show all your books in your catalog, or else you can choose books from a specific collection, or books read in a specific year.
The Home page is customizable – there are a bunch of different modules you can choose to display on your home page by default, in the order you specify, each of which is configurable.
I’m not as active there as I used to be, but until last summer I maintained a reading journal thread in the Green Dragon group. There are several groups like that on LT where an individual starts their own thread, and posts about what they’re reading in as little or as much detail as they want, and a lot of people post general non-book stuff too. People then browse other people's threads and comment. I really enjoyed that because I got quite a lot of discussion on my threads, but it also became a little overwhelming to keep up with so I decided to stop for the time being. But all of that is to say that people enjoy talking about books there, including SF&F. While they have a much smaller member base, they’re a pretty chatty bunch of people. Some groups are more welcoming than others; I would definitely recommend the Green Dragon as a mostly-friendly group that always treats new people nicely. And here’s the link to the SFFBC group Allison set up. Nobody’s really posting there, though. https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/...
Michelle, I’m not sure how well the import works, although to the best of my knowledge you can import your books and reviews from GR just fine. I've never seen anybody complain about it, for what it's worth! I just haven't done it myself because I joined LT so soon after GR that I didn't have many books shelved and just added them manually. Under the “Add Books” tab, there’s an “Import books” link and then from there you can select “Goodreads import” which should accept a Goodreads-formatted export file.
Not had any notifications for 2 days now (as another tumbleweed silently floats past my window).
Thank you, YouKneek- this is all very helpful!I might just stay with GR since it's more social overall. I really like the people in all of my groups on here, and with limited time available to me I would fall behind if I were to go between two platforms. GR is the only social media that I use, so I am used to only dealing with one.
When I was looking through Librarything last night, the ratings system and recommendations function appear to be far more superior. Those aspects were very attractive to me.
In message #106 above, Daniel mentioned that GR is hiring software engineers. Could you ask Ernest to apply? He'll get everything up to snuff! We can pay him in catnip and feathered mice :)
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I don't think Goodreads is leaving but it does crash regularly and then some of us lose some of our data, including reviews. So, on your books tab you can export your shelves to a spreadsheet so that if things go sideways, you'll have a recent back up.
Yeah Michelle, the time is the hard part! There’s never enough. :)Michelle and Allison, you don’t understand about Ernest. If he got his paws on GR code, the notifications might not break, but they’d surely get stranger. “Somebody said something somewhere and they might have mentioned you. I dare you to find it! Meow.” Or there’d be bouncing links that jumped around on your monitor and you have to try to catch them with your mouse to access the notification.
On the subject of backing up one’s GR data, just adding my vote that it’s definitely a good idea, especially if one doesn’t already have that data elsewhere. Especially since it’s so quick to do. I’ve seen more than one person note lost data on GR. There was also that incident in 2013 where they made a policy change that resulted in a bunch of reviews and shelves being deleted that violated the policy. (This was a little before my time, so I don't know all the details, but something about reviews or shelf names that attack authors getting removed.)Aside from that, there’s always the possibility of glitches, a disgruntled programmer running amok, a major hardware catastrophe, etc. I would assume they have backups of their data, but people don’t always make intelligent decisions or think things through properly, especially when planning for the unthinkable. At work, we lost a critical production system and our DR (Disaster Recovery) system in a crazy, unthinkable systems disaster in late 2020. Thank goodness we had a 2nd backup system that wasn’t affected or we’d have been screwed, but it was pure stupidity that allowed our production and DR systems to be lost in the same catastrophe. I would have expected better of our people whereas my expectations of GR aren’t that great. :)
And then we’ve probably all seen the spammers who appear to have hacked into legitimate but dormant accounts for the purposes of spewing spam, so hacking is a potential danger also. Or user error. Or cat taking over the keyboard error.
Sorry this is super off topic, but YKK's talk of backups made me think of one of my old jobs where I got to work in The Cave several times! It was the coolest (literally and figuratively) place, a literal underground server room in a human made cave system. There was of course another backup location on the other side of the country, for maximum natural disaster security, and of course a million other backup systems, which will interest no one unless they're super into database/server backups :) I'd read a techno thriller where the protag worked in The Cave!But yeah, YKK is of course right, there doesn't have to be a CATastrophy, you might need that export for all kinds of non-critical reasons, so it's good to have at least one per year/month, depending on how active you are on GR, and if you have other "backups", like a reading journal or a spreadsheet, etc. I have all my read data in a spreadsheet, so I could lose all of that on GR and I would be able to import it back in, but I don't really have backups of my several TBR shelves, and I'm fine with that. Well I do have the GR exports, but not a non-GR backup.
I've recently turned off almost all notifications on GR, so I don't really notice when they stop working. It's been kind of nice? Of course having a third mod now makes it easier, I don't feel like I need to be constantly ready to see what's happening, so I can pop in when I want, see what's new, and then stay off GR for a longer while, not being drawn in by constant notifs (when they work).
I too have all notifications turned off - it's so easy to click on the icon to see My Group Discussions and click on the red numbers to see the new posts. Besides, since the Amazon account is in my husband's name, he might be a tad bit upset with all the additional emails coming in...
I’ve got notifications. Only 2, but it’s a start.
That server cave sounds very cool (in both ways), Anna! That sounds like a great way to save on temperature control costs.I don’t have many notifications turned on for group discussions either. I keep a tab in my browser open to the Community/Discussions page and mostly just check the new posts through there a couple times a day or so.
However, since I write reviews and sometimes comment on other people's reviews, notifications are important to me for those. I can check my profile for new comments on my most recent reviews, but sometimes somebody leaves a comment on a review I wrote years ago and I would have no way without notifications of knowing that's out there. And I won't see replies to the comments I leave on other people's reviews unless I get notified. (Or keep that page open, which I don't usually do.)
Oh good to see that notifications are generally off. I thought it was again a me-problem.
*ha* I am just now receiving notifications for Feb 13. It's been quite 'lonely' with the quiet.
I'm still getting some in at a slow crawl from the 12th. Ernest must've batted the GR staff into shape!
The notifications have reappeered (50+) late today, after 3 days of nothing. This is getting outright ridiculous. And being told 'contact Gr Support' is no help at all, as GR Support seems to be missing in action.
Michel, if you're referring to my DM, what did you expect I could do to fix this if GR support can't?
Notifications are coming in, though there's some strangeness, i.e. duplicate notifications on threads/reviews where I was the most recent person to comment. Everything's fine...
Anna wrote: "Michel, if you're referring to my DM, what did you expect I could do to fix this if GR support can't?"
What I simply asked you was if you were receiving notifications, so it could tell me if I was the only one to have a problem. You could have simply answered yes or no to that.
What I simply asked you was if you were receiving notifications, so it could tell me if I was the only one to have a problem. You could have simply answered yes or no to that.
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Ryan wrote: "I'm not going through them all despite it technically being my purpose now. Anyone that took advantage of the downtime to post memes can let go of the breath they didn't know they were holding."😂😂😂
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I will make a note for next time. I have a well curated collection of quality memes.
And I will say again what I said before: Amazon will not fix goodreads' usability issues, because they have no incentive to. So it's useless to hope or to mail support about it.
Okay, finished a book today, no notification to share my kindle highlights, though I have made some, so some things are wonky still...
Ryan wrote: "...Anyone that took advantage of the downtime to post memes can let go of the breath they didn't know they were holding."😂🤣👏 excellently played
(And, now seems to be a chance again).
My notifications are on the fritz again.
Quick, Everyone...post your memes on the count of three!
My notifications are wonky today. I thought that all of my groups were awfully quiet, but the I saw in the discussion sections of the groups that there were new unread posts. Anyone else having this issue?
Yes, I think I’ve gotten a total of 10 notifications in the past 36-48 hours. Normally at the end of a month I have to make sure I don’t get more than 30 before I go through them or I don’t see them (on the app) at all.
Mine are all over the place right now. None for ages, then a sudden flurry.
And now I'm being notified of my own comments 🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️
My notifications have been extremely delayed off and on for the last week or two.Not sure I could handle being notified of my own comments. Let's hope they nip that in the bud!
I don't follow threads so I don't get notifications of those, but I'm sure that if I did, it would be a hot mess. I only get notifications of comments or likes on my reviews. The fun thing that I often see is a notification icon with multiple items - indicating 3 or 7 or something, and when I click to view them, there's only one item.
I'm used to GR grouping things - like if 3 people like a review, it will group that into one notification - but this drives me crazy because it's like they count them separately, but then only display the one item. Or maybe they want me to assume that people are unliking/commenting?
Anyone else have this disparity between the number in the icon and the actual number of notifications?
No, but this assumes that multiple people like my reviews. 😂
YouKneeK wrote: "I just wanted to note that LibraryThing is a really different sort of site than GR. It was originally designed primarily as a cataloguing site, I think. I like many things about it, but it lacks ma..."I tried it once but then I realized it had a limit. That kind of screwed me up.
Mel wrote: "No, but this assumes that multiple people like my reviews. 😂"LOL - well I don't know if it's that... or if I'm just missing updates!
Kirsten wrote: "I tried it once but then I realized it had a limit. That kind of screwed me up."[For reference, the above comment is regarding LibraryThing.]
They used to have one, but they don’t anymore. In the past, you had to pay a one-time fee for a full account or else you were limited to shelving 200 books. They frequently offered full accounts for free though.
But they went completely free back in March 2020 so there is no limit for anybody anymore. https://www.librarything.com/topic/31...
Just had half my notifications vanish (just realised because not all of them vanished) for the last couple of weeks. Which means I now know that I could have nominated a YA book in a poll that closed a week ago. Got to love Goodreads notifications or lack thereof.
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Michelle wrote: "My notifications are wonky today."Mine never worked properly, to be honest.
