Agreed completely. The support on this site for writers is terrible and needs some serious improvement.

Trust me, you're far from the only one who feels this way. Between the visibility problems, the formatting problems, and the no-importer problems, not to mention the staff's apparent stance of "Promise and forget" when it comes to improvements for writers and stories, I've actually begun to warn other writers away from Furry Network. It's not writer-friendly in the slightest.

I'd argue that the problem with the story gallery giving all this information up front rather than a small icon is that it makes browsing a much bigger hassle than the other galleries. While it's true that when you're looking for a story you want something that will be able to hold your attention a bit longer than a picture or a photograph, it's also important that you're able to easily go from piece to piece, especially if somebody just did a bulk upload of story chapters.

Plus, as others have said, a thumbnail image can do two things: It can catch the eye, or it can quickly and clearly summarize the most important tags. Both of these will help a story get noticed, which is good for both the reader and the writer.

As the site is designed right now, without scrolling you can see fifteen items for artwork, photos, and multimedia. For stories, you can see two, and that's if both writers are very brief in their teaser -- somebody who takes all the space allotted will bring this number down to one submission on the page at a time. This isn't good for a reader who wants to browse for something to read, and this isn't good for writers who want their stories to be noticed. Nobody wins here.

Just a reminder that if you give this idea a thumbs up (or down, either one!), please leave a comment as well so this thread can get more eyeballs looking at it. :)

Just a reminder that if you give this idea a thumbs up (or down, either one!), please leave a comment as well so this thread can get more eyeballs looking at it. :)

Agreed. I've had bad experiences on other sites with people who just want to troll, leave hurtful comments, or just have arguments in the comment field. Being able to stamp this out myself quickly would be nice.

Some kind of change definitely needs to be made. I don't even bother looking at Popular anymore because it's always the exact same content.

If I'm writing a story to publish on a site, it's not gonna be on mobile. So this argument doesn't apply to story writers who have to suffer Markdown. Leaving a quick comment on a piece of work? Yeah. Writing a shout or quick update? Sure. But any lengthy piece of work is going to be done at a computer, not on a cellphone.

Markdown doesn't work as well for writers as other formatting methods do. For proof of that, just look at this comment thread at all the writers saying "I need things other than Markdown." Not want -- need. Look at all the upvotes on the comments from people asking for other options but Markdown, because it can't meet their formatting needs as well as the alternatives.

The community's spoken. It doesn't matter how many characters you save using Markdown, it's still not as desirable.

So this would be something that essentially allows users to save tag sets to quickly apply multiple tags to a new piece of work? For example, if somebody were uploading pages of a comic, they could just apply the category/tag set to each page rather than have to enter each one individually?

Because I like that idea.

Indeed. Groups would be another nice feature, as would some type of option to mark a submission as "Feedback Requested" outside of simple tagging, but both of those are topics for another ticket.