I second this! I tend to spend a lot of time into writing my characters profiles and feel like there should be a way that those who are following you can be notified.
I had a quick browse and didn't see this suggested anywhere, so sorry if this has been suggested before.
Notifications are great for keeping track of when a subscription has created a new character, or added new art to a page. However, as someone who spends more time writing the character pages than drawing, I find it's worth having a notification system for when a character page has had a heavy text update, such as when the character has been rewritten or touched up and the writer wishes to display that the character has received edits.
Of course, if a notification was sent out for every minor edit, it would become incredibly frustrating when writers have to fix a typo after saving the edit and everyone getting a new notification, and it could also be abused, so I thought of a way to work around that. Instead of having it be automatic, one could use a check box-like option offered under the "update character information" page for "major edits" that allows a notification to be sent out in the same vein as when new art is added.
To prevent intentional abuse of the system and avoid inbox/notif spam, it could be made possible that this option is only made available if there is a significant change in the word count!
A more complex system could be a checkbox for "major edits" and "minor edits" with users being given the option to disable being notified of minor edits. This is helpful if they are subscribed to a larger number of people, and would rather keep their inbox cleaner.
Obviously if someone begins to spam Notif inboxes deliberately and maliciously with edit notifications, that's what the block button is for.
TL:DR Writing is just as important to a character's core as art, and I think that in itself deserves recognition in the form of a notification (but in moderation).
An Additional Suggestion, or is this a bug?: (I hope this is okay to do) For people who create a character on private initially to work on writing them out and touching up the page and CSS. I discovered after nearly 2 years of using Toyhouse that if you create a character on Private, and later move them to Authorize only or Public, no one receives a notification for that character's creation. A friend I had invited to Toyhouse very recently was surprised by this. I hadn't realized he'd already uploaded characters because he would create the page on private initially to work on the writing. It's a little shocking that this is the case, and I don't think the solution should be to remake the entire character page on public.
(Although uploading art remedies this issue since the art notifications would still be sent out, my friend is not an artist.)
Thank you for reading this thread :> It's my first post.
I definitely agree with this! I also write, and I like writing things for my characters (when I can). This is something I wish Toyhou.se had.
I agree with the writing notification idea!! That would be super helpful! However - I don't think there should be a min word change to allow you to update. I don't really see how something like this would be abused? Since the worst thing would be people promoting their characters a bunch and if you don't like their characters or if you find it annoying just unsubscribe?
I could just be missing something though, but regardless of the abuse, my main issue is that I like to slowly write up my character profiles, add a sentence a day for example since I don't really have time to write it all out in one go, so if I write up a profile over the course of a couple of weeks and then finally finish up the last little thing I'd been procrastinating o
n I'd still like to send it out as an update, but if the system only lets it update where there's a min word limit, then despite the fact that I'd completely changed their profile I wouldn't be able to update it. Plus there's people who just like to have short profiles so if their full finished profile is under the word limit, would they be unable to update?
Thanks for your response Niidles, I would like to clarify that I don't mean a "minimum word limit" for updating, but a "minimum word limit for a notification to be sent for an edit", to prevent the flooding of notifications either accidentally or deliberately. You would still be able to update to fix small errors, but it wouldnt then notify all of your subscribers to say "Niidles has edited [Character] -- Edit: This is an egg sample example.", I obviously don't want the minimum limit to be too long! I mean more along the lines of 20 characters, like 4 words.
To clarify when I say abuse of notifications, I mean several possibilities:
One kind of abuse could be someone spamming notifications by repeatedly making tiny (1 word) edits to all of their characters, deliberately to "promote" their characters without really editing them. These people should be blocked/reported anyway, and a minimum character limit wouldn't even stop them because just spamming CTRL+V would be enough to get around it in order to spam. But the limit may deter some of it.
However, on the other side and the bigger problem, people may accidentally spam notifications without realizing. Imagine you make an edit to a character, post it and it notifies everyone, and then you notice a typo, correct it, and notify everyone again. Once or twice isn't too bad, but if everyone were doing this, it can get annoying super fast. 30 people all notifying you for typo fixes, for example. That can be prevented with a small minimum word limit.
I hope that clears it up!
As someone who saves when they update A LOT I support the checkbox idea. Or else that would really be flooding and I'd like that to not happen, haha. I do hope they also implement a feature like on dA where you can checkbox what thing you want to be updated on from who you sub tbh.
Yes! Thats why I think the checkbox idea is the better idea too. Thank you all for your input :>
I made two suggestions on the off-chance of one or the other being too complicated to code into the website, cuz I have no idea how coding works.