Now that I’ve published fifty Ficly stories, I’m a self-described, federally-licensed Ficly Veteran™ and as such, demand more, newer, and better features out of the online micro-publishing platform. After all, what else am I paying my $29.95 monthly subscription rate for, if not exceptional service?

So I’ve assembled an official List of Things™ (rendered on equally-official Ficly Mayoral Candidate™ letterhead) that could really use some improvement on Ficly.

Before I get started, I must profess that I absolutely realize that Ficly is created, managed, and maintained by only a ragtag outfit of rebel monkeys who do it purely as a fun and interesting side-project/diversion/portfolio-fodder. I don’t expect them to cater to my will–or, indeed,  even acknowledge that I wrote anything of the sort at all. However, as the newly-christened Ficly Gubernatorial Clabberwonky™ I fully expect all of my requested changes and updates to be implemented within a week. That should definitely suffice.

Things that are broken
These being things that were implemented (or at least partially implemented) but in one way or another do not completely function the way they were intended or designed.

Inspirations – In the old Ficlets site, we had built-in inspirations. Some were images pulled from Flickr which we could use as “starting blocks” for stories. Others were “starting lines” and “ending lines” that we could use to launch ideas. There’s a button for inspirations on Ficly, but it gives you an error message saying that they monkeys are working on it, and there’s a fairly flimsy promise attached to that statement. We’d love to have this implemented.

It should be somewhat telling that this is the only item on the “broken” list.

Things that could be greatly improved
These being things that essentially work as designed, but could really use a tweak (or seven) to get the most functionality out of the features.

Profiles – Profiles currently house links to an author’s stories, a bio, a website link, and a friends listing.. There’s some numbers for how many challenges, comments, and stories the author has created. But what would be extraordinarily helpful would be some links to the comments and challenges authors have participated within.

Browsing tags – There’s the ability to see some tags on the browse page, but we don’t know if those are recent tags, popular tags, active tags, etc. It would be nice to have an alphabetical listing of all tags for easier browsing.

Better browsing in general – What we need is a better organization system for stories to be able to find content more efficiently. Maybe the ability to add categories or genres? Like a standard science fiction tag or romance or mystery. That could be helpful.

Notes – From working with them, notes appear to have been a last-second afterthought. There is very little functionality to them. I have notes in my Sent folder, but I have no idea who I sent them to. Every incoming note is new, even if it is part of an ongoing conversation. There’s no attachment to an earlier note, or connection to its history. Notes are substantial for authors coordinating series cohesion and organizing group efforts. This could use a bit of a redesign.

Things that would be awesome
These being things that do not currently exist on the site, but, as stated, would be awesome.

Challenge entry – Right now in order to enter a challenge, you have to create a new story. What if you already wrote something that would be a perfect addition to a challenge? The ability to add an existing story to a new challenge would be something nice to implement.

The “mid-ficly” – This is something that I wanted to see implemented on Ficlets, and I’m still championing the concept on Ficly. A “mid-ficly” story is one that can be both a sequel to one story, as well as a prequel to another. You could create it as a sequel, and then pull up a list of existing stories to attach it as a prequel to something else. Or vice versa. It would probably be a difficult piece of functionality to design, but I don’t care. That’s not my job, just do it.

Auto-post to social networks – Sure, you can connect your author RSS feed through TwitterFeed and have it post to your Twitter and/or Facebook, but I would rather have it done intrinsically through Ficly with some kind of inherent shortened URL (fic.ly/13452, perhaps – I don’t even know if .ly is a real domain namespace. Once again, not my job.).

Okay, that’s all for now. I’ll probably be back with more outrageous gripes and complaints after I’ve written 100 stories.

All right, all right. Maybe I’ll give the monkeys two weeks.

So saith His Royal Highness, the Fifty-first Ficly Over-father of Fortitude™. Amen.

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