Okay, I'm a book person, but I don't like the library system as it's set up. It's hard to find the newer books. When I use browse all I get a list of the old books first and the new ones at the very end. Is there any way that can be reversed (or an option added where that is reversed)? In real life when you go into a library all the new books are at the front of the library, same with bookstores.

I'd also love it if the editor on Nexus was a little more easy to use in writing books. A spell checker would be nice. I'd also like it if the editor was set up so that so many formatting issues would arise when we cut and pasted from word or notepad (I'm always wrong on the page width and I often overcompensate). It would be nice if Nexus didn't drop all the apostrophes and special characters when you copied and pasted. Even writing directly into the editor isn't always the best solution.

I know it's not easy to change or add to the programming you have started. In my opinion having the books rearranged from newest to oldest would be priority (for me and the book people).

I approve the reversing of order so the newer books are at the top and the older ones are at the bottom!

We have like...four posts regarding bookbinding and the library system now, don't we?

Just as an FYI, the mudbot module has a text editor (`edit) that works nice if you don't use nexus -- and it tends not to strip out the apostrophes and such.

I agree about the importance of putting the new books at the end. Unless you're a library aide it's hard to tell what was recently published. (and even then it's no walk in the park)

I've never had a problem with the Nexus editor, and most of what I have written has been done with the Nexus editor. It never dropped any of my characters.

If you copy and paste from MS Word (which has a spellchecker), Nexus will strip out any "non-standard" characters -- like for instance, quotation marks that are at an angle (which Word automatically does).

Yeah. Once Shiri the Awesome explained to me that you don't have to actually log out to switch from being logged in on Mushclient to being logged in in on Nexus, I generally write whatever in Works (or Word, if I'm at work or - more recently - on my laptop) and then copy it over into the nexus editor and it works great for me too.

You can change Word's settings so it doesn't do that slanty punctuation thing.

If I recall, copying from Mircosoft Word into the Editor will drop certain characters. This is why I use notepad.



Ouch. Lamentable ninjas.

Since I use zmud, I prefer not to have to switch over to nexus for the editor when I want to write something, and the mudbot editor works better in other ways as well (for one, it's easier to cut out that annoying dating stuff that the game automatically puts in) =D But -- how do I change those settings?

Here's how I do it on the 2003 version I have at work: Click on Format, then click Auto Format on the drop down. A dialogue box'll pop up. Click on Options and then uncheck all the things you don't want (like replacing the straight quotations with slanted ones and so on).

Or, you could type everything on Notepad, copy-paste to Word to check for spelling/grammar errors, then paste into the editor. That's what I do anyway.

On-topic: I too support the newest-to-oldest thing.

OR

Allow books to have a synopsis.

I used to be a librarian aide, and sometimes, trying to decide what goes into the subject of a book is tough. On one hand, there are already enough subjects that i do not want to clutter up the list any more. But on the other hand, when I'm looking for a book, sometimes a certain subject doesn't catch the book I want, especially if I've forgotten the title of the book.

I spent hours upon hours on cleaning up the categorising of books, and I'm fairly sure hardly anyone uses it. I'm pretty sure everyone just does BROWSE ALL and then look for their book, as the subject system is either too cluttered or not comprehensive enough.

And, book synopsis would make looking for random interesting books to read much easier. Sure, I know that this book is one Night and the Supernals, but what exactly is this book about?

I've always wondered why authors can't set a sort of "prototype list" of subjects on their own book. The librarian aides could override it if they wanted, or add to it, but this way there'd at least be a basic subject list to make the BROWSE SUBJECT list useful.

I recently found out about BROWSE TITLE (which is awesome), but I think that being able to assign "pre-publishing" subjects to your book would be nice.

That would be nice to have a prototype list, and then you could refine the search further with more keywords.

That or a command such as

LIBRARY/BOOKSHELF PUBLISHED (year)

YESSSS...

Why not get your cityleaders to ask your patron for a 'library annex'? (See the foot of HELP GREATLIBRARIAN).

:/ because relying on librarian aides to properly sort books by date would be about as effective as relying on them for the browse subject feature?

I still don't really understand the library annexes. The ones at the world library are really under-utilized (it looks like they're organized by topic, if I remember right, but then if annexes are just to help better organize your books by topic, don't we already have a free command for that?) and there's no helpfile for annexes that I can find. It's only got about two sentences in HELP GREATLIBARIAN that I can see and an even briefer mention in library commands that basically says if you're standing in your library atrium, there's no difference in how these commands work, but if you're in that annex, it does.

Is it possible to have the same book in two annexes? I can't tell. And if annexes are expensive (there's no mention of what the "fee" is), I imagine that the natural inclination of the librarian would be to just have an atrium for scholarly and one for literary, though I could be wrong since I imagine they could be convinced that since there's already a browse subject and a browse scholarly/etc, that the only real use for an atrium would be to organize by date.

I really want a synopsis for books. That's how I look for books in any case. I look at the title first, then the cover (yes yes, I know the bit about judging and covers and books, but yes, covers play quite a large part in me deciding what books to read), and then the synopsis. Actually, the first two are just attention-grabbers for me. What really decides for me if I want to read a book or not is the synopsis. And having no synopsis in Lusternian Libraries beyond SUBJECT: is making it realy hard for me to look for books to read, considering that we have so many of them.

PS: I liked Aiakon's monthly(?) book review thing. Loved it.

Edit: Wait, is this the right thread for the Aiakon book review thing? I must have confused this with the bookbinding/library thread then.

I remember when I was Librarian in Celest and it was so freakishly annoying to find and read the new books from other the other city/communes so I could rate them or find the problems in them. There should be something for everyone to access that gives them the list of the lastest books that year and then just the normal other stuff.