I love love love buddy reads. There are ways it can be improved for sure (aka marking what chapter as opposed to page/percentage), but it is by far my favorite method of reading books with friends on SG. I would love if there was a way to have a group of friends where you can add a book and everyone in that group was automatically included in the buddy read. I feel like this would be an easier way than adding the same group of people for every buddy read.

I’ve been enjoying using book clubs! I just use it with small groups of friends (2-3 people) as a way to keep all the books we’ve read together in one place. I’d love a book club level setting I can turn on so everyone is automatically marked as attending a meeting so they get automatically added to the buddy read. Since it’s such a small group, everyone is part of every buddy read but people forget to click Attending and then can’t find the buddy read.

I would love to reuse readalongs. Our club has been running for a while, so we regularly schedule rereads of books the club has already read (and that can, therefore, not be voted as official club books again). For this, I would like to create a new meeting, but eventually (this will not become a current problem for quite some time) attach an existing readalong instead of creating a new one, so we can see and react to the previous discussion.

I would definitely love some basic moderation features for the forums. As an admin, I would at least like to be able to delete posts and kick users, maybe even ban them. I don't need much more than that.

Our club has a very strict "no promotions" policy, to protect our users and keep it as a place for readers to talk about books primarily, and I would like to be able to enforce that.

I love TSG and use it exclusively for my personal reading. I am trying to convince my book club to use it. At the moment they are looking at an app called “Bookclubs” and I’d like to find a way to sway them to TSG. Here are the features that would tip the scale for us:

1. Polls that are independent of a specific meeting. We vote on 8-12 books at a time and then assign them to a meeting date.
2. Rank ordered polls. Each of our members suggests 3 books and then we rank order those, selecting the highest scored book to go on the next round list.
3. Meeting reminders directly (automatically?) from the app so we don’t have to remember to email the group about an upcoming meeting.
4. RSVP yes or no to a meeting. If the only option is to mark “attending”, then we don’t know if someone is unable to attend or just didn’t get around to marking it.

Love the ideas others have included about the stats and leaderboard areas.

If the recommendations could also highlight books that are on all members TBR? That would be so cool!

I would really love to see a 'readalong' tab in book clubs. Currently from a book club page you can only see what live and upcoming readalongs a club has from via a meeting, or at least I haven't found another route.
Ps... I love what you are building!

Would love to be able to hold discussions in the book club similar to what readalongs are, without having to create a readalong.

I would love to see some stats about the specific Book Club. Our book club has existed since 2019 and we have gone back to add in all the books we have read for past meetings. It would be so cool to see like stats around like how many books in different genres we have read, dnf rate, average ratings for members etc. It would also be great if we could associate a book club pick to a specific member and see stats on that as well.

Ability to end a poll early if everyone has voted already

I would love an overview over which books my clubs are currently reading and upcoming books, so I can plan my personal reading.

(Maybe I just haven't found out how to do this, but ...) I would like to be able to choose a book's edition for a book club meeting.
When I search for the German title of a book, I will find the correct book, but it will always show me the main edition (which, in case of translated books, is in English) and I can only add the main edition to the meeting.
Some of our club member read exclusively in German and they will not find the book/meeting easily, because the English and German titles aren't always a direct translation and the covers are often different.

In the "upcoming meetings" and "past meetings" views, I would like to see the number of people attending each meeting without having to click on them.

We do not hold meetings for one book, we get together and everybody talks about a book they like. I create "upcoming meetings" for books we have talked about, and when enough people are interested, we see if we can schedule a buddy read. So it would be helpful to have an overview.

Love the Leaderboard, it's such a cool idea! I'd love to be able to force update the leaderboard, or have there be an annual recalculation, instead of just updating only on book clubs within a week?

A lot of members of my book club don't necessarily use TSG super consistently and sometimes they might take a couple weeks (or as we noticed reviewing for the intro of Book Clubs, months or years) to review a book after we've read it. I also know that I sometimes rethink my ratings towards the end of the year as I sort of review everything I've read. It would be nice if we could force the leaderboard to update like how we can recalculate the year in review stats?

I also know part of the reason for the limited time frame was performance and I'm not really sure if there's any solutions to that, but the other part about wanting to make the leaderboard historically accurate to who was a member of at the time isn't something I prioritize (which I could certainly be a minority) but when I talked to the other members of my book club they liked the idea that it would encompass all reviews regardless of if we read them at the same time, so it gives us a better understanding of what we all like (or didn't lol)!

Reading sprints! A bot or Pomodoro timer feature with a chat log and the ability to schedule sprinting sessions.

Hey! I'm running a book club that is centred around nonfiction books, and the members do not meet in real life. We don't know each other in person, so the only way to communicate is on the forum of the book club. This can cause the book club to fall off peoples' radars because there is no way to send out announcements to all members about anything and if you don't actively come and check for updates, then you will miss new posts (which is how I do my 'announcements' now).
I'd like to send announcements such as a call for book suggestions, a call to vote in the poll, a call to participate in the readalong once it is up, etc.
Perhaps to help people to manage notifications, there could be a toggle for notifs on or off for a given book club?

Other Leaderboard ideas! I made my own for my book club in a spreadsheet because (despite my best efforts) not everyone is on TSG yet and here are some things I encountered:

• Not everyone rates books at all! I started factoring in "how many people have marked this book as "Read"?" when calculating the rankings. Having a column for that in the Leaderboard might be neat.
• Similarly, having a column for # of DNFs is interesting data. If only one person ranked a book as 5⭐ but everyone else DNFed because they hated it, I wouldn't want that one to float to the top of the board without a signal about the DNFs.
• I also added a column to my sheet that calculated the standard deviation. Which books do we all universally love or hate? Which ones do we have the most disagreement about?

First - LOVE the new feature!! Thank you SO much.

One thing I'd love to see added would be the ability to have two people set up as admin. I created the club but I co-facilitate with someone else and I would like be able to add them as an admin or something like that.

make book clubs discoverable so people can join them

And another one!! Could the "Book Club Suggestions" factor in members' TBR, in addition to the machine learning algorithm? It would be really cool if there was a suggestion like "Four of you have X book on your TBR, and it matches the mood/theme/etc of your book club! Consider picking this book for your next meeting!"

Just thought of this while I was setting up a few new meetings for my club (we choose books several months in advance). I'd love to have default settings for meetings! We use the same Zoom link every month, so it would be really convenient to have that pre-populated in each meeting so I don't need to look it up every time. I also plan on setting up a Buddy Read for every meeting and it would be nice to have that automagically set up for me since it's a multi-step process right now.

Loving the Book Club feature (and loved following your Insta stories while you set it up) 🤩. Thank you!

My book club is pretty old school and not all are particularly into technology - I've always tracked our meeting data on a spreadsheet.

If at all possible, I'd love to be able to add the names of members and record their ratings, etc. so that the leaderboard is not just based on my ratings, haha.

Appreciate the consideration ❤️

Love the initial release! It's so helpful to just have a collection of members so I don't have to remember who all to invite each time for buddy reads. My ideas for what I'd like to see in the future:

• The tabs should be permalinks, like the tabbed views under Community (ex: /book_clubs/{id}/upcoming-meetings, /book_clubs/{id}/members)
• The About section doesn't need to be a tab I don't think. There's a lot of empty space in the area where the book club's name is, and I feel like some of those lines could be collapsed to make room for putting the "About" section there ("Run By" and "X members" don't need to be on separate lines, for example)
• I think the page as a whole could benefit from a two column layout. Would love a smaller column on the left that featured the current read, and then below that maybe a "Members" tab formatted similar to the "Friends" one on the Community page. Maybe the "Suggested Reads" could also go here at the bottom.
• I wish the Leaderboard did not require people to mark meetings as "attended". Maybe that can be an option to toggle on/off, but I feel like if a member has read the book at all, I want their rating to be factored in. I would love to add the backlog of past reads for this book club, but there's no point in doing that if I then have to bother everyone to go in and mark themselves as having attended 12+ previous meetings.
• Though we aren't there yet, I would love the option to have a pretty graphic associated with a yearly wrap-up for the books read in book club, similar to what we get for our personal stats. Even in the meantime, it'd be nice to see a little more ~* flair *~ to the Leaderboard page that shows the covers and average rating.

Excited to see where y'all take the feature, and thank you for your hard work on it!

Thank you for all of your hard work on V1 of the bookclubs! I have just a couple things that spring to mind for me at the moment.

• just wanting to add my vote to the ability to reorder forums and/or pin forums, as well as perhaps pinning messages in forums too.

• I wondered if we would be able to set a date for the meetings that is just the month. No day or time. My reason for this is, I like using bookclubs to have a 1 stop place for all of the readalongs I'll be holding, as well as a place for a code of conduct, and the forums etc. But my bookclub is purely online only and wont have a specific meeting date. I've attached a photoshop of the current view to show how I'd want it to display.

• Will there eventually be a plan to make Book Clubs searchable? I can see at the moment its just a case of being invited to join one/given the link to join. I think it would be nice if Book Clubs could set themselves as Open or Private, then Open ones could be searched for from the community tab.

• and finally, just an aesthetic one for me so plenty of others might disagree, but I'd want the About section of the bookclub to not be a tab but instead displayed underneath the bookclub name and who its run by. It just felt a bit strange to me to have to go looking for a description of the club.

First off, I can't tell you how thrilled I am that Book Clubs came to STG! <3
HUGE thank you! We are a club that desperately needs a concise functional way to discuss books online on top of our in-person meetings.

Here are my recommendations for V2:

• The big feature for me and my club is TBR and Read lists for clubs. We actually poll based on the recommendations tracked in our club's TBR.
• Within those lists, having a tag system for sorting through genres. Or perhaps keeping a single total list of books, and having 'TBR' and 'Read' tags.
• Chiming in agreement on upvoting on books within the book lists, so that hosts can see which books members are most interested in.
• Privacy Settings: Being able to toggle whether a club is private (invite only) or public - I didn't see any information on this? I would be interesting hosting both sorts, one private and one where it could be accessed/discovered publicly via TSG.
• Also chiming in agreement on reordering forum with a special request for the ability to pin forums to the top.

• More than one host for a book club (not just for one meeting)

• More than 4 options in a book poll.
• Ability to add more than one book to a meeting.
• Search bar in "upcoming meetings" where I can search for a book title/author.
• Ability to comfortably link/imbed books in forum posts (maybe I can copy & paste the link and TSG automatically shows it as title + author, nicely formatted, or I have a button next to the other formatting buttons where I can search for a book or...)
• Ability to add a (sub-)title to a meetings, for themed polls etc. (my book club has monthly themes)

• Ability to add "bonus" books to an event. My book club will sometimes have a main book and a bonus book or sometimes a choice of two books in a single meetup. Being able to have both books visibly represented and attached to the event would be great! Not sure how common this is for other folks. I'm getting around it right now by linking to it in the meeting notes/agenda. It also would be cool to have a way to designate a book a "bonus" like you can with a reading challenge, esp if the reading challenge features ever get folded in to book clubs.

• A way of messaging group members. This is a probably a much bigger lift since there is currently no way to message at all in the app, but, if I need to say to my friends "hey I can't make it to the date we've set for next month, can we reschedule?" I have to do that outside the app. I'd love to be able to do it straight from TSG so I can explain why I'm sending out a new poll. Another use case I can see for this is to notify folks about something related to the book. We've had a few instances where we've picked a book (e.g. Fledgling by Octavia Butler) without knowing a whole lot about it and then the first person to start reading was like "HEY team this book has some content warnings we didn't know about, make sure you take a look at them before getting started".

• A way to reorder the forums. I'm using one of those as a makeshift TBR, but it was the first forum I made, so now it's buried at the bottom. I'd like to pin it to the top.

Thank you for the book club features! I am excited to try it out with my book club! I especially love the concept of the leaderboard.

Just wanted to add to the wishlist for V2 - I would love to have TBR and Read lists for the book club page. Maybe on the TBR members could upvote books they are interested in reading, so there can be a kind of asynchronous ongoing poll. If a TBR is added, I'd love to also be able to use tags to help organize it.

I'd also be super interested in book club stats, if that's something that could be supported in the future. What moods are the books we choose? What formats/editions are members reading them in? What are our top authors within book club picks? How do members' reading outside of the book club compare to book club picks?

Just throwing around ideas. Thanks for all the great work you do!