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Book Clubs V2
Ideas
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Nadia

Let's hear it! :-D

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rainbowbrarian
Apr 29, 2024

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.

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aleenala
Apr 26, 2024

make book clubs discoverable so people can join them

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jaina8851
Apr 25, 2024

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!"

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jaina8851
Apr 25, 2024

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.

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holly14
Apr 23, 2024

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 ❤️

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holly14
Apr 23, 2024

Oh, and we take turns choosing the book. It would be great if I could indicate whose chosen the book. Some great stats could come from this too, e.g. who picks the most/least loved books, what kinds of books each member gravitates towards, etc.

Thanks again!

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Nadia
Apr 24, 2024

holly14 Thanks for these, Holly. So glad you enjoyed following the journey on Stories. There was a world in which V1 had a way for a host to add in a user's rating, but that still would have required a TSG account. For the choosing of the book, for now you can note that down in the agenda, but I do see a future where whoever made the nomination/selection is listed.

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maxgardner
Apr 22, 2024

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!

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imaginary_space
Apr 23, 2024

maxgardner I would also love for the leaderboard to be based on every club member who has read the book, regardless of them attending the meeting. Since our club meets in real life, we don't create a meeting or buddy read for every book. Sometimes people will read books beacuse someone else recommended them during a meeting. So they didn't read the book at the same time, but they did all read it and talk about it during club meetings.

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jaina8851
Apr 23, 2024

maxgardner I'm actually surprised that the leaderboard is only based on who "attended"... I meticulously added all 100 of my past book clubs books, and definitely didn't mark myself as "attended" for all of them. Mine seems to be populated with all the books I read, and I invited one of my book club members as a test (and I know she just joined and didn't really do much else with the feature) and I just double checked that the leaderboard now shows the average rating for the two of us for the books we both read.

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thebi_brarian
Apr 22, 2024

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.

Bookclub.png
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imaginary_space
Apr 23, 2024

thebi_brarian My online club also has mothly reads, so we will read & talk about a book we chose during a whole month and not have specific meetings!

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RaspberryBri
Apr 20, 2024

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.
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RaspberryBri
Apr 20, 2024

RaspberryBri

Just remembered another probably difficult one, but..

  • Having a way that members of a book club could have a book club specific nickname - private to only that book club? Or perhaps this is more a TSG-wide suggestion - and could be toggled on/off for clubs?

The reason I ask is that my group is local, and it's hard to know who is who when it's just everyone's site-wide username (and usually not their face as a profile pic) instead of their real names. This goes hand in hand with the Privacy setting, of course, but being able to have folks have a nickname for Book Clubs would be astronomically helpful in letting in-person clubs connect faces to names to users.

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imaginary_space
Apr 18, 2024
  • More than one host for a book club (not just for one meeting)
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RaspberryBri
Apr 20, 2024

imaginary_space Seconding this!

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rainbowbrarian
Apr 29, 2024

RaspberryBri Thirding this!

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imaginary_space
Apr 18, 2024
  • 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)
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jaina8851
Apr 17, 2024
  • 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.

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imaginary_space
Apr 17, 2024

jaina8851 Seconding reordering forums! That would be really helpful, especially for lager clubs with lots of online communication.

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RaspberryBri
Apr 20, 2024

jaina8851 Thirding the reordering of forums!

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astropova
Apr 17, 2024

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!

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imaginary_space
Apr 17, 2024

astropova Seconding tbr with tags!

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jaina8851
Apr 17, 2024

astropova Big +1 on both of these features. A TBR that everyone can contribute to is the only feature that bookclubs.com has that I really wish the new TSG book clubs had.

I also diligently maintain a tag for all of my book club's past books so that I can see the stats, and having that be looped in to the book club itself would be really cool so I don't have to be maintaining the list of books in three places.

The third in-app place where I maintain a list is a reading challenge so I can see what percentage of the books I've read, I'd also love if there was a piece in the book club that included that data so anyone could see "I've read 65% of these books, here are the ones I've read and here are the ones I haven't". Having all that info accessible in just the one "book club" place would be incredible!!

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RaspberryBri
Apr 20, 2024

astropova I came here to also recommend TBR and Read Lists for tracking!

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Nadia
Apr 17, 2024
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