Better surface series page and Improve series navigation

[Megumin]

Description of your request or bug report:

As per discussion here:

[Feature Request] Add a way for users to mark a series as having new entries

I find it happens quite frequently that I go to look at a series and find it has several volumes missing from the website. Most recently this happened with [Mao]( MAO(21) | L24 ) missing 7 volumes, but for ongoing series, it feels like it is more common than not for the series to be missing at least one entry that has already been published, so it feels like the “just wait a bit and it’ll be updated on it’s own” thing isn’t happening. For the example of Mao, it has been a year and a half since M…

And here:

[Feature Request] Table of Contents for Series

It would be nice if series had a side bar that allowed you to skip to any volume or season in it. For longer series, it feels a bit silly to have to go through every single volume in it to get to the end of it, or to get to a specific volume. As an extreme example, if I wanted to do something with the 100th volume of One Piece, I’d have to click through 99 other pages to get to it. Instead it would be much nicer to be able to go to volume 1, go to the proposed side bar, then scroll down and clic…

[mic]

@[Feature Request] Table of Contents for Series

if I wanted to do something with the 100th volume of One Piece, I’d have to click through 99 other pages to get to it

You could open the series page, scroll down to volume #100 and open that page.

[暁のルナ]

They mentioned after making the request that they (just then) found the series pages… But they’d already been using the site for an entire year, and didn’t know it existed. I think they have a point about it being very easy to miss

[mic]

That’s a point. Maybe a good place is in the middle of the first line, like:

<< book #1. series page. book #3 >>

But I have no idea if there is enough space for this on a phone display.

[IronFishJmp0]

I think this would honestly be a pretty good compromise. I still think it would be nice to have a side bar on desktop, but making it more obvious that the series page exists would be good enough.

The other change I think would be helpful to make would be changing the default behavior when opening a series from the search page to opening the series page instead of opening the first volume of the series. That way it’d be basically impossible to miss the existence of it.

[gillianfaith]

@IronFishJmp0

the default behavior when opening a series from the search page to opening the series page instead of opening the first volume of the series

This is already the default behaviour I’m confused how you’ve gone so long without navigating to a series page or seeing that they exist, when I imagine most users would naturally navigate to a series before seeing individual books.

The majority of the most popular items are series and clearly labelled that way on the browse page, and clicking on any of the items with that label takes you to the series page instead of volume 1. There is a setting to display only 1 volume instead of series in search results, but displaying them as series should be the default search behaviour.

[Megumin]

This does not always work.

See:

Bug report: Lots of series do not show as series on search page

Description of your request or bug report: I’ve seen this plenty of times and reported it to @brandon, but like he suggested it’s probably best just to open a formal bug. Lots of times when I’m searching by author, series I know are series don’t show up as one on the search page: [image] [image] I’m typically searching by series, so I don’t know if this also happens when searching by title/just browsing. Trello link:

Even then, we all use Natively differently, it’s still possible to go to a volume without going through the series page.

[nikoru]

@gillianfaith

clearly labelled that way on the browse page

To add to what others said, it depends on the workflow of the user. E.g. I don’t use the „browse“ page, I search for books directly, so I didn‘t know it’s displayed like that If you are on a book‘s page already, it’s admittedly not very obvious there is a series… (it’s underneath the author).
I will think about it and see what we can do in the big overhaul

[gillianfaith]

Ah yeah, I was thinking about on mobile, where you can’t get to the search without seeing the browse page, but I guess on desktop it’s easier to find exact books without ever seeing a page full of series

[seoby]

I have been registered on Natively for a while but just recently began to actually use it and I can confirm all the confusion with series page described above happened to me as well Lol. And I am not even new to tracking books (goodreads, storygraph, librarything, I`ve used them all!)

[IronFishJmp0]

This has not been my experience. This is not how it behaves in the search pages which is the primary thing I use.

[gillianfaith]

You have series results set to “One volume only” on the search page (top right dropdown). IME it should be set to series by default and not one volume, but maybe there’s a bug or something that switched it?

[IronFishJmp0]

ah, I never noticed that drop down before. I don’t recall ever changing that before, but it is possible that I changed it a long time ago and forgot I did so?