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I’m not sure if it would be better to have one section that includes all books or if manga should be split out. The tough part is that while I think it would be nice for manga to be separate, I would want novels and LNs to be together. I wonder how others would want that organized.
I personally would love to see separated sections for manga and LN/novels. Gives me more room to pick favorites, if nothing else. Plus, I feel like it’d encourage people to branch out a bit when picking; if manga and novels are in one list, I’m sure more would fill up their favorites bar with just/mostly manga. But if they’re separated, it gives the novels more chance to breathe.
I agree. I just wouldn’t want a favorites section for every book type individually. I don’t want to separate books from LNs because those lists are already small enough for me! But if Brandon wouldn’t mind two favorites lists: one for manga only and one for novels, LNs, and children’s books together (no other book types selectable), that would make me happy.
So I think all of this fits well with the custom list updates I’m planning… except allowing you to favorite series. I guess more generally being to add a series to a list might be nice as well, but I’d prefer to at least start with favorites without series, and then add series as a ‘V2’.
I think I wouldn’t by default break apart manga and other books. Rather, I think it makes more sense to be able to put any custom list on your profile page. Then users could simply only put novels / other books in their favorites and have a ‘Favorite Manga’ list which they bump up to their profile page.
I know you’ve expressed a little disappointment @seanblue at leveraging custom lists for favorites in this way (hopefully just because of the series issue), but it will be simpler I think and allow a bit more functionality for custom lists in general.
Proposal: Split out including ‘series’ in favorites and mark that as V2.
With a “custom list” approach, how are you planning to surface those lists on a user’s profile? Will the user have the option of designating “featured” lists or something? I assume so based on “have a ‘Favorite Manga’ list which they bump up to their profile page” but wanted to make sure. Personally, I would never go to a user’s actual library just to see if they have “favorite” lists, so it would have to be surfaced on the profile in some way.
Yes, honestly I would not use this feature if I can’t designate series. I’m unlikely to favorite an individual volume of any series, especially not manga or light novels. The individual volumes tend to all blur together, so I wouldn’t call out specific volumes as favorites. So of the 6 manga I listed as favorites on my profile I would mark none as official favorites, and for the 4 books I listed I could mark 2-3 of them. But at that point it would feel too sparse, so I would probably still not bother.
Additionally, while the lack of series support was my primary concern with this approach, there’s a second reason I don’t like it. To me, having to create “favorite” lists in my library just adds noise. Specifically, custom lists are for me and favorites on my profile are for everyone else. I don’t want to see my favorites listed separately every time I go to my library. I’m not saying that’s the only way to use favorites / custom lists of course. That’s just how I use them on AniList and it works well for me there, so I plan to do the same here.
If you think this is valuable enough to do as a V1 that’s your call of course. I do worry a bit that you’d be designing yourself into a corner since the V2 support for series doesn’t fit into that design. Specifically, it would be weird to display series in the library as separate entries (as part of a custom list), so at that point “favorites” would have to diverge from “custom lists” anyway. Or did you have something in mind for that?
Ok, that’s good feedback. I guess I thought people could mark the first volume of a series as a favorite for a placeholder… but I’ll think on it. I can see how you’d be reluctant to do that.
Right, ‘featured lists’ on your profile seems like a nice feature and one people probably expect with GoodReads having that functionality. It’d be nice to tackle all those together, but the series aspect certainly throws a wrench in things. I’ll think on it 
Well, I will approve this as a feature. Not entirely sure yet on how i’ll handle series, but at least a version 1 should get into Trello.
Just occurred me a way to do it on the back-end.
How about a hidden 6 star rating. The 6th star is shaped as a heart in the UI. This will mark the item as favourite.
We could hmm. I guess then you could filter your library by review rating to find your favorites?
Of course that would require a 5 star rating for all your favorites 
Certainly would be a quick hack though!
Or since you don’t allow .5 ratings, a hidden .5 rating.
This way a 3.5 rating would be a 3 star and favourite.
Then on the profile you display non-entire number ratings as favourites.
Although this is even more hack-ish than the 6 star way 
Just thinking off of @Megumin’s suggestion, and whether it could still be used to display favorite series. Perhaps Natively could also check the series designation when checking for the extra “star”, and if it finds more than one item from the same series marked as favorite, it would then collate those items to show a series placeholder in the favorites spot instead?
The series placeholder could then have the usual series dropdown where you could see the individual books you’d favorited.
Going along that line of thought, I feel like it would make more sense to use the half star as a favorite indicator rather than a whole star; that way I can favorite a book that I didn’t mark as five stars normally. (If, for example, I wanted to show that X series is one of my favorites and include all it’s books, even if not all books in that series were bangers.) Since there’s been some asks for half star ratings already, you could even just make the favorite a quarter star, @brandon.
Alright now i think we’ve gone too far down the rabbit hole 
To be clear, adding a separate item in the database marking an item as a ‘favorite’ is really not that hard, so we should only utilize this as a temporary hack until I build something out a bit better. Honestly, I think the 5 star approach is probably the only one I’d go for… it is limited, but we shouldn’t hack this too much.
The biggest hurdle with favorites is simply figuring out how we want it to work, not the implementation. Should it generate a list in your library? Do we need to be able to order that list? Do we need to be able to favorite series? If we do allow favoriting series, where do we allow you to edit that favorite? Only on your profile overview page? Only on the series page? Somehow in your library (the notion of a ‘series’ in your library is only available in the context of ‘collapsing series’ not an independent object)?
All those questions need to be answered. Otherwise it’s simply one api, one database object and tweaking the UI of an ‘item card’ for you, very simple.
Going for rabbit holes, I was thinking that we could mark as favourite if you are in the book page for longer than 180 seconds.
For all those questions, Sorting yes, Marking entire series favourtiable not so sure, but could be collapsed if more than one book in the series is marked when showing it on the profile.
For favourite sorting, you could have a meta list in your profile that allows you to sort, ala Steam Wishlist.
I’m fine waiting for a proper implementation. Any hack you put in will just add more work later.
No, it should just be visible on the profile.
Yes, absolutely.
Yes. I’m sure I’ve said before, but I think the feature has very little value if it only allows individual books. See my profile with my manually specified favorites to see why.
No strong feeling here. I think favoriting from your library is unnecessary. Either from the series page, a dedicated favorites page / favorites section of your profile page (with built-in search to make selections), or both would be sufficient.
Ok! We’re finally getting into this ticket and I think it will be very easy!
My plan is to simply surface a heart icon next to the review stars widget… so that will be surfaced on all individual items (books, seasons, movies).
And then for favoriting series, it will be next to the title:
(by the way, i’ll probably be going with this second red color…).
Then, on your profile overview, you will be able to order & delete favorites. I’m not sure i’ll allow you to search & add favorites right now… just do that from the review widgets / series page.
Also, I think I will separate the favorites by item type? So favorite movies / tv shows / books? Maybe break out Graded Readers & Texbooks too? Or should we have everything together?
Let me know your thoughts. If this UI approach is good, this feature will be very easy to implement. Should be done by end of the week.
The UI sounds good to me!
Definitely separate books from videos. How granular beyond that is up to you, but it might be good to be consistent. Meaning if you’re going to separate movies and TV it kind of makes sense to separate the book types as well… except those have a ton of options and some (novels, LNs, children’s books) all blur together, making it potentially unhelpful or confusing. Ideally I’d like to favorite manga separate from novels and LNs, but if that causes novels and LNs to be separated from each other it might not be worth it.
Personally, I’d like my favourites to be split like so:
What about favoriting from the search page itself? Something like so (excuse the messy trackpad hearts):
That way you could favorite either a series or individual book at will from there. Though that then brings up the question of how to handle me favoriting the よつばと! series and wanting to favorite individual books; you could just grey out/disable those hearts, perhaps? Maybe with a little pop-up saying “series is already favorited” or somesuch?
I would vote for all books to be together and all audiovisual to be together, if only for space reasons. Currently reading and Finished are already separated out by category (textbook, graded reader, other books) on a user’s dashboard, and for users who’ve read a wide variety of things that already takes up a ton of space.
Are we talking manually, or by a pre-sorted order? (Like reading level, date finished, etc.)
Will users have the ability to favorite/de-favorite from their library? I feel like that would also be handy.
So, I agree, that’d be really nice and intuitive. However, I’d have to implement a hover over I think, I don’t have room next to the titles and I don’t want to make it taller / make the search page busier than it already is. You will be able to favorite in your library as the review widget is there.
With regards to doing a hover over, that only really works for desktop and I’d have to implement my current solution anyway for mobile. I do think I should have hover overs for desktop though as almost all book sites have them… but I think it’s just extra work right now. Would definitely be nice in the future, ugh.
No they aren’t, only favorites are separated by some categorization right now, which this would be replacing… see Naphthalene’s profile. I do agree though that it can get a little long, that’s a very valid concern.
I was thinking only a manual, as specified-by-profile-user, sort for your overview page. I could certainly add a ‘favorite’ filter in the libraries though, and then you could do all those sorts as you’d like. Would that make sense? 
I think that makes a lot of sense.
Really appreciate all this quick feedback you guys!
