I'd like to see use of something like Facebook Connect, or maybe a Tweet this button. I think there needs to be as few steps as possible for people to get involved in a Book Oven project. I've been able to get a decent number of people to visit my Book Oven project, but I am pretty sure none of them ever signed up so they could make comments.

I suggest going multi-language. User would be able to choose his native language to publish or proof-read. In my country (Poland) there is actually no website devoted to help writing short-stories and longer prose. Changing the user-interface language isn't that much essential (except for publicity purposes) as almost everybody know English. This change would dramatically increase usefulness for people who doesn't primarily speak English, and so would increase the popularity of The Book Oven.

Greets,
John Evans

From CoriS on the forums:

Just another thought ... I wondered if the snippet window has a font-choice, or whether people will be using their default browser font. DP has a famously-ugly in-house font, which does distinguish quite well between commonly confused letters (e.g. b and h.) However, it takes practice to use it, and it does slow down the reading somewhat, so I don't think we could easily inflict it here. But perhaps a monospaced font?

I used three spaced periods: ". . ." as ellipses (whereas some people don't put spaces, i.e., "..."). Unfortunately, it looks like the Bite-Sized Edit sentence parser is turning my ellipses into phantom sentences consisting of ". " and whatnot.

This is just a nuisance more than a serious problem. I could always just do a find/replace for "my" ellipsis and replace it with "...", but ideally I think we'd all like a smarter parser.

Just not . . . too smart, lest it rise up against us!

I've noticed I get a message in my inbox notifying me every time someone makes a comment on a Bite-Sized edit. Often I don't check these until I've finished reading the Bite-Sized edits, in which case I'll have already seen the comment in the message. I'd love the ability to just tick a checkbox next to a bunch of messages and mark them as read.

When I get a notification in my inbox that someone has left a comment on a bite-size edit, it tells me the comment and even gives me the sentence in question. However, it doesn't give any sort of URL or option to go directly to editing/approving that particular edit. Instead, I have to go back to the project, find the sentence, and then edit or approve it.

www.textnovel.com already have this feature. Their FAQ describes their system as follows:

"• The subject line must have the following format: Story Code:chapter number
If the story code is 12 and the chapter number is 2, then the subject line should read 12:2. If you want to add a new chapter, then make sure to use the next number in order (so if you already have 10 chapters, to add a new chapter you would use 11 as the chapter number in the subject line)."

But perhaps a more friendly system could be created

Someone proposed a couple of edits to Love Freak, Death Freak, Porn Freak that were intended to move a quotation mark up a space. But I'm not able to determine where these supposedly misplaced quotation marks. Unlike the person proposing the edit, the project owner is not able to see the preceding and following sentence. So in cases like this, the project owner doesn't know where the edit will happen.

At the moment, we have potentially three sign-ons for Book Oven - your site sign-on, the forums sign-on (which is the same username and password as the main site but it still makes you log-in again) and User Voice (either a new sign-on or OpenID). We will eventually have just one but whilst we're ironing out the wrinkles, please bear with us!

I've noticed at least 1 user that appears to be a commercial enterprise using BSE, ok, well, i'm very happy to help out other writers, and I do comprehend the link between writers and publishers, but I'd rather not do paid editors work for them, or i'd at least like to have a choice.

In the same vein, you are bound to be hit by spammers adding content which will be fed to BSE participants, this would allow us to block content from those users.

I've occasionally been offered a blank snippet by BSE.

I guess this is because people are entering blank lines between paragraphs or at the start/end of the uploaded piece? These should be stripped, it's annoying for the editor but also means that a piece is broken up into more snippets and therefore takes longer to go through an edit cycle.