The Perspective, Promise, Problem, and Polemic of Page Breaks · 4:53pm Jul 23rd, 2016
The [page_break] code is a not-immediately-obvious, but still widely used, feature available to Fimfiction bloggers, which creates a stylish cut-off to your blog previews, and generates a lovely green button inviting readers to click on it to receive the next instalment. This changes from standard ivy-green to a more alluring lime-green when you move your mouse pointer in place. Isn’t that cute?
This ability to separate the main part of your opinion-piece from the preview is a power no worthy writer should neglect, but neither should we take it lightly. You can guide the readers’ blog-reading experience, introducing a deliberate pause to build up suspense. It lets you ensure the bulk of your blog is conveyed only to those readers committed enough to click on the link, and allows you to hide spoilers, or conceal a barely coherent political rant behind some tantalizing clickbait.
I have never used this feature—for reasons I shall outline below—but perhaps I should? I am curious to know what the general opinion is, so I solicit the opinions of my dear readers. Please post your views below.
As a reader, I have the feeling that this feature is overused. While many writers use it wisely, there are many occasions where it seems an unnecessary interruption. The “+ View Full” bar at the bottom of each preview is perfectly sufficient to allow me to expand a post to read the entirety, and it has the benefit that it doesn’t take me away from my feed. Thus I can skim through those long tedious posts looking for the interesting bit hidden three-quarters of the way down, before moving on to the next. This is my morning routine: while drinking my coffee, I check out the exciting new contributions to the Fimfiction blogsphere, posted by writers on the other side of the world while I was asleep. But, given my busy modern lifestyle, I may only have five or ten minutes before I have to leave for work. If I am obliged to click on a ‘Read More’ icon, then it disrupts my flow. I may then get distracted by something in the post, I may not go back to my feed, and might miss other interesting posts below it.
Does using this feature give any benefit to the writer? Isn’t obliging your readers to make an extra mouse click to reach your work inevitably going to cut your readership? There will always be a fraction of followers who won’t pass this hurdle. But there may well be benefits to manipulating readers. The full blog post page presents readers with the comment box, so forcing readers onto this page maybe increases the chance they will leave a comment. I also note that the view counter only responds to those who actually click on the blog title. Our feelings of self-worth as a writer are more directly connected to the view count figure than our actual number of readers—where’s the point in someone reading our work if we don’t know about it? By putting a green button in their way, we can force all our readers to stand up and be counted.
But maybe readers don’t like this? Maybe they dislike being manipulated in this way and feel intimidated by being commanded to ‘Read More’. Like all those irritating website pop-ups demanding you register or complete a survey. Maybe readers prefer to peruse the full text before deciding whether it is worthy of being clicked on, and if a writer deprives them of that option, demanding they click on the link if they want to know more, then they are obliged to make a difficult choice: Do they click on the button? And give approval to some poorly scripted rambling about an irrelevant bit of BBCode, not worthy of their attention. Or do they refuse to bite the bait, and potentially miss out on something interesting?
At the end of all this musing, I have no conclusion, so I invite your comments on this epic controversy.
While my stories are (generally) clop with plot, they are very clop-heavy, and even relatively clean parts will usually have some reference or suggestiveness. So I use the tag to create early page breaks and a second barrier on top of the spoiler tags when I discuss my work in detail, or quote from the cleaner parts, as a matter of politeness. I mean, I know anyone following me, in theory, knows what they're getting into, but I prefer to be more polite rather than less.
I hope you die, you monster.
I like the Read More-button, for posts above "quite short" length. One thing is the view counter point, but mostly because if I'm going down my news feed I really don't want to have to scroll through an epic-length essay about something I don't care about in order to find that one other blog post or chapter update I was looking for. Most of the time it cuts off automatically and puts in the "view full" button, but notably often it doesn't. Better to just use the page break function and make sure.
Perhaps (probably) I'm an exception in this, but for me keeping up with a user is an investment of time and energy, and the more prolifically that person blogs, the greater the likelihood that I'll decide I don't have enough to spend and just unfollow them. I do not understand the people, and I gather there are a lot of them, who have thousands of unread chapters in their shelves, and hundreds upon hundreds of unread items in their feed. I like to keep it clean, and an intro that describes the content of a post followed by the Read More-button helps.
The biggest advantage to using the read more button isn't for front page viewing, it's for when people are looking through your blog later trying to find something.
If you use the button, than only the pre-button parts show up on the blog list. If you don't, than the entirety of every blog is on the list, which means if you happen to be someone who writes long blogs, you've got to scroll all the way through every word and picture of ten blogs at a time.
I admit, I have attempted to manipulate my followers into clicking into rather short posts in order to encourage feedback and, yes, pad the blog's view count. Still, for the most part, I reserve it for especially long blogs like Friendship is Card Games, especially those that comment on the previous day's episode. In those cases, it's as much spoiler protection as it is reader convenience.
But yeah, I'll knock off the more transparent attempts at BBCode-based clickbait.
4108443
This is the reason why I generally use pagebeaks, both on FiMFic and my blog. I know that if I was a reader looking for a specific post, or an author scrolling through the recent reviews to see if anything of mine had popped up, I'd much rather look at a few titles and teasers than a seemingly-endless wall of text which makes scrolling past an entry without noticing all too easy.
The whole "extra click" thing is a legitimate grievance. Yahoo's sports page recently changed their setup so that, when you click on a headline you're interested in, it takes you to a new page, shows you a paragraph or three, and then makes you click a "continue reading" button which takes you to an entirely different page which has to load from scratch. As a result, I dropped them from my afternoon internet routine (anyone know any good general sports sites, btw? ESPN and Sportsline are already on my
list for various other crimes against accessible browsing). But for the kind of blogging I do, I think the ease of bingeing and quick-searching are worth the inconvenience.
As has been said (but it's worth repeating), breaks are really really really helpful for people trying to find specific items, both in their feed and especially when looking through somebody's blog posts. Having to scroll past a dozen pages of content per post five dozen times to find the one item you're looking for is amazingly inconvenient and obnoxious. Your blogs are... borderline, I guess I'd say - not annoyance incarnate to search, but neither a paragon of ease.
Also, I was under the impression that stuff behind the break didn't load unless you hit read more, which too is/would be quite useful for people with lame internet connections. Wasting data reloading a wall of pictures you're not planning to look at again is less than appealing.
On a slightly different note, is there any reason to not just open whatever you do/may want to look at in new tabs? I typically skim through my feed until I reach the end of the new stuff, then go back and read the saved items in order of importance/interest. That way you both prioritize and ensure you don't miss anything, since any tabs you don't have time for immediately will still be there when you return.
A feature I have never noticed or thought about, and now will have to ponder. Possibly useful for stories in blog posts, putting the page break directly after whatever length of introduction serves as the ideal hook? It would allow for greater control over the very important first impression, no scrolling down and being turned off by length or any such thing.
Why not just open a blog post with a page break in a new tab?
I actually was completely unaware you could view full blog posts on your feed.
My morning routine is to open all my feed pages from my various news sites (including fimfiction), then middle-click posts that look interesting as I scroll through each feed to open them in new tabs, regardless of the presence of a page break. I then come back to each tab, closing them after I finish reading.
I generally use it for blogposts that are:
A) Spoilerific
B) Rather lengthy
or
C) image-laden.
Sometimes, though, I use it when I want to control exactly where the cutoff happens, due to a need for it to be neat and orderly.
4108395 4108411 4108443 4108485 4108513 4108577 4108743 4108757 4108816 4109827
Thank you for the feedback. There does seem to be a consensus in favour of using page breaks,so I will endeavour to use it to truncate my longer posts in the future. This confirms what I suspected - most fimfiction readers don't use the site in quite the same way as I do. Our brains all work in slightly different ways: I am happy to skim a large block of text, while (it seems) most people prefer to focus on short previews.
There is a large element personal style here. 4108485's posts are all neatly laid out like a deck of cards, while mine are like science posters, trying to pack too much information onto a single sheet, with lots of images and citations.
Once daily, I go to feed, keep hitting SpaceBar until I have a day of feed, and then let my computer text-to-speech the feed. Now you know how I read the feed, I shall explain how I feel:
If none would use PageBreak, I would never have to click on ReadMore, but it could take hours to read the feed. If all would use PageBreak, the computer would finish quickly, but I would have to open lots of tabs.
In conclusion, use PageBreaks as appropriate, without abuse in either direction.
I'm like you and find it annoying. I find the View Full button does the job Page Break does well enough on its own. Other people have convincing arguments though for its use, so while I personally do not like it, I won't begrudge any author for using it.
4108443
4108513
This, yes. As someone who semi-regularly skims pages of blog posts to find review posts, I am a big supporter of the page break.
The page_break is essential if anyone wants to go thru your old blog posts looking for a particular post. Want to find something someone posted 2 years ago about EqG? They didn't use the page_break but did write 4,000-word posts with lots of pictures and YouTube videos? Good luck.