Venues now have a Talk

Venues have long had a "comments" section, which was better than nothing but not good. It was separate from the talk system—and indeed from all other systems—making it hard to maintain, a site for spam, and generally a pain.

I've now moved to a Talk-based system that will be easier to maintain and, I think, will draw more use. Venue pages show the comments—the last three comments—and link to the full discussion, which is in Talk.

Some details:

*All the old comments (3,984, across 3,249 venues) were moved, unless they had flags or were from bad users.
*The venue page shows the comments without any adornments, except for tiny images. But Talk is Talk, and works like Talk.
*Most venue comments are short but, if long, the venue page shows only the first few lines of the comment.
*Venue discussion goes into Venue Discussion group ( https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/25243/Venue-Discussion ).
*Venue discussion has its own TOS.

"This is a place to leave helpful comments, share memories, share pictures and more. Criticism is allowed, but group administrators will remove criticism that seems excessive, personal or mean-spirited."

Looking through the comments, I found a hard minority that were personal gripes from drive-by-users. Something about the store irked them, and—I'm guessing—they went everywhere they could online to post about it. Members can criticize a bookstore, but LibraryThing isn't the Better Business Bureau. We're not Yelp. If you want to take a store down with negative reviews, go elsewhere.
*Even if this doesn't get a lot of use, it's helpful for us to consolidate the systems. And it's a good test of using Talk in ways that tie into an "entity" other than a group alone.

Example Links:

*Powell's City of Books (Portland) https://www.librarything.com/venue/3811/Powells-City-of-Books-Portland
*Venue Discussion group https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/25243/Venue-Discussion

Seems smart. I never used the venue comments; I'm not sure I ever even noticed them. Even though I posted venue pics and did other work on venue data.

The "Venue Discussion" group doesn't have a search box on the main group page, as other groups do. I think that would be helpful.

>3 lilithcat:

Fixed. Thanks!

oh nice, they show up in "your posts" and "started by you"

Sweet! Thank you Tim. Sadly, a couple of my favorites have closed.

Would it be useful to have a link to Venue Discussion group: https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/25243/Venue-Discussion
on the Local home page: https://www.librarything.com/local
like the link to Zeitgeist, in the left hand side.

Or is it not really meant to be navigated to, in that way. I'm just thinking aloud, really.

Mockup image:

>5 norabelle414:

Right. I would like to have them show up in Your Groups if you've favorited the venue in question. What do you think?

>7 Nevov:

I like how you think.

What do you think of >8 timspalding:?

Did the defunct stores get listed as well as the still open ones? It's a long list and I didn't feel like scrolling.
Also, when this section was created, did the last message time stamp get included with the new Talk segment?

Yes, comments were possible on defunct venues before and is now. Some of my favorite bookstores are defunct—in Harvard Square alone that's Schoenhof's, WordsWorth, Globe Corner, Arrow, Paperback Booksmith. I'd love to talk to others with fond memories of those places.

Yes, all the times transferred over.

>8 timspalding:
>9 timspalding:

I for one would welcome my favourited venues showing up in my Groups. I'd especially like to be alerted to a new post about a defunct place.

>8 timspalding:

Oh, yes, please!

Sounds like a logical idea, and popular.

I've added:

1. A "Your venues" section on the left Talk nav
2. Your Groups and Posts now includes your groups, your posts, your starred (as before) and your venues. If you really don't want your venues in there, go ahead and ignore the group.
3. A little section on the right of the talk page about the venue. It replaces the "About" section, because a venue Talk page cannot be about a book. Someone might want to use it to talk about a reading, or something, but this would be a misuse as the page will long outlast the reading.

Your Groups and Posts now has an info button after it. I'm waiting on info from Chris about how to get the explanation it into the help slider.

>15 timspalding: I'm glad it's possible to ignore the group for those of us who don't want discussions of venues clogging up out talk feed. I don't think it'll be a big issue for me personally, but it's good to know I can remove it if it does show up.

I've recently wondered about the chaos that could ensue on Talk discussions linked to individual tag combination proposals :-)

Is it permissible here to plug a group that I admin? Bookstore Tourism is about travelling to visit bookshops, and bookshops that are worth travelling to visit. Not much happening in it these days, unfortunately. My favourite bookshop is probably in there somewhere, but there's quite a few to choose from.

@timspalding, if it's not OK, delete this post by all means.

>15 timspalding: Just for the record:
I confused myself a bit by clicking on a local bookstore and fixing some outdated information.

The location is shown in a google map window and in my head this was part of the LT information. So when it said "no reviews", I clicked to add a review and was confused when asked to login to my Google account.

Probably just me getting confused :-)

>1 timspalding: Just wondering, what happens when the venue is renamed? Does the thread title stay in sync/linked?

It would be useful to include the store's location (or at least the country) in the thread title. Just the name isn't all that informative if you've never heard of the place before.

>19 bnielsen:

The location is shown in a google map window and in my head this was part of the LT information. So when it said "no reviews", I clicked to add a review and was confused when asked to login to my Google account.

I'm thinking you had wandered out to Google?

>21 konallis: It would be useful to include the store's location (or at least the country) in the thread title. Just the name isn't all that informative if you've never heard of the place before.

Yes, I agree. I'll get on that.

>20 ianreads: Just wondering, what happens when the venue is renamed? Does the thread title stay in sync/linked?

At present, yes and no. (The topic page has them in synch, but not the list in Talk.) But I'll make sure it always happens.

It would be useful to include the store's location (or at least the country) in the thread title.

Yes, indeed! I just noticed two threads that I thought were about the same bookstore. But it's two different stores, in two different countries, with the same name.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/381624
https://www.librarything.com/topic/382305

>24 lilithcat: To make it worse - the Swedish one has additional locations in Stockholm and Gothenburg (the Uppsala one is the original).

Really great bookshop, by the way.

>25 PawsforThought:

I think we'll run into this a lot with chains, such as Barnes & Noble, that often have multiple stores in the same city.

Which reminds me, I need to add a B&N location!

It's a very generic name. And yes, a great bookshop. Won the Bookstore of the Year award at The London Book Fair International Excellence Awards ceremony in 2018.

>27 anglemark: I didn't know that but am not the least bit surprised. The amount of money I've spent there (and at the Sci-Fi bookshop) is not something I'd like to thikn too long and hard about. My only complaint is that there are hardly any hardcovers (but that's not really their fault, it's the publishers').

I'm afraid I can approximate how much we've spent there. I started recording where we buy books when the UEB was 175 months old, and since then, another 188 months have passed. Those last months we've bought around 480 books there. Since the pace has been relatively stable, but we buy a little less these days, we've probably bought around a 1,000 books there. Let's assume the average price has been 150 SEK, that 150,000 kr. Actually, not too horrible over 30 years. It might be a little more, most books (yes, we buy hardbacks) are more expensive these days. But let's say less than a quarter of a million.

Still the place that's got most of our book money. In comparison, we've only bought around 200 books from the SF Bookshop during the same period.

>22 timspalding: Exactly.

>29 anglemark: No, that’s not too bad for such a long time period.
I’ve spent more at SF, but that’s because I found it earlier and the Stockholm location is better than it is for EB.
I don’t think I’ve ever managed to leave either shop without spending a minimum of 1200kr (regardless of location, and I’ve been to all of them except the new SF place in Linköping, and I’m going there in a few weeks).

ETA: And I won’t get started on the French Bookshop in Lund.

Okay, topics now have the place (city and state for the US and Canada, city and country for elsewhere), in the subject. This true both on the topic page and on the list of topics. The latter is cached, but will update every 4 hours, if something changes.

I have no idea where to put my question since the LT group for Local has gone dormant: https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/4015/Librarything-Local

This venue: https://www.librarything.com/venue/120071/Murder-by-the-Book is a duplicate of this venue https://www.librarything.com/venue/492/Murder-By-The-Book

I was going to merge them; but I can't remember which order to merge -- if it even matters. I want the 492 to survive the merge.

Also, what happens to talk posts for merged venues?

Is there someone going through and checking all the venues just so all these places get a comment?

>33 lesmel: Doesn't posting to a dormant group resurrect it?

If you are tinkering with venues, I think it would be great adding a two-way link between Awards and venues. So it is possible to add the place where an Award is given, and link an Award giving organisation to a venue.

>34 gilroy:

This member: https://www.librarything.com/profile/qaptainqwerty seems to be going through and noting when a venue has closed.

>35 jjwilson61: Maybe? I stopped trying to figure out what is dead or not dead on talk.