Personalizing Checkmarks?

Would it be at all possible to code personal preference into the checkmark functionality?

Currently, the different colors of checkmarks are locked into certain pre-set Collection identifiers:

http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Checkmarks

I'd love to have the ability to select what color checkmark is assigned to books in my personal Collections. Perhaps it could be controlled by a drop-down option within the Collection Manager?

As checkmarks in an account are visible only the account owner, I don't think this sort of personalizing would be likely to become confusing or overly complicated -- except maybe to the code programmers!

I agree, I mainly use custom Collections and it would be nice to pair that with custom Checkmarks.

That was considered when the feature was being discussed but rejected as being too complicated, for both the programmers and potential users.

How interesting. I did a cursory search to see if this suggestion had come up before, but it seems I wasn't thorough enough. Thanks!

ETA: Typo.

It was probably buried in a huge thread and it may have been in the BETA group.

ETA: The story is that originally there were only green checkmarks indicating if the book was in your catalog at all. We managed to persuade Tim that it wasn't very useful if you couldn't distinguish between the book being in your Wishlist or Your Library collections. Then others brought up that Read But Unowned would also be useful.

At this point we discussed letting the user choose which color went with which collection, but Tim was against having too many colors and the UI would have been too complicated. That Tim was even considering it seemed a godsend so we were careful not to ask for too much. And there's also the complication that each collection would get its own checkmark color but you'd have to specify which color takes precedence when a book is in more than one collection.

Thanks for the ETA! That's tremendously helpful.

There are so many other LT ideas in the works that this suggestion seems more a pony of the elderly, cranky, and mud-covered variety rather than of the magical, rainbowy, with sprinkles, and flys variety.

(Still, maybe some day. If the option ever appeared, I'd find it quite helpful myself.)

This is the sort of thing that I won't do by itself, but if we need to revamp the UI for some reason, may get done. The marginal cost of opening up something like this is high, even if the change itself is probably not major.

Huhh. That explains a lot. Thanks, Tim!

If you really want the thread, look for 'paisley checkmarks'. That's the one that stuck with me...

Hmmmph. Did the search and nothing came up. Dangit, someone was asking for paisley checks...

The discussion was here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/81530

And then here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/81814

Rather long threads to read through, the second one delves into personalized checkmarks more than the first I think, the first one was initially just focused on the purple ones, whereas the second one was discussion of the new feature and so it was more detailed.

Bump.

I've asked for this in a different RSI. Would really like it.

Resuscitating this again because it's the latest, most relevant thread I can find:

The coloured ticks (checkmarks) are useful sometimes but also confusing.
a) I can never remember what colour is what and though I saved a guide (once I unearthed it) to my homepage, the colours are now different. A link or drop-down list or pop-up box with a key would be helpful.

b) I appreciate that everyone uses the ticks differently; for example, I take a quick look on my phone in bookshops - with whatever spotty network is available (so stopping to browse through my catalogue isn't a practical option) - to jog my memory as to what books in a series I wanted to buy. So the current order of precedence doesn't suit me in this case because I might have read a book that I subsequently wanted to buy ... but have I already bought it? Would it be possible either for each member to customise the order of precedence according to their preference or for LT to display all the ticks next to each book?

The pony I would like to see with checkmarks is a tick in a different colour where you own an anthology that contains the work.

It does mean making sure the work-to-work relationship is correctly set up, but we should be doing that anyway.

>14 Maddz: Absolutely. I'd love that, too.

How about the updated link to the checkmarks to make it easy to find?
https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Checkmarks

They say 'never ask for what you want; you might just get it.'

Currently on my thread, I am seeing double ticks against the touchstone list of books. The blue and green ticks are showing double but in two different sizes but the grey ticks are just showing as single.

Does that mean they're being worked on?

>14 Maddz: re. ponies
If asking for ponies, I'd love if books marked as private caused the checkmark part of the icon to be a padlock symbol.
Anthologies could work the same way so:

Green with checkmark= Your Library
Green with 'c' or other appropriate symbol= Your Library (contained/anthology item)
Green with padlock= Your Library (private book)

Purple with checkmark= Wishlist
Purple with 'c' or other appropriate symbol= Wishlist (contained/anthology item)
Purple with padlock= Wishlist (private book)

etc.

>13 humouress: re. which colour is which
If you Wishlist all your desires, then it's "Purple to purchase", happy shopping!

Deleted duplicate message

This recommendation goes hand-in-hand with one I suggested several years ago: https://www.librarything.com/topic/297584

I still think that it would be extremely useful to be able to see at a glance what the next book that I need to read in a series is - just like many people used FictFact for. I have found that because this feature is not in LT, I no longer spend as much time on the site because I have developed my own way to track this and thus LT isn't as meaningful for me. If I had one location to catalog my library and track my reading, that would be wonderful.

And before anyone tells me that I can use LT to track my reading - of course I know this, but it is very difficult to see at a glance the difference between whether I just own a book in a series or whether I both own and have read the book. I feel that one should be able to look at the series page and be able to see this quickly.

I guess I use collections for this. I have an "owned but unread" and a "read but unowned" collection as well as "on hiatus" (which is a hopeful term) and "officially unfinished" (where reality has set in).

>21 krazy4katz: Right, but all custom collections all have a grey checkmark, with no way to differentiate between them. So when looking at a list of books on an author page or a series page there's no way to tell which ones are "owned but unread" and which ones are owned and read.

>22 norabelle414: So the biggest problem is the custom collections?

If I look at the author page for the Dalai Lama, for example, I have a blue checkmark, a pink checkmark and 3 green checkmarks. The green ones are in my library (and read). The blue one is in my library, read but unowned. The pink one (in which he only wrote the forward) is tagged wishlist.

I also looked at a series I have (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency). All of the checkmarks are green on both the author and the series page.

The biggest problem I have is remembering what the colors stand for.

Perhaps I still am misunderstanding? Sorry!

Since I have the same problem with books not in a series, I've tried to roll my own method:
Whenever I start to read a book, I put "???" into the review field so books I have in my LT catalogue but haven't read will have an empty review field or one with ??? somewhere in the review. (Anthologies will typically get a ??? for each story.)
I can then quickly search the export file for say comics that I've started reading but not finished yet.
??? is not a good choice for searching in LT, but I didn't know that when I started doing it :-)

If you choose something like UUU I think this would work fine with searches in LT without having to bother with the export file.

>24 bnielsen: Couldn't you just put the books in the default "currently reading" collection when you start reading them and then remove them when you finish (or when you write a review)? Or add a tag called "started" or something similar? Or enter a "date started" but no "date finished"?

If you put something that is not a review in the review field it could get flagged as "not a review", and those flags would not automatically go away if you replaced the non-review with an actual review. I'm sure some people don't mind their reviews being flagged but I wouldn't recommend this method.

Good points! I hadn't considered the danger of flags.

>23 krazy4katz: I have the perfect example of this for me. I also use custom collections and I have collections for Read and To Read, as well as the standard My Library, Read but Unowned, and Wishlist. I use My Library for books that I own, which are either read or unread because they are in my library. Read but Unowned is for books that I have read but do not own because I have either borrowed them or have given them away. I use Wishlist for books that I do not own, but wish to own. I use the Read collection for books that I have read (both owned and unowned, so there is some overlap with Read but Unowned) and To Read for books that I own but have not yet read.

There is an order to the colored checkmarks and if books are in more than one collection, then the checkmarks appear in the following order Wishlist, Read but Unowned, My Library, Custom. My To Read and Read checkmarks would both be gray, as well as other custom collections that I have (which don't affect owned/unowned/read/unread)

I am reading the Mrs Bradley series by Gladys Mitchell. Because the books have been on sale at one point or another on Kindle, I have collected the entire series over the years. I like to read a series in order and I typically only reading one or two of this series a year - there are 67 Mrs Bradley books, so it is going to take me some time.

I now own all 67 Mrs Bradley books, so when I go to the series page, or the author page, all I see are green checkmarks. The green My Library checkmarks supersede the grey To Read or Read checkmarks on the page. As I own all of the books, there are no longer any Wishlist checkmarks or Read but Unowned checkmarks. I have no way to know where I stopped, especially if it has been 6 months or more since I have read one of this series.

Then in LT, in order to see what book I need to read next, I would go into the series page, guess approximately where I think I have left off and then click into several books pages to see whether I have read that particular book. This can get very time-consuming, especially as this is just one of the 100+ series that I am reading - and many of those series also contain 30+ books.

It has been suggested that I use the dates read field for the books that I have read and then I could pull up a list in Your Books of that series and see which ones do not have a read date. There are two reasons that this doesn't work for me - first, I don't have dates in some of the fields because I have no idea when I read them since it was pre-LT for me. I suppose I could just put an arbitrary date in but then the second problem comes into play. I don't think that there is any way in Your Books to sort based on the series order - so I would know what books I have not read, but would not be able to see which book is next.

LT does a wonderful job cataloging collections - it is so easy to see what books I own, want to own, or don't own but have read. It is definitely a site for "libraries" or collectors - I can tell at a glance what books I have. However, I am a "reader", as well as a collector, and this is where I think LT falls short. It is much harder for me to quickly tell what series book is up next.

I know that there were many LTers that used FictFact before it shut down, so I know I'm not the only person with this issue.

>27 rretzler: Ok. I think I understand now. I have been in the habit of only downloading samples to my kindle of books I want to read in a series, but I don’t enter them into LT. That is probably why I haven’t run into this problem and with the new series feature on the kindle it helps a lot. I can see that finding where you left off in the middle of 60 books would be very frustrating!

Nice discussion. Especially about some problems, I seem to have avoided :-)

>24 bnielsen:, >25 norabelle414:

Besides the flagging hazard, I would personally avoid this method because it would misrepresent the date of the eventual review.

>27 rretzler: I have a workaround for the sorting by series order - a bit of work, but spread out over time. I don't use my Comments field for anything, so I put the series and series order number into it. I have a view that shows me the CK Series field for a book and Comments, and I'll write it into Comments. This also allows me to pick which series or sequence I want to use (published vs internal order, sub-series, etc). Since I can sort by the Comments field, this makes it possible to sort my series in catalog view.

It took a lot of work to get my backlog entered - I don't think I've gotten everything, but most of them are right now. I do the entering for new books as soon as I get a batch in; that's a relatively small number at a time, so ongoing it works. I do a lot of minor adjustments to each batch of entered books (DDC, media, authors, publishing info is sometimes wrong, etc), so I just do the series as part of that.

This doesn't work if you do use your Comments field, though. Not sure if there's another field that can hold text and numbers, is sortable, is long enough to be useful, and that you don't use - since Comments works for me, I haven't looked.

>31 jjmcgaffey: There is “Other Call Number” which is free text and if you do not use it for anything else, it works beautifully for this. It can be made visible in a catalog and you can sort by it.

I was thinking about that. But I haven't tested it, so I didn't want to say.

>31 jjmcgaffey: >32 AnnieMod: >33 jjmcgaffey: I use the 'other call number' column in much the same way, to put series (including different series by the same author) into order to keep track of the books I already own. Also still gradually working my way through my library.

>27 rretzler: You could post a quick review or give it a star rating, which would also show up in the catalogue side and quickly let you know that you've read a book.

>31 jjmcgaffey: I do the same with Comments but use the export file and a script. So I can do both:
...
Peddersen og Findus 1-2, 4-8
Penguin Books, Great Ideas 10, 12, 15, 22, 41, 56-57, 60-62, 67, 74-75
...
I.e. list the series to see if I fix should go hunt for any missing books :-)

And

Tintin, bind 1 Den mystiske stjerne
Tintin, bind 2 Kong Ottokars scepter
Tintin, bind 3 De syv krystalkugler
Tintin, bind 4 Soltemplet
Tintin, bind 5 Faraos cigarer

I.e. list a specific series.