Feature Suggestion: Templates

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#1

Something I think might be nice is a button for creators that allows us to make a new post draft from a template.

There are a number of ways to do this, but an easy way might be to let us click a button on any post, that lets us make a “New post from this post” - which would create a new post with duplicate information/settings as the post we clicked the button on.

Alternatively (and likely with more effort), let us mark posts with “Make this post a template” and let us select from templates while posting, and edit those templates.

I just notice that a large number of my posts are basically routine posts that give rewards as part as incremental packages that I never change the text on. So like “Aprils sketch rewards” and “May sketch rewards.” Or there are a number of links I always include in every single post I make, and a template or something like that might cut down the number of steps I take every time I make a new post.

Usually before I make any post I have to go find an old post from the same “category” and basically copy paste it into the new post, then change the text. Something to just allow me to start a post with some information filled in already might be a nice quality of life change.

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#2

Awesome feedback, great insight into your workflow. Seems like the ability to start a new post from a copy of an existing published or draft post would get you pretty much to where you’d like to be. You could use unpublished draft posts as templates, or just copy from the latest published post that has the format you want (to ensure you’re using the latest format/metadata).

To other creators that check out this post, @amyyy and I would love to hear more about your workflows for creating posts and if you, like @Watsup, often are creating similar routine posts.

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#3

I would love to straight up be able to create and save a template that can be selected from the new post page.

I have a monthly recap post (and other stuff that would benefit from a template, like my monthly polls, off-platform reward reminders like discord and other things i’d like to start) that i basically have to go to the last monthly recap, copy the post, then copy it in a new post but it’s honestly a pain to go find one with ease (I still have to go to posts, find a tag, find the post etc., and the pages seem to load pretty slow a lot of the time so it’s quite frustrating when it could just be a saved template to select from the new post page.

I wouldn’t want to copy from latest published posts because the amount of posts i post in a month ranges from 20-70 depending on the month. I’d still never be able to find what i’m looking for that way. I would need to have the option to create a new post, make the template and instead of posting or scheduling it, the option to save it as a Template (which would be separate from drafts.)

@Ben @amyyy

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#4

Latest post might not work since I often post alternating between several types of posts, but some way to select a previous post and just completely copy all fields for a new post would still save me a lot of time.

Templates would be the ideal way to go about this, but I recognize some solutions are easier to implement than others and something like “copy this post” might be something that could be done quickly and provide nearly as much time saved.

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#5

Hi Ben,

I do regularly create similar posts. Being a comic artist, I usually have to double back and check the front page for the last page I posted. “What page is this, it’s 23 right? What format was I using? Page 23? P.23? P - 23? What did I say the last time? Do I want to copy and paste the comic synopsis?” Whether a post is public is something I feel like I always have to triple check too.

And that’s if the last comic page is even easy to find. I work on 2-3 projects at a time, plus polls and the occasional text post, so without any way to organize comic pages into issues and galleries I sometimes have to scroll through two pages of my feed. And I just think to myself, “If it’s this hard for me, how hard is it for Patrons? If someone wanted to read the comic, how would they even find page one?” That’s a huge issue for me and it’s had me petitioning Patreon for change for some time now. A stop gap that’s at least related to this thread would be a template that autofills tags.

Also I know it’s not great for engagement to leave a post description blank, but I find myself doing it often anyway because when I’m done with pages I can be so unorganized. I’ll have just stopped streaming so OBS is running, my paint program will be in the background, I’m usually pretty tired because these things get posted after a 6-10 hour stream. It’s not unusual for it to be 2-4 AM.

Edit: I know this might seem silly, but I think some huge insight into how I work is just to create a dummy/test Patreon account and just start uploading comic pages. Spiderman, Thor, whatever you can grab for testing. Just start uploading multiple comics from different issues one at a time, like I would do. You notice a lot. How often you need previous information. How they end up in backwards order. How often you’re uploading assuming you can do a page every other day and how quickly that first page gets buried. The need to link these together in some way becomes apparent very quickly.

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#6

I definitely have posts for recurring rewards with the same or similar language each time. Right now, I just use the Text Expander app on my Mac (which allows me to trigger fill-in-the-blank forms, where I can just quickly type in the current page and panel numbers.) I’m not sure if being able to save and retrieve a draft template would save me time personally, but I could see how it might for folks who are having to toggle back and forth between previously published posts.

@Corablue I hear you about the pain of trying to post webcomics on Patreon. I ultimately decided that the best experience for my patrons would be on my own, dedicated webcomic site. I’ve used Patreon Plugin Pro for Wordpress to make that happen. If you’re curious, you can check out the results here:

#7

I’d just be really grateful to be able to create a post properly from the app.