The autofill on "Public teaser text"

[reapersun]

I noticed this new feature recently added to posts. I don’t use it, because I don’t want to have to write an extra teaser text for each post, but I didn’t mind it existing, until I noticed what it was doing. As I would click down filling in my post info, it will autofill this text based on the first sentence in my post body.

Maybe this isn’t problematic for everyone, but it’s been nothing but a pain for me. I’m a comic artist and many of my posts are pages of comics, and so the first lines of my post are almost always my “Read from beginning” link, followed by page number links to go forward and backward. Alternatively, they are sketch prompt posts with patron’s usernames in the first few words, and I don’t want to expose them to the general public if they don’t want to be. This is also bad teaser text.

Currently, I have to fill in my post as normal, and then click into that field and manually delete the text, adding extra work onto every post. If I have to edit the post at any point, it autofills again, and I have to delete it again. I know there is a good chance I’m alone on finding this frustrating: I just wish I could just get an opt out on this feature, or at the very least have the autofill on a button or something. So many small updates recently have been adding extra work for me, it’s really bumming me out.

[erin]

Hi @reapersun,

Thank you for the feedback on this new feature! It sounds like it’s creating extra work (which was not the intended consequence), and that sounds really painful. We’re definitely taking all feedback on this change seriously, and will keep monitoring its affects on y’all as we continue to iterate.

I’d love to hear what other small updates have been adding extra work for you. Would you mind giving me some more information on those?

Best,
Erin

[reapersun]

Thank you for considering it

The other updates I mentioned are really small things that have to do with very specific ways I use the site, which is why I didn’t bother sharing my feedback on them. For example, I run a monthly sketch request post where patrons submit and vote for each other’s sketch prompts by liking/hearting them. At the end of the round I would copy the list of prompts (usually somewhere between 60-70 posts) into a spreadsheet and sort by who had the most votes, making an easy reference. This worked fine because the text for the number of vote counts was selectable. In the past few months the text of the vote counts was made inexplicably unselectable, so I can’t just copy paste them over; I have to spend extra minutes going through the list and manually typing each amount of votes/hearts/likes into my list. Again, since this is a really specific practice of mine, I figured it was not worth complaining about.

Some other really minor things were moving “Save as draft” to the bottom of the list when creating a post (I use it more frequently than any other option since I try to save all my posts for the weeks as drafts at the beginning of each week), and the way certain text formats itself when you copy/paste it into the text body (since I’m a comic artist I frequently copy/paste the formatting from one post into a new post so that I don’t have to retype it from scratch, but it’s had a variety of issues over the months, like pasting in with no line breaks, stuff like that.) But yeah, it feels kind of absurd to complain about minor things like this. They just… pile up, I guess.

Thanks for listening~

[toplessnewyork]

You are absolutely not the only one frustrated by this - the worst part is that, as you say, it isn’t sticky, has no memory… so even the slightest edit to one of my posts that I’ve scheduled for later publication, and it resets to the autofill of the first sentence (or two). Naturally, I only realized that it wasn’t sticky after the first time I published three posts using what I thought was custom teaser text but turned out to be completely wasted effort.

I’m glad I’m not the only one.

Jeff
Topless New York

[erin]

Ahh, ok - so having the teaser text re-populate on edit is definitely not intended behavior. My team will be addressing this!

[toplessnewyork]

I also just checked on a browser where I’m not logged in, and the teaser text is so faint as to be nearly illegible (see below). If it’s going to be at all effective as a teaser, shouldn’t non-patrons be able to read it?

Jeff
Topless New York

[ammulder]

What I found obnoxious was this sequence:

1. It filled the box with text
2. It was clear that the text it used wasn’t a great teaser – it wasn’t all wrong, but if I was going to summarize in one sentence it wasn’t worded right. So I clicked in the middle of the text and started typing better wording into the middle of the first sentence
3. After the second letter I typed, it started ignoring my keystrokes because that made the total amount of text longer than the teaser was allowed to be. So I ended up with two and a half words all jammed together and text that made no sense.
4. I had to then go select and delete some other text from the teaser “to make room” before I could go back to editing the part I was trying to improve.

It’s fine if the teaser has a limited length, but stopping me precisely in the middle of the editing process was very jarring, and then I had to go make a different decision and edit some other part before I could go back and finish what I was originally working on.

[toplessnewyork]

…and now it appears not to be working at all. I created a post in a single shot - no saving then editing, no scheduling then editing, just wrote the post and created the “teaser text.” And instead of the actual teaser text I’d written, it just did its old “hey, the first sentence must make a great teaser” thing again, see below.

So I think your teaser text feature might need a lot more work to function properly, not just a bit.

[Lochy]

Any way at some point in the future we could get the ability to put a teaser image in addition to the teaser text? I would LOVE to be able to have a closely cropped image that the public can see along with a little snippet of text to entice potential patrons. I wouldn’t even mind making my own cropped images.

[joumana]

I need to add an additional moan to this feature. You listened to feedback, which is great, but removing the automatic teaser text altogether is not great for everyone; I could live with it if only the teaser was optional, but I can’t publish if it’s left blank, apparently. I don’t have the time or headspace to worry about teaser text every single time. It’s a great feature, but not always needed or wanted. Can you just make it so it’s not a required field? Then it would work for everybody. Thanks!

EDITED: I still had trouble publishing even after adding the text, so maybe it wasn’t related after all! But I’m leaving this here just in case.

[lisavollrath]

Gotta be honest: I am totally ignoring this feature. Since my patron-only posts tend to be visual, teaser text does nothing to help me.

[FutilityCloset]

We would really like an easy way to turn this feature off. It’s ruining the privacy of one of the patron reward levels on my husband’s campaign as the public teaser gives away the information that normally you’d have to be getting that reward level to see.

[Temrin]

I second this, hard!