Sounds like a plan to me. And yeah, start date for upcoming books in status sounds like a good place.
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@seanblue I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve created a sister thread to this one, meant to help people find the other types of discussion clubs that aren’t about reading. 
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That’s fine of course, though it probably shouldn’t be in the #japanese-language:book-clubs section. Maybe just #japanese-language?
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How else to make people notice that there are other types of “book clubs”? that’s the conundrum. 
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It’s difficult for sure. It looks like most of the current discussion topics are in #campfire which makes it even weirder.
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yeah, that’s where the anime threads ended up, mostly I think. And then there’s some in the listening session. I’ll sleep on it I think. And maybe change it tomorrow.
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Well, the moving of the sister-thread is done! 
I just had to do my night of overthinking things! XD
@seanblue would you mind posting a link to the Masterlist of Other Media Discussion Threads in your OP post as I did you - just to help people navigate these forums even better?
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So anyone have any clue where I should put the slow reread of コンビニ人間? It is kinda a repeat club of IBC, but with a slower schedule so also not.
Aka should I add it to misc scheduled clubs (is it then considered intermediate or beginner? Since it is supposed to close the distance between beginner club and intermediate club, it is either upper beginner or lower intermediate (I personally think more lower intermediate but…)) or do I put it as a “slow reread” in the IBC category?
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Remember how we discussed using tables instead for the main clubs? We never got further than discussing it and agreeing it would probably be better.
Well, I decided to spend some time to make a table for a couple of the categories as mock-ups so we could see them in action.
Visual Novel Club and Advanced Book Club now have an extra details/dropdown called “table mock-up” where I tried out the format we had mostly agreed on. For offshoots with a different link I linked that in the status field while keeping the original volume read with the club for the title link. For Visual Novel Club I kept the Natively field empty because they haven’t added visual novels yet. For VNs this could be changed to VNDB that is a database of VNs, or we could wait until VNs are added to Natively (no idea if this is in the plan), or that column could just be deleted.
What do you guys think? (Hopefully I made no errors, but if so, it is easy to fix.)
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I dig it and added the Natively link for Nausicaa. I forget how to do it, but I know table headers can be made to be two lines. I think it’d make more sense and be a bit easier to read as
Natively
Level
and then have the level without L beforehand.
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At the end of the Advanced book club mock up table, I also added a short version including type (so we can compare on how they work on mobile!). Also thought that maybe the first category should maybe be called Title rather than Book.
@DIO-Berry No idea how to do that either (and didn’t try right now). I think the L/Level info need to be there somewhere, and it would be cleaner to have it in the category title for sure. So if two row headers were possible, that would be best, because it really sucks when a category title is so much larger than the data in the category (especially in tables like these that we want to work well on mobile too).
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I just recall looking it up and having done it before, but sadly I never think to copy the instructions down and put them in a nifty file for future reference. If I figure out where/how I did it before, I will make sure to share.
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| Something Like This |
Perhaps? |
|---|---|
| Some Sample | Data |
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I’d just remove the column. VNDB doesn’t help much since it won’t include difficulty level, which is the main point of including the Natively link.
Otherwise the tables look good to me. There’s one thing to decide though, which is whether we should include the English titles in parentheses like before. Currently this is done a lot in ABBC, BBC, and IBC bullet lists, but in the table format it might be a bit much. We could always put them underneath the Japanese title (using a <br/> tag) to reduce the horizontal space.
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Two of the advanced book club’s books had the English title included, but I deleted them because it made the title column very wide.
I think there is certainly a case to be made to include English titles for ABBC and BBC. By IBC, I personally realized that for me, it was time to actually learn the Japanese titles and such. But I wouldn’t be against including them there too.
What did you think of the type column version of the table? When I checked on my cell phone, there were some titles that split across two lines because of it. Personally though, I think it might be worthwhile, because if someone is looking for an easy book to read, they could easily see every book read by all the book clubs. Conversely a manga fan could more easily see what higher level picks have been manga.
Obviously, if we include English titles and also having the type column, it might make the table rather hard to read on mobile. Maybe I or someone else has to make a mock up of that too, to see what we like best. After all, it would be a pain if we did all tables X way and then decided that we wanted to add/delete a column soon afterwards.
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By “type” column you mean manga, novel, etc.? I can see the value in having it for ABBC and BBC, but I wouldn’t say it’s necessary.
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Yes!! That’s it I think
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So we’re happy with this format?
| Title | Status | Natively Level |
|---|---|---|
| 本好きの下剋上 | Offshoot ongoing | 32 |
| 雪国 | Completed | 47 |
| 容疑者Xの献身 | Completed | 33 |
| すべてがFになる | Offshoot ongoing | 32 |
| 人間失格 | Completed | 40 |
And for ABBC and BBC (and IBC?) we’ll do this:
What do we do about rereads? Use < br /> and have a both completed status and a Reread ongoing/completed? This is what that would look like:
| Title | Status | Natively Level |
|---|---|---|
| 本好きの下剋上 ENGLISH TITLE |
Offshoot ongoing | 32 |
| 雪国 Snow Country |
Completed (fake) Reread completed |
47 |
On that note: I’m still curious what other people’s opinion of where the slow read of コンビニ人間 should fall. I’m honestly not sure if it count as a reread for IBC. I’d be fine with adding it to the misc scheduled section, but at the same time, it would lose the link to IBC and how it is supposed to help bridge the gap.
Also about the offshoot for 本好き, I didn't put a link on the offshoot part because when I looked at the club, it seemed to use the original ABC home thread as the home thread for the whole series. The link added for the offshoot is instead to the volume 4+ discussion thread (which means volume 2 and 3 is kinda skipped). Every other offshoot I linked to had a different home thread for the offshoot part.
I feel like we need to decide what to do here so we do the same thing across all clubs; I’m pretty sure some of the other clubs have used the original home thread as the series home thread. If an offshoot club doesn’t use a different home thread but continues to use the one for the first volume read with the main club, do we link the offshoot part in the status category, and if so to what thread? (Home thread, first discussion thread for the offshoot, volume (home) thread if such exists)
To me, it is weird to link to a discussion thread since they typically have less info. And while I think it is redundant to link to the home thread again, it would make all offshoots look the same (and make it easier to pick what to link, if it is always the home thread for the series whether it is separate from the first volume or not).
We should also consider adding a small explanation what Natively is, so people understand what that level thing is. (I wouldn’t be a good pick for that because I don’t use Natively so someone else can probably explain that better and more concisely. I’m also not known for being concise. xD)
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I like 
Actually what I like most is that the books that have an offshoot book club are now back in the ordered list of read books - I always found it weird to pull them out to the separate offshoot list because it destroys the ordering. 
What about this?
| Title | Status | Natively Level |
|---|---|---|
| 本好きの下剋上 ENGLISH TITLE |
Offshoot ongoing | 32 |
| 雪国 (fake) Reread Snow Country |
Completed Completed |
47 |
My reasoning being that an offshoot book club follows “after” the original book club, thus it’s like a subordinate thing, but a reread is “at the same level” as the original book club, therefore it should be next to that and not subordinate?
But in the end it really doesn’t matter as much, I guess.
I see your point. What if we’d put it in both categories? The misc section with “Beginner/(Intermediate)” label, and also the IBC section as it technically is a reread?
Fully agree. I like consistency, so I’m all for re-linking the initial thread if that’s where the offshoot book club is being hosted.
Thanks for all your work and the beautiful suggestions!
Hehe 
I like your wordiness though! But for explaining Natively, I don’t feel qualified either. I’m sure somebody else would be willing to take over.
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I get your reasoning. On first impression, I think it muddles the title category. And it shifts the English title down below rereads which looks a bit weird to me. But let’s test this properly.
So lets check if we added コンビニ人間 with both the reread and the primer/slow club with both methods to see which looks cleaner. (I used fake links for コンビニ人間, because this is just a test.)
In status category:
| Title | Status | Natively Level |
|---|---|---|
| 本好きの下剋上 ENGLISH TITLE |
Offshoot ongoing | 32 |
| コンビニ人間 Convenience Store Woman |
Completed Reread completed Slow reread ongoing |
XX |
| 雪国 Snow Country |
Completed | 47 |
In title category:
| Title | Status | Natively Level |
|---|---|---|
| 本好きの下剋上 ENGLISH TITLE |
Offshoot ongoing | 32 |
| コンビニ人間 Reread Slow reread Convenience Store Woman |
Completed Completed Ongoing |
XX |
| 雪国 Snow Country |
Completed | 47 |
Tried moving the English title to just below the original title while keeping rereads in title category:
| Title | Status | Natively Level |
|---|---|---|
| 本好きの下剋上 ENGLISH TITLE |
Offshoot ongoing | 32 |
| コンビニ人間 Convenience Store Woman Reread Slow reread |
Completed Completed Ongoing |
XX |
| 雪国 Snow Country |
Completed | 47 |
I think I prefer the look of the status category/column one (I really should call them columns, shouldn’t I?), it provides the cleanest look in my opinion. If I was scanning the table for a specific item, I’d probably be scanning for a title or natively level, and then it is better the less cluttered the title column is. Although I guess the completed tag for the original club kinda floats a bit by itself at the top…
The other problem with putting the rereads in the title column is the need for a non-breaking space with the < br /> tags in the status column to get everything to line up properly. This should probably be the biggest con, but esthetics and ease of use is more important to me (than ease of entry since the entry won’t be common).
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