Nora Roberts Groupies discussion

Goodreads has a planned maintenance outage for tonight at 9:00 pm PST (midnight EST). Should only last about 15 minutes.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Here's what Goodreads staff communicated a few minutes ago in the Goodreads Feedback group:

"Today we’re rolling out some much-needed visual design cleanup on the Goodreads desktop site. Among the changes you will see are a new single font family to replace the many different fonts previously used on the site; tweaks to the color of links, star ratings, headers, and buttons; and the removal of some extraneous design elements, like boxes around headers and content.

While not a full redesign, these changes are intended to clean up and standardize the styling on the site, making pages look more consistent and ensuring that new pages and features also look consistent going forward. We have heard from many users who have pointed out (rightly) that newer pages and features on Goodreads don’t look the same as older ones, and that there are too many different fonts on the site. This is an effort to directly address those concerns.

Goodreads members have also noted that some features (e.g., the Want To Read button) looked too bright or out of place with the rest of the colors on the site, which are more muted. The changes we are making to button, star, and link colors are based on a more cohesive color palette, which ensures that they are complementary to each other and to Goodreads’ overall look and feel.

Our goal with all of these changes – in addition to making Goodreads look more consistent, modern, and clean – is to improve usability. Our font and color choices follow established design best practices for contrast, readability, and scannability, to ensure a better experience for all of our users.

We’ve tested the changes thoroughly, but we would love your help in reporting any bugs, inconsistencies, or broken layout issues you see, so we can get them fixed as quickly as possible. We’d also love to hear about any places where you still experience difficulty with contrast or readability on the site so we can make plans to improve that in the future. We will be actively monitoring this space and responding to your bug reports. "

Here's the link to the post:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Thanks for sharing Jonetta!

You're welcome!

Important message from Goodreads

Private messaging (between users) will be down for approximately 2 hours tonight starting at 8:00 p.m. Pacific time. It should last no longer than 2 hours (though we're hoping it will actually be less time than that), so please don't panic if you can't send/receive messages during this time. We'll do our best to make sure this is as short as possible.

Today is Nora's birthday! If you're interested in giving her well wishes, you may do so on her Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/noraroberts

Goodreads is launching a new search feature. You can now search for giveaways by genre. Go here for details.

I like that they finally streamlined the genre tags in the giveaways, which people have been suggesting for years. Now if they'd start notifying me of giveaways by an author I read instead of telling me about giveaways for books I already have... :-\

Hi - I didn't know who else to tell about this - I received an email notification about : BrianLGomez posted a new comment on Nora Roberts Groupies topic: "Loan Offer @2% rate !!!" on Goodreads.

I think someone should remove it and I wasn't sure who that would be. thanks

I already did and removed him from the group.

Thank you Jonetta!

Yea, Jonetta - thank you!

Thanks, you Do a great job

Goodreads has made changes to the navigation dropdown menu. Use the link below to see the details.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Jonetta wrote: "Goodreads has made changes to the navigation dropdown menu. Use the link below to see the details.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/......"

Thanks Jonetta!

See the message below from Goodreads:

“We wanted to give you a heads up: we are planning a little bit of downtime tonight for some crucial back-end maintenance. We are hoping it will last a short amount of time — less than an hour — and it will take place at 9 p.m. Pacific time (or, as we all know it, Goodreads Standard Time).

Apologies for any inconvenience this causes! We are working hard to ensure that this outage stays short and that you're able to get back to using the site as soon as possible. Please let us know if you run into any issues as a result of this downtime.”

Thanks for the great job you're doing.

You’re welcome!

Another planned outage tonight. See below:

“Hi everyone! Just a quick heads up that we are planning a little bit of downtime tonight for some important back-end maintenance. It will start at 8 p.m. Pacific time aka Goodreads Standard Time, and we hope it will be short (less than an hour).

Our apologies for any inconvenience! We'll do our best to make it quick so that you can get back onto the site as soon as possible. As always, let us know if you run into any issues. ”

This message from Goodreads staff:

Similar to what we did here, we have temporarily disabled the ability to add new URLs in member profiles as a proactive measure against a tactic being used by a group of spammers. We aren't sure how long this will be disabled, but we wanted you all to be aware in case you attempt to edit your profile in the coming days. We'll post here (Goodreads Feedback Group) when this has been re-enabled.

If you haven’t noticed, there’s a GR bug that adds a second read when you use the progress update from the home page to change your book status from “currently reading” to “read.” You’ll need to fill in your read date, too as it’s not automatically doing so. Then you’ll need to delete the second line of information below the one you just completed. Even though the data fields are empty, it’s still showing it as two reads.

This has been going on for a few days so you should go to your My Books and review the books you’ve recently completed.

It's not only doing odd things changing for reading to read, it's also doing some strange things with dates going from read to reread as well. It seems to be an issue when you put a read date in when you hadn't idenitified an actual date before. I've actually had to delete a couple of books from my list and put them back on the list to fix the issue. For some reason sometimes it wouldn't let me delete the second line.

I have several books I've read, and reviewed, that show up as "want to read". No matter what I do I can't get this to change.

Anita wrote: "I have several books I've read, and reviewed, that show up as "want to read". No matter what I do I can't get this to change."

You should post the problem here as I’m not sure it’s related.

Thanks, Jonetta. It really is just an annoyance that I've come to live with, but I'm report it.

I keep getting kicked off and have relogon to Goodreads and my reviews are not being put in too.

Jonetta wrote: "This message from Goodreads staff:

Similar to what we did here, we have temporarily disabled the ability to add new URLs in member profiles as a proactive measure against a tactic being used by a ..."

This is now enabled again!

Use the link below to see the GR announcement about changes to the profile page.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Goodreads has implemented changes to the series list pages. Use the link below for more info and any feedback.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Goodreads has rolled out an all new android app. Follow this link for more details.

Goodreads New Android App

Info on “Connections in Death”

I hope this is ok to post. I’m not sure if news about Nora/JDRobb books from the publishing company’s FB page get shared here or seen by everyone.
On St. Martin’s Press (MacMillan.com) FB page:

Connections in Death Sweepstakes

This is the promo:

“ Enter now for a chance to win a signed advance reader's copy of J. D. Robb's latest gritty and gripping novel! “

Just a heads up :)

Erin, info regarding the In Death series is shared in our sister group, J. D. Robb:

https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

You may always post info like this in the Nora News section.

The following link is the American Library Association's petition regarding the new Macmillan Publishing e-book policy. I strongly urge you to read and sign it. This is important to Nora readers because Nora is now published by St. Martin's Press which is a subsidiary of Macmillan.

https://ebooksforall.org/

FYI, we are unable to edit messages on the site. I contacted Goodreads support and they’re aware of the issue and are working on it.

This affects things like your challenges that you may try to update. Currently, when you edit and save, you’ll receive a message that there was a problem saving your edit.

Looks like the notification system is temporarily disabled. Here’s the message (thanks, Anita):

Email, in-app, and phone push notifications temporarily disabled
Hi everyone,

Goodreads has temporarily turned off email notifications, in-app notifications, and push notifications to your phone. These notifications include when you receive a new message from a Goodreads member, new friend additions, new followers, new group additions, and any other event, comment, or activity notifications you've signed up to receive in your Account Settings. We're working on bringing these back soon.

We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and will provide updates right here on Goodreads Help on when we’ll reinstate these notifications, so please check back for more information.

Privacy Settings
We just learned that Goodreads changed everyone’s privacy setting so that you’ll only receive private messages from friends. To change that back to where you can allow anyone to send you a private message, you will need to edit your profile. The option is in the “Settings” section.

(FYI, if you don't change the settings, you will not receive broadcast messages or the newsletter from us unless we are friends.)

I just sent a broadcast message to all members for the start of the Sweepstakes for The Becoming. Here it is again in case your privacy settings have not changed:

St. Martin's Press is sponsoring a sweepstakes for 30 advance reader's copies (ARCs) for Nora Robert's upcoming book, The Becoming. The Sweepstakes is exclusive to Nora Roberts Groupies members. The book is scheduled for release on November 23.

The sweepstakes begins today, October 4, and continues through October 8, US residents only (apologies to our international members).

Here's the link and good luck!

https://read.macmillan.com/promo/theb...

Goodreads is removing multiple features. Here’s a summary of the announcement and a link to the details.

“ As part of our dedication to improving Goodreads, we are phasing out a number of features in order to focus on the ones our members use most, and continue to improve the overall Goodreads experience. As of July 5, 2022, Goodreads will no longer support the ability to create new content for the book reviews recommendations/recommenders section, favorite authors list, creative writing, the condition and details about owned books, friend stories, trivia, quizzes, and adding photos to books. These features will no longer be available on the site on Sept. 1, 2022.”

https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/...

That time of the year…the opening round of the Goodreads Choice Awards has begun.

Here’s a link to a Goodreads announcement about notifications. It really isn’t very clear.

https://help.goodreads.com/s/announce...