Enriching Notebook.ai discussions

Lots of new features for the Notebook.ai forums

A few of the many, many discussion boards available on Notebook.ai

Hello, worldbuilders! It’s been a while. I’ve been hard at work on a big redesign for Notebook.ai, building an AI to help fill your world with interesting creatures, and creating a tool to help you prepare to publish your stories, but I’ve got a lot of useful new features for the Notebook.ai forums to tell you about.

All of these features are available for all users right now on Notebook.ai — the release just went out! There’s a lot to talk about, so here’s what’s new:

You can now save discussions as annotated documents

Just finished an awesome RP or collaborative story on the forums? You can now export the entire thread as a document to keep forever. Simply click “Export to document” in the new thread action menu at the top of any discussion.

The original author is listed next to each paragraph when saving discussions to a document

Every post from every page in the thread will be automatically collected and saved in a private document in your account. The original author of every post will be preserved in the exported document, too. Simply hover over any paragraph in the document to see who originally wrote it.

You can now view discussions in plaintext or chat formats

There are two new formats to view discussions in if you so choose. To access either, simply click “View as plaintext” or “View as chat log” in the new thread action menu at the top of any discussion. Either of these views are a great way to print out an entire discussion that would otherwise span many pages.

• Plaintext: In this view, the content of each post is set in its own paragraph, forming a prose-like structure that lets you read through the entire discussion as if it were a story in an ebook.

An example of a discussion viewed in plaintext

• Chat log: In this view, each post is set in its own paragraph but prefixed with the username of who wrote it. This might be preferred in one-on-one roleplays where, for example, dialogue tags might be otherwise inferred from who wrote what.

An example of a discussion viewed as a chat log

Linking notebook pages become rich previews

Any time you link a notebook page in a discussion, it’ll now automatically turn into a rich preview card that includes any images you’ve uploaded to your character, location, creature, etc.

An example of posting a link to a Notebook.ai character page

Of course, you don’t always want a giant card if you’re simply linking a page in the middle of a sentence or paragraph. These cards will only appear when the link to a page is on its own line; if a link occurs in the middle of a sentence, it’ll instead convert to an underlined text link — characters get a red underline, locations get green, languages get blue, and so on for each of the page types available on Notebook.ai.

With this update, you’ll also start seeing these rich preview cards for links to some other sites, too. This includes Wikipedia, Google Docs, Google Drive, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Typeform, and more.

Share your public pages straight from the forums

You may notice icons appearing next to some people’s usernames. You can choose your own icon by setting your “Favorite page type” in your account settings. This icon is also clickable — taking anyone who clicks on it directly to your public pages of that type!

As a reminder, all content on Notebook.ai is private by default. However, if you wish to share your created characters or locations or items or more, you can make those pages public (or set them back to private) at any time. If you set your favorite page type to characters, for example, anyone that clicks the character icon that’ll appear next to your name on the forums will now see a list of all of your public characters.

Lastly, the boring stuff

This release also includes a TON of performance improvements and bug fixes meant to make the site faster, more stable, and ready to use any time inspiration strikes. The design of the forums has also been polished up and improved based on user feedback, and many of the performance improvements stretch out to other parts of the site as well.

Thanks, everyone!

I’m extremely happy to be in a spot where I can continue to keep making Notebook.ai better and better, and we’re still just getting started on this crazy worldbuilding tool. There are a lot of exciting new things on the horizon and I can’t wait to share them with you! As always, if you have any feedback on how to improve Notebook.ai, I’d love to hear it!

Happy worldbuilding!
Andrew