Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

5 Complaints about Wattpad

This isn't really a chapter on improving yourself or getting better on navigating Wattpad so much as a critique on some of the more obnoxious issues Wattpad offers. Maybe if I bring them up and you star or comment, Wattpad will notice and "finally" get around to doing something about it. So here are the things that bother me the most about Wattpad, and feel free to add your own issues in the comments section.

1) Strange formatting issues -

Wattpad does not offer an abundance of tools in their native editor for inserting chapters and stories. Furthermore, without any form of reliable backup, only the craziest of authors would actually attempt to write their stories inside the Wattpad text editor.

Instead, most people edit in some kind of word editor, and then bring the files over to the Wattpad editor to launch their chapter. The problem is, Wattpad doesn't understand a whole lot on formatting, and that's how you end up with paragraph breaks three spaces large, and awkward spacing all over the place.

You'd think Wattpad, whose only function when you get right down to it is hosting books, would be able to manage that. They can't. And I assure you when people launch their book, there is no spacing or strange formatting in the Wattpad editor. This crap gets added AFTER you click submit. The only way I've found around this is copy and pasting to notepad, which removes all formatting, and then uploading that file, but even then I end up with awkward spacing at random intervals that don't match up with my final product. It's frustrating, and Wattpad should drop whatever they're doing and address the issue of having the free books that we freely write that brings traffic to their site and bring it into a better uploading system. Perhaps one with a "preview section" (not a "save but don't submit, now go look at it, now go back" section)

2) Wattpad Page Sizes

Why does Wattpad choose to have such a strange page size? It's roughly 1.8 X the size of a word page, which is already larger than you'd see in a typical novel page. I think it may have to do with many tablets being widescreen, and this working better on a widescreen... maybe. Then again, it's Wattpad and the ipad whom Wattpad more or less uses the name sack of does not have nearly as wide a screen as say, a Samsung or a Kindle.

If they want my respect in this matter, they should give you the option to choose the size you want. It's not difficult. A little box that lets you choose 8 by 10 or whatever other sizes you'd want. They could have one that mimics words page size, one that mimics a novels typical page size, and one that mimics their current size. That will be especially helpful for people on 6 inch tabs. It should be an easy and quick conversion. Do it!

3) Better Forums

Jee whiz, forums could be better developed. For example, say I want to respond to a post you made three posts ago. Short of randomly quoting you, I can't do that. That's annoying. That's really annoying. The easiest way to fix it? Make it so when you click "reply" it will not just pop up their name "@me", but it will also pop up the post number "@me #2" Of course, that still is a weak way to do forums.

This site handles forums like text messages or tweets. It's awful, and it really needs to be fixed into something better. Take literally ANY forum out there, and it is superior to what Wattpad offers. People use this forum aggressively enough that there really is no excuse.

There should be better ways to track conversations. There should be better ways to reply to people. There should be a small editor tool to help you enter the information/tags you want, like inserting a picture. I should be able to decide how many posts load on each page and I shouldn't have to lose my reply every time I click on another link. The forums could be way more accessible, and you know, they should be.

4) Fix the Glitches

Like the uploading glitch I mentioned before, this website is riddled with glitches. I had one forum thread I participated in where each individual post was given a different page. It loaded 300 pages and if I wanted to refer to anything someone else said I had to get clicking, and since each click results in reloading your response, if I had to do something like gather together a list of the people I was responding too... it could become very tedious.

As we speak, my inbox doesn't report when I receive messages. I've had people sending me messages for a week only to realize they arrived yesterday. Why? I have no clue. It's not the first time it's happened to me, and it has happened to others I've talked to too.

Why are glitches so common on this site? Most sites I've been to might have a glitch and almost always leaving and reloading the page fixes it. Wattpad is the only site I've seen with consistent glitches that encompass major aspects of the website (like uploading books) and don't seem to go away. And worst of all? I've been on this site for over a year and not a single one of them seems to have been fixed in any permanent manner.

5) The new profiles suck

Maybe some will disagree with me. I thought it looked really cool the first second I saw it too. That is, until I tried to use it functionally. I get what they're trying to do. They're trying to make the profiles more tablet (their main market) friendly. In the process, what used to be one click and I could see everything about a person and know what their profile contains is now a hodgepodge of clicking around to get information. If I want to see how many works someone is working on, when they are being worked on, or how popular they are, I can only see the last updated book and have to click a small (not tablet friendly) button that says 'View All Works' to see more than the cover of any other book. Which means if I'm interested in their secondary or tertiary book, I will not able to find information about it without clicking into their published works folder. On top of that, chapter number, page number, and word count... a couple of things I find kind of important, are all hidden behind that click wall as well (although, they never did word count, it'd just be nice if they did considering that's a way better indicator than page size).

Quickly check out followers or following? Forget it; you need to go into a different page to view that. Want to know who they are voting on and who is dedicating them? Well tough, you're not privy that information anymore. Sorry, you can't know what your favorite author likes to read. This of course puts emphasis on reading lists... which I don't even use, but I suppose that's a personal problem.

You should offer options. We should be allowed to update to the new one, keep the old one, or maybe offer a few more options for customizability. I for one have NOT updated, and I rue the day the website is going to force me to update to this new system, which wastes tons of space, and provides considerably less information.

So yeah, fix all of that Wattpad, and you and I'll be square... or keep tinkering with the things that don't need fixing and ignore the things that do. Whatever works... 

And here's a runner up I'm tagging on while I'm at it.

6) Let people actually form clubs.

Come on, wattpad. People form book clubs. What you call clubs now, which is just a perfunctory for each genre into order to post in the respective forums, is NOT a club. How about letting people form their groups. How about designing it so they can? I'm not talking about starting a forum and balancing things with a story book that shows up like other story books. I'm not talking about creating a profile centered around a club rather than an author. I'm talking about allowing the creation of groups, circles, or clubs... whatever you want to call them. Why is this not a thing yet? It's a thing on every other social website around. Get on it.