Collaboration

Collaboration is a panel of the writing screen and a section of Book settings, and both read the same thing. The panel’s small view shows who holds the turn and who is on the book; its full view on the Panels screen does everything: roles, invitations, the turn, the model, the invitation link and the record of what each participant did.

There are four roles, and the table in the panel is where they change. The owner does everything, including roles, the mode, the book’s facts, publishing and deleting. A co-writer writes prose and beats, edits the story bible through the proposal gate, runs the checks and sets the targets. An editor comments, proposes changes to the prose and decides the bible’s proposals, and cannot write prose directly. A reader reads, comments and gives kudos. Only the owner changes a role or removes somebody, and the control says so beside itself for everybody else. The owner’s own row is not among the roles you can assign: ownership moves in Book settings, not here.

Somebody is invited by username or by email address. The row reads which of the two you typed and says where the invitation goes. An address nobody holds an account for gets an account invitation with the book invitation attached, so the person lands in the book after signing up. A guest invites by address only, because a guest holds no account to attach a username to. Copy link makes an invitation anybody holding the link may accept, for the role beside the field.

An invitation that stands can be sent again or revoked. Three resends are allowed per invitation, and a revoke stops the link working. An invitation nobody took is swept after thirty days and its address is blanked when it goes, so an invitation nobody accepted is not a record of somebody’s address.

A book is written under one of two models, and the owner chooses.

Turn-based is the default and the one that needs nothing running. One person holds the turn; everybody else reads the last synced version. While somebody else holds it the editor says who, and the prose is read-only until they let it go or their turn runs out. A turn nobody has touched inside the timeout can be taken over, and the book’s record says so. A guest cannot hold the turn on a book they do not own.

Real-time relays what each person writes to the others as they write it. It needs every participant online and the hosted relay. Nothing of what is relayed is kept on the server: a restart loses the connections and no writing, and there is nothing on disk for anybody to ask for. The story bible and the record stay each person’s own: your copy applies the merged prose and writes its own events.

The grid you see follows your role. A writer sees every panel. An editor sees the editor with the prose read-only, and comments, proposals, checks and reference as the working panels. A reader sees the prose and the comments and no tools. The owner can preview any of the three with View as, which is how you see what somebody else will.

Presence is read from the connection alone: online, away after five minutes of silence, and offline once nothing is connected. Nobody sets it by hand, and nothing about it is stored.

Sync is in Book settings, under Sync. Sync now packs this device’s book file, asks for room for exactly that many bytes, puts the file straight into storage and tells the server it landed; the copy’s head and the version are recorded afterwards. Download the cloud copy writes the newest copy back over this device’s file. Stop keeping a copy removes the bytes and the row. The application reads and writes the file itself: the book’s bytes never pass the server, which is why there is no route there that takes a file.

The side of the full view is the book’s record. What each participant did is read from the book’s own trace, one line per kind of event with the first and last time it happened; the list under it is what happened to the shared book, newest first, with who did it.

Try: open the Collaboration panel, go to its full view, invite an address to the editor role, and watch the invitation stand with Resend and Revoke beside it. Then switch View as to Editor: the prose goes read-only, the panels narrow to the review set, and the line at the top of the editor says what an editor does.