@Silverthistle: We're down to manually adding books at this point, so the quickest way to add your book is to enter the ISBN / ASIN (or author name and book title) in the search bar at the top of your dashboard, then
a) either click on the edition that is showing, and if it's not the one you're looking for (which may happen if you're not searching by ISBN / ASIN but by author name and book title), on the corresponding book page, open "all editions" and see whether the one you're looking for is already here; if not, use the "add a new edition" link / button at the top of the "all editions" page to open the screen to input your book data for your specific edition;
b) or, if no book at all is showing in response to your query, use the "add a new book" link / button at the bottom of your (negative) search results to directly open the screen to enter your book.
NOTE: BookLikes searches are tied to edition languages, and some books in the database don't have a language designation (because initially it was possible to import books without that). So it may happen that you get a negative search result, but if you then try to enter your book as a "new" one, the system will tell you that a book with that ISBN / ASIN already exists. In this case, go to the corresponding author or book page and set the language drop-down menu at the top of the page to "all" (and the number of books shown per page to something sufficiently large) in order to find your book.
Thank you so much for the explanation. I love booklikes and the community! I just hate how it's so unusable. It's taken me over 10 minutes to finally find a way to get the comments to show so I can reply and say thanks. drives me nuts! Added to that, when trying to update my reading challenge for the 2 books I've added today, the dates won't show so it's showing 0 on my progress bar (even though the actual slider thing on the bar has moved). Similar thing back in 2017 where it looks like I only read about 12 books when the total was closer to 60 so it's the only year my challenge showed a fail when it really wasn't and contributed to my decision to bail on BL. Booklikes was amazing but I go insane now every time I visit so I rarely pop in any more :( V Sad.
The reading challenge has basically been kaputt ever since Jan. 1 2020, because the BL system isn't tracking any reading end dates after Dec. 31, 2019. (Sorry to be the bearer of yet more bad news .:( )
The hardcore part of this community has sworn to stay around until they carry us out feet first! :) (For the community's sake first and foremost, of course ...)
I'm with you. I really wish the staff would be active. But at least to my knowledge amazon isn't shutting them down or buying them out. With all it's failings, booklikes is currently the best book site for me and where most of the goodreads escapees I followed have come.
I'm out of the loop here so I don't know what the situation is with who runs BL but if someone were to get this up and running again like it used to be...I'd be back in a heartbeat. Actually, might lurk a bit to see how broken it all is and come back anyway :D I was about 7 years on goodreads until that carry on started and I ditched them and took all my reviews with me to come here. then I had about 5 years here until everything started breaking a few years back and I grew weary of fighting with the interface. Haven't really found anywhere else since then (and haven't looked either to be honest) so maybe it's time I got back to reviewing and mingling with book people again.
As far as we know, BookLikes was sold to a Polish ebook company named Legimi in 2016. The original venture capital investors who (in addition to the EU) gave the startup capital way back when the site was founded are still listed on the relevant BL "about" pages, though, so unless that's a monumental oversight and nobody at Legimi is even the slightest bit interested in a truthful presentation, we have to assume that they, too, retain some sort of financial interest. -- That being said, nobody on behalf of the site owners has made an appearance here for almost two years at this point, so as far as the running of the site is concerned, we're basically on our own. Which is well and good as long as it means nobody is actually interfering with our day-to-day exchanges and posts (à la Goodreads), but decidedly not so good as far as functionality, bug and spam removal, the book database, and similar things are concerned.
That being said, the community is hanging on tooth and nail, and as you said, there's really no place out there offering quite the same format. (Most of us have resorted to backing up our libraries somewhere else, but none of those other sites comes even close in terms of community building.) Also, the site owners are, at the very least, still interested in keeping the site alive as such: the basic functionality items have been outsourced to a German web hosting / maintenance service, the domain is punctually renewed on an annual basis (or has been, so far), and when the site actually did crash earlier this year, they spent a painful couple of days bringing it back up. All told, it feels a bit like we're playing in a little forgotten "nowhere-land" corner of the big sand box that is the world wide web, but as long as nobody is either interfering with us or shutting the site down, that's perhaps not the worst imaginable place to be in!
Thanks for the edited highlights and getting me back up to speed. BL is without a doubt still my favourite book platform and the combination of the ability to shelve/catalog books and also have the blogging format with a community presence makes it close to perfect. Obviously the lack of stewardship is less than desirable and the functionality issues are what got to me last time too. That was during a time when I wasn't in the mood to deal with them though and that's all water under the bridge now and I'm going to try and wade through it to get back to where I was.
It's a bit scary that it's pretty much rudderless in terms of site overseers and I'll have to see where else to back up content in case the worst should happen. That was one of the things that bothered me last time too, the thought that it could all go in an instant and everyone would scatter and content would be lost along with friendships if the only means of communicating with them was BL...
When I win my big Jackpot Lottery of £11m I'll buy it all up and throw money at it to make it the best place ever :D
http://booklikes.com/do-over-david-wolf/book,14016078
Although I think I put it with the wrong author. One of the librarians will likely have to fix that - sorry guys!
@Silverthistle: We're down to manually adding books at this point, so the quickest way to add your book is to enter the ISBN / ASIN (or author name and book title) in the search bar at the top of your dashboard, then
a) either click on the edition that is showing, and if it's not the one you're looking for (which may happen if you're not searching by ISBN / ASIN but by author name and book title), on the corresponding book page, open "all editions" and see whether the one you're looking for is already here; if not, use the "add a new edition" link / button at the top of the "all editions" page to open the screen to input your book data for your specific edition;
b) or, if no book at all is showing in response to your query, use the "add a new book" link / button at the bottom of your (negative) search results to directly open the screen to enter your book.
NOTE: BookLikes searches are tied to edition languages, and some books in the database don't have a language designation (because initially it was possible to import books without that). So it may happen that you get a negative search result, but if you then try to enter your book as a "new" one, the system will tell you that a book with that ISBN / ASIN already exists. In this case, go to the corresponding author or book page and set the language drop-down menu at the top of the page to "all" (and the number of books shown per page to something sufficiently large) in order to find your book.
Here's a workaround that at least allows you to record your reading end dates *as such*: http://themisathena.booklikes.com/post/2026074/work-around-for-date-read-end-reading-setting
As far as we know, BookLikes was sold to a Polish ebook company named Legimi in 2016. The original venture capital investors who (in addition to the EU) gave the startup capital way back when the site was founded are still listed on the relevant BL "about" pages, though, so unless that's a monumental oversight and nobody at Legimi is even the slightest bit interested in a truthful presentation, we have to assume that they, too, retain some sort of financial interest. -- That being said, nobody on behalf of the site owners has made an appearance here for almost two years at this point, so as far as the running of the site is concerned, we're basically on our own. Which is well and good as long as it means nobody is actually interfering with our day-to-day exchanges and posts (à la Goodreads), but decidedly not so good as far as functionality, bug and spam removal, the book database, and similar things are concerned.
That being said, the community is hanging on tooth and nail, and as you said, there's really no place out there offering quite the same format. (Most of us have resorted to backing up our libraries somewhere else, but none of those other sites comes even close in terms of community building.) Also, the site owners are, at the very least, still interested in keeping the site alive as such: the basic functionality items have been outsourced to a German web hosting / maintenance service, the domain is punctually renewed on an annual basis (or has been, so far), and when the site actually did crash earlier this year, they spent a painful couple of days bringing it back up. All told, it feels a bit like we're playing in a little forgotten "nowhere-land" corner of the big sand box that is the world wide web, but as long as nobody is either interfering with us or shutting the site down, that's perhaps not the worst imaginable place to be in!
It's a bit scary that it's pretty much rudderless in terms of site overseers and I'll have to see where else to back up content in case the worst should happen. That was one of the things that bothered me last time too, the thought that it could all go in an instant and everyone would scatter and content would be lost along with friendships if the only means of communicating with them was BL...
When I win my big Jackpot Lottery of £11m I'll buy it all up and throw money at it to make it the best place ever :D