Posting on BookWyrm starts with a book. Users can comment on in-progress or recently read books from the "Your books" section, or from a book's landing page. From there, users can reply and start a conversation. BookWyrm posts can include formatting like bold, italics and links using Markdown.
If you're familiar with posting on Mastodon, you'll find that BookWyrm statuses have analogous visibility settings, content warnings, and mentions. However, polls, custom emoji, and attachments are not supported yet.
There are three types of posts users can create directly in response to books: reviews, comments, and quotes. Comments respond to general aspects of a book, quotes pertain to specific passages, and reviews deal with books overall. Users can also reply to statuses.
| Component | Review | Comment | Quote | Reply |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text field | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Spoiler alert | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Page number | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Quote | ✔ | |||
| Rating | ✔ | |||
| Title field | ✔ |
Spoiler alerts (also known as content warnings) are useful to give people a warning before they read a status that might spoil the plot of a book they want to read. Usually just putting "contains spoilers" or something similar is sufficient, but you can be more specific, especially if your status discusses potentially sensitive topics.
A star rating can be added to reviews, or added on its own by clicking the stars below a book. It is a 5-star scale, and half stars can be added by double clicking on the star. For example, if you want to rate 2.5 stars, you'd click on 3 stars then click again on the third star to make it half. When viewing a book or reviews, the star ratings are hidden until the user selects "Show rating".
Statuses are generated when a user indicates that they want to read, have started reading, or have finished reading a book.
Text can include:
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