Just skimming the first pages of Dragon Heist I feel that at times the linking to other sources is just... lazy? A few times I've found so far other books are referenced, but rather than refer to the specific page in the book in the hyperlink it just refers to the book itself. For example, in the Old Xoblob Shop, under Trinkets I feel it should link to the Trinkets table in the PHB, not to the PHB itself.
It might seem harsh to just call it lazy but this is really disappointing as I love D&DBeyond but when one of the main selling points of buying books on here as opposed to physical copies is the hyperlinking from source to source which can't be done with hard copies, this is kind of a let down. I've yet to get through the rest of Dragon Heist, but I hope these few examples I've found are the only few.
Just skimming the first pages of Dragon Heist I feel that at times the linking to other sources is just... lazy? A few times I've found so far other books are referenced, but rather than refer to the specific page in the book in the hyperlink it just refers to the book itself. For example, in the Old Xoblob Shop, under Trinkets I feel it should link to the Trinkets table in the PHB, not to the PHB itself.
It might seem harsh to just call it lazy but this is really disappointing as I love D&DBeyond but when one of the main selling points of buying books on here as opposed to physical copies is the hyperlinking from source to source which can't be done with hard copies, this is kind of a let down. I've yet to get through the rest of Dragon Heist, but I hope these few examples I've found are the only few.
EDIT: Don't get me wrong though, thank you DnDbeyond staff for your otherwise awesome job :)
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I can assure you it is not laziness - linking to the book or the specific section of the book is really the same amount of effort.
It is more that we have some "standards" we try to follow while linking and the instances you mention were simply missed in our multiple passes to add links. Adding these links is a more manual process than we would like for it to be, primarily because the different books handle references differently.
As an example, most of the time references appear as:
(See "Trinkets" in chapter 5 of the Player's Handbook)
In this case, we would want to link "Player's Handbook" to the PHB landing page, and "Trinkets" within the quotes to the more specific section. This is the standard we want to follow, but we can't always do so because the references themselves are not formatted like this and some of the older books might have been linked slightly differently before we figured out what we think is the optimal standard.
So while we would want "Player's Handbook" to link to the landing page in the first example you gave, we would also want to link the words "chapter 5" that appear before it, like so:
Surely the ideal scenario would be to hyperlink the words "Trinkets table" to the point of the table within chapter 5 of the PHB, or at the least as close within Chapter 5 as you are able to hyperlink us to the table. Assuming it were a manual process, a read-through of the script on receive to list each reference then an individual scanning through each asking "what would the player want to read (if anything) from this reference?" is all that's needed no? Add a second opinion/approval state if needed but assuming you don't have any plans to proceduralize the process through key-words and tags, a more tailored hyperlink placement could help improve the experience over a consistent universal hyperlink standard in my personal opinion.
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Just skimming the first pages of Dragon Heist I feel that at times the linking to other sources is just... lazy? A few times I've found so far other books are referenced, but rather than refer to the specific page in the book in the hyperlink it just refers to the book itself. For example, in the Old Xoblob Shop, under Trinkets I feel it should link to the Trinkets table in the PHB, not to the PHB itself.
It might seem harsh to just call it lazy but this is really disappointing as I love D&DBeyond but when one of the main selling points of buying books on here as opposed to physical copies is the hyperlinking from source to source which can't be done with hard copies, this is kind of a let down. I've yet to get through the rest of Dragon Heist, but I hope these few examples I've found are the only few.
Other examples:
EDIT: Don't get me wrong though, thank you DnDbeyond staff for your otherwise awesome job :)
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D&D Beyond FoundersThank you, that's some good feedback - I'll check with staff and we'll work harder to land those hyperlinks in a better place.
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D&D Beyond FoundersThanks for bringing this to our attention. I can assure you it is not laziness - linking to the book or the specific section of the book is really the same amount of effort.
It is more that we have some "standards" we try to follow while linking and the instances you mention were simply missed in our multiple passes to add links. Adding these links is a more manual process than we would like for it to be, primarily because the different books handle references differently.
As an example, most of the time references appear as:
In this case, we would want to link "Player's Handbook" to the PHB landing page, and "Trinkets" within the quotes to the more specific section. This is the standard we want to follow, but we can't always do so because the references themselves are not formatted like this and some of the older books might have been linked slightly differently before we figured out what we think is the optimal standard.
So while we would want "Player's Handbook" to link to the landing page in the first example you gave, we would also want to link the words "chapter 5" that appear before it, like so:
The other examples you gave were similar.
In other words, we missed some of the instances that we would want to link and you pointing those out allow us to add them.
Thanks for sharing!
Sorry for saying lazy I was really tired and my word choice was off. I'm glad you're addressing the issue though :)
Surely the ideal scenario would be to hyperlink the words "Trinkets table" to the point of the table within chapter 5 of the PHB, or at the least as close within Chapter 5 as you are able to hyperlink us to the table. Assuming it were a manual process, a read-through of the script on receive to list each reference then an individual scanning through each asking "what would the player want to read (if anything) from this reference?" is all that's needed no? Add a second opinion/approval state if needed but assuming you don't have any plans to proceduralize the process through key-words and tags, a more tailored hyperlink placement could help improve the experience over a consistent universal hyperlink standard in my personal opinion.