Storylines

The same site, told two ways, and counted.

Anywhere content says something to a person, it may say it in several ways by giving a list instead of one string:

name: Want to help out in the neighbourhood?
description:
  - The work day, the spring fair and the committees need more hands. Say what you can do.
  - The neighbours do most things themselves. Sign up here for whatever you fancy.
alternatives:
  - name: [Join in, Sign me up]
    consequence: [[Send], [Count me in]]

Each index is a storyline. A visitor is given one at their first request, kept in a cookie (portal_storyline) for a year, and reads that storyline on every page, in every button and in every mail the site sends them about their case. A single string is every storyline.

The rules

• Same length everywhere. Every list of texts in the content has the site’s arity, so a storyline never has a hole in it. The lint refuses a list of another length and names it.
• What varies is what a person reads: name, description, label, placeholder, title, a mail’s subject and body, a list’s empty line, consequence and encouragements (those two as lists of lists).
• What the machine reads never varies: a field’s name (the stored key), a select’s options (the stored values), states, groups, paths, buckets.
• One storyline per site, not per page. That is what makes it a storyline rather than a scatter of variants: a warm front door leads to a warm form and a warm mail.
• A signed-in person keeps the storyline they had as a visitor.
• A site that tells one storyline sets no cookie.

What is counted

Every record and every answer event carries the storyline it came from (storyline on Answer and on portal.answers.submitted). The mail a case gets tells the same storyline, so a person who read the warm front door is not thanked in the plain voice.

GET /report gives the counts, per bucket, per storyline, per state:

{ "storylines": 2,
  "buckets": { "requests": { "0": { "open": 3, "solved": 9 },
                             "1": { "open": 5, "solved": 14 } } } }

Storylines are assigned evenly, so those numbers are the comparison: which words brought more people to send, and how their cases went. No record, field, address or time leaves the site. The trainer reads this (portal report) next to what its personas scored offline, and the plan’s tones are where the storylines are written.