Webnovel.Forum

Is there a way? Sure. Authors can do whatever we want in our process before hitting that "Publish" button and putting our stuff up for reading on the site.

Is doing so going to catch on? Maybe, but probably not. Visibility on a platform like this is a matter of competition. A large part of staying on top of that competition is releasing chapters early and often. If you have a creative pipeline of proofreaders, story consultants, beta readers, etc., you are injecting additional time into the whole process, time that the chapter could have been up and read and your novel could have risen in the rankings. Additionally, having all of those folks on board has other costs, particularly with folks doing strong editorial work that -- depending on the quality of the author's raw work -- can take a decent chunk of time for them. Especially when you're starting out and getting nothing but satisfaction and practice from doing this, you're not going to have very much to give besides virtual headpats.

Now, if you do all that stuff you'll probably (that really depends on how good the people you have working on it are, BTW; you can't just magically pick anybody to edit and suddenly you're JRR Tolkien) have an edge in chapter quality, but that advantage can be eroded if your whole machine gets clogged and you can't maintain the same pace as others who have some minor writing issues but are putting out constant content. Where a single author just has their own breaks to plan around, an editorial team+author multiplies the number of people you have to be mindful of the availability of, and so more easily can fall to pieces if not carefully managed (there are teams that do this very well in the translated stuff, but they also tend to be teams that are getting compensated well for it).

Keep in mind in China where the translated tales hail from that the authors there generally don't have the kinds of heavily wrought editorial machines we apply to some of the very top tier translations here either. You just have the author, sucking down on cigarettes and/or caffeinated beverages, wailing out up to four chapters a day, trying to hit a daily word/chapter count to keep themselves eligible for their contracts. The guys rising to the top there don't have a committee improving the work, they just naturally put out something people want to read and maybe it'll get an editing pass on the way to print if they do well enough for that.

Since that system works well enough over there, don't expect the culture from the site runners here to be terribly different, nor should it be. I've seen some suggestions else-thread about enforcing a standard of quality and I wonder if the people suggesting these actually use any online platforms (where nobody does that kind of thing for free) or if they just think there's an editing/proofing sweatshop that'd be able to even sift the very bad from the passably good and better without incurring such a cost that the site would have to entirely paywalled to afford it. Guess what, folks? The readers are the ones who are doing that here, by design.

It does make my eyes bleed to look at something new and from the first sentence it has bad capitalization/spelling and random spaces (or lack thereof) before and after punctuation marks, if they're even used, among other travesties I've encountered. The way a platform like this is designed to handle that sort of thing, though, is for the readers to rate that stuff poorly and then to more highly rate the stuff that isn't eye-gougingly terrible. One place where that currently makes no difference, though, is on the front page "Latest Updates" section, where we're all equal. I really don't know what they can do there, though, because they have to strike a balance between giving brand new works decent initial exposure so the whole process of rating it can begin and do its thing while also promoting the stuff that people do think is good. Not having a comprehensive, well thought-out solution of my own, I can only note it's going to be a problem as we get more and more of this stuff in the total pipeline, and wish them luck in figuring it all out.

Whew, that was sure a good chunk to say in one go, but I'm also sort of addressing stuff in other threads all at once too. We do need to find our way as a new-fledged writing community here, but I'm not thinking it'll be terribly mutated past what China gets in this regard. :)