OK, I'll just shut up then. sorry
From the looks of votes received verses the number of views a story gets, it seems to me that most readers choose not to vote to begin with. Yes, it is nice for writers to get some measure of satisfaction from their labors but are metrics that realistic for this purpose? For example, do votes received actually reflect how well the author’s followers liked his/her story or are there merely an indicator of how popular the author is within the site? Does the number of views reflect how many times the story was read or is it merely an indicator of how often the page was opened? No system is perfect and this one seems okay to me. It would be nice if more people voted; however, I do wish more people would take the time to comment on stories. Yes, it requires a little more effort from the reader but I think the content in the comments could be far more valuable to the author.
Very well said Shinzon, and thanks for posting. I agree totally.
Here's what I noticed about the scoring.
Often a so-so story that gets 6 "5s" and no "4s" will show up in the listings as much more popular than a really good story that has 36 "5s" and 3 "4s".
I know why this happens because if I don't like a story I just don't vote on it. Why make an enemy by giving someone a "3"?
I wish there was some way to reward a really good story in the ratings by rewarding the sheer number of 5s it gets, not just a numerical average. Maybe some sort of a volume weighting..
That's the engineer in me..
Of course the best way to give feedback is to comment..
Just to add my two cents, I have the same problem as tomlando. Sometimes very hard to decide between a 4 and a 5! I, too, wish there was a wider range from which to choose.
Yeah, I know... no worries, ok? Just wanted to get that off my chest. : )
There will always be that no matter what rate you have.
Oh should it be a 7 or an 8.. I can't decide.. maybe we need to go to 20.
I'm tempted to remove the comment requirement totally. The oldest erotic story site in existence doesn't require any comments being made on any score.
We can easily track if the same people are voting down scores regularly. Gav could program something in to the new server to flag those people, and their votes would all be removed, as would their ability to vote.
A reminder, the new setup will have the option to turn off voting totally on your stories. Perhaps when that's in place, we should remove the comment requirements too?
Before it changed so that we had to comment if we voted a certain #, our votes showed in our profile. Not just "Jebru gave a score on Eden" but "Jebru gave a score of 5 on Eden. Maybe a move back to that would satisfy people, though I wouldn't mind a list of who voted what on each of my stories either. Not only for the sake of understanding the vote, but also just out of curiosity about who reads my stories.
I like voting and comments and I am not against constructive comments. I hate it when I have 12 5's and someone breaks the streak with a 4 who wouldn't but am I losing any sleep, Nope!! I do with a higher percentage of people would vote I think less than 1% of the views vote so who knows, maybe peoples fingers are all messy and that makes it hard to vote (WEG).
The voting system will be changed slightly once Gav is finished with his server build.
Comments are not going to be required for any scores. Forcing people to comment has led to artificially higher scores, and less scores.