142 responses to “Scoring System Changes”

1. I like the new wording. It seems to be a more accurate description of stories.

2. Excellent change, especially with descriptions instead of numbers. Only question I have is with the first description. There is no such thing as “Impossible to Improve” with human nature being what it is. There is always room for improvement of some type. Might I suggest using the word “Outstanding” instead?

3. I find that ‘scores’ are totally useless to me.

   As a reader, I will glance at about 50% of the posts of new stories, that’s usually because the story codes turn me off. If they do, I skip the tale. Other than that, you’re almost guaranteed that I’ll read at least a few paragraphs and make up my mind if I’ll read any further. Votes and scores mean nothing to me because I’ve often read a few paragraphs and moved on before any votes appear.

   Oh yeah, for your first place, if you plan on using some term instead of a number, why not use a term like “Deserves Publication”?

4. Naturally, I hate it. Everything suited me fine the way it was. Well, not exactly, but the old system was good to me. Maybe it was too good to me.

   Times change though and so do attitudes. Do you have a timeframe for when the scores will be recalculated?

   cmsix

5. I want to say that I think having the rating system is great (and is one of the things that makes SOL such a great site). Having said that, I also realize that the voting is skewed toward the high end.

   I’m not sure that this is really a problem though. Because I don’t have the time to read every story on the site, I really only consider reading stories with a 9.0 rating or higher (unless something in the description really appeals to me).

   Changing the system as you describe would just mean that my “threshold” becomes lower. It’s not going to really change anything about how I read (as long as older stories get re-ranked also).

   As far as voting goes, I find the 10 point scale to be a bit of an overkill. I think that I’d prefer more of a 1 to 5 stars sort of approach. Since it seems that the real problem is that so few readers actually enter a score, (most stories only get about a 4% or 5% voting response) anything you can do to encourage people to vote would be a good thing.

   Furthermore, I don’t know if this is possible, but what about taking into account the person doing the scoring? For example, if a story gets a 9 from someone who usually gives out 10s, that should be worth less than a 9 from someone who usually gives out 7s. This is especially true for those few trolls that like to give out 1s to everybody.

6. The one change I would suggest is that stories with multi-part chapters not allowed to have votes posted until at least a certain percentage of the story is posted. That would of course be determined by the author. It is amazing how sometimes a Prologue chapter which simply intrduces the characters gets a low rating which then in turn drags down later scores when the core of the story is posted.

7. A scoring system is by its very nature
   unfair for the very reason you stated in your article. DROP SCORING and let the readers decide if they want to read a story by its description. I have not voted on a number of stories not because they were bad, but because they failed to capture me. All scoring is subjective

8. As derf56 said, all voting is subjective, so any change has to be an improvement and I agree with you that everyone’s scores rate far too high. Now if you could get rid of the folks who ‘just wanna be nice’ and the trolls who ‘just love to be mean’ you’d have a better rating system.

   I do have one recommendation, that each reader automatically registers as a five, unless and until they vote differently. I think that would encourage people to vote, but it could be a mite of a database challenge.

   I also like the idea of saying that the top score possible read “Deserves Publication”
   That sounds ‘cool’ to me. 😉

9. i agree the voting needs a overhaul but i am concerned that all time classic stories might lose out in the new ratings .is this possable?

10. “Deserves Publication” may sound cool, nifty, or keen but it is nonsense. The stories are all published already, else how could you read them?

    Did you perhaps mean “Deserves Print Publication” or “Deserves Dead Tree Publication?”

    cmsix

11. Another problem is vote inflation, as suggested by Pleasure Boy 1 on his blog. I haven’t done the statistics, but there is probably a direct correlation between the number of chapters a story has and the number of votes it gets–not to mention the SCORE it gets. After all, in a longer story, the reader gets more chances to bond with the characters–as well as more chances to vote. This leaves short-story writers out in the cold, while chaptered stories of inferior quality routinely break 9.5. In short, I think the system is biased towards multi-chapter stories.

    The simplest answer is to just disallow voting until the story is completed, but I doubt you’d like that and honestly I don’t either. An alternative is a system that adjusts total score downward depending on how many votes the story has accrued. Alternately, if a single membership logs multiple votes on the same story, perhaps some or all of THOSE could be adjusted downwards. This is more fair but would probably be much harder to program (I failed my C++ class, so all I know is, this shit’s hard).

12. The scores have inflated, so that a score below 9 isn’t an decent story.

    The median score on a slow, usually longer story is 9.17. And that includes stories before inflated scores.

    As a multiple chapter story goes on, later votes are suspect. Why did someone vote after chapter eleven of a continuing story.

    I think scores are often more of an encouragement to a writer to continue, rather than an honest evaluation. Low scores don’t encourage a writer to continue, since it’s about the only reinforcement and feedback they get.

    A writer of a 9.5 story still might get only two or three comments on a new chapter of a continuing story. And readers that voted prior, have burned their vote to encourage.

    I understand the balance between information and encouragement for the author makes having a scoring difficult.

    And I almost never read a story that I don’t download the chapter. Downloading doesn’t encourage voting.

    With one vote per story, scores are difficult to understand as multipart stories go on.

    Nothing is perfect.

    rougher63

13. I like the wording changes. You might want to show improvement needed in storyline, or improvement needed in Emglish/punctuation.

14. How about a classification of “story idea is good, but find an editor” I get frustrated trying to read a story and encounter misuse of words, bad spelling and miserable grammer. And yet some of these offer some viable ideas if they could just write them so they were readable

15. Current system works well for me. Anything over 9.5 is usually worth a look. 8.5-9.5 depends on topic or author or categories. Under 8.5 rarely is worthwhile. I would find the proposed new wording difficult to differentiate between great and excellent. The top category would also be too difficult to realistically attain (although I have read a couple of stories here that I would give it to).

16. Won’t weighted scores make a score meaningless? 50 people give an average real score of 9 (excellent story or whatever) and the system comes up with an 8 (good story). It just seems like, ‘why bother voting?’

    But, everyone is in the same boat so, ‘whatever’. 🙂

    I like the new wording. That aside, personally I don’t think the scoring system is ‘broke’, so I can’t see the point in ‘fixing it’. The only thing I compare scores with are my own stories. And they ‘reflect the scores people gave them’. The only thing that peeves me is the ‘bomber’ who scores ‘1’ and distorts the score. I think scores outside a standard deviation (or two) from the mean ‘for that story’ should be auto-rejected, but what do I know.

    Good luck!

    SN

17. I tend to like your new idea for voting. Descriptions may help to pull ratings off the ceiling and give authors a better idea of how their work is doing.

    One thing I’d like to see included in some way is the technical side of writing – – things like spelling, wrong words, and basic good grammar. I have completely given up on some stories that may have had a good story line but were so full of the errors I mentioned that they were simply too difficult to read. In some of these cases I’ve sent messages to the author suggesting a fresh edit or other corrections. Very hesitantly, as I know it would complicate matters tremendously, could I suggest a two track scoring system? One for theme, characters, etc. and one for grammar, spelling, and other technical issues. This could solve, in part, the situation mentioned by another poster about not scoring stories that don’t “grab” you.

    I also agree that stories with many chapters shouldn’t be scored before at least some reasonable percentage of the story has been published. It has been my practice not to score a story until I’ve finished it. That may be a disservice to several authors who produce extremely long stories but I see no other way to be fair in scoring. Some stories that started very slowly and barely had enough “hook” to keep me around turned out to be excellent. Had I scored them based on the first chapter or so they would have received a score that didn’t reflect the quality of the story.

    Seems like I’m echoing some others here. 🙂

18. I appreciate the difficulties that you’ll have with any type of rating system. My difficulty comes from being unable to properly score a story that is well thought out and interesting but that is technically abominable. Poor spelling and grammar can be overcome and a writer with a good idea should be encouraged. On the other hand a technically perfect presentation of a story that isn’t worth the time spent writing it needs to be scored differently. Is there any way, maybe adding a plus/minus, that we could score both the idea and the execution?

19. This will spread the scores out, but it doesn’t really change the underlying reason for the inflated scores: most people ( myself included ) simply don’t make it to the voting form if the story isn’t keeping me reading.

    In the end, you learn to know what the median is, and know that something above it is likely worth reading. This will just change that number from 8.5+ to something lower. It will eventually level out, but it’s going to knock down the downloads for a while until people get used to the changes.

20. I agree that the scores are inflated. Changing the numerical scores to descriptive scores is a good idea. I just wish that people would give a reason for their score. It’s hard to improve your writing without constructive criticism, either good or bad.

21. I agree about the bunching up. I personally set the cutoff point in My Library to 9 because I’ve found too many works rated in the 8’s that I felt weren’t really worth my time. I just wish there was some way to separate rating the story idea from the execution. I’ve come across fundamentally good stories that were so unedited or badly edited (grammar, spelling punctuation, etc.) that they were unreadable. On a couple of occasions I’ve given some feedback to the author, but I wish there were a way to reflect it in the ratings.
    -Emjay

22. the weighted system seems to be too weight. It seems that it would significantly drop good scores even when everyone likes them. I like the new wording, but the numbering seems a bit much.

23. Here’s an idea that might or might not work.Why not have the readers vote on each chapter with a score of 1.00 down to 0.01 that way at the end of the story it can add up to no higher than 10.00 and no lower than 0.01.Of course on short stories it’s just the same accept it is 1.00 to 10.00.
    Dwight

24. I favor the suggestion of a dual scoring system. One score for the quality of the writing and a second score for the story itself(plot, characterization, etc).

    I have read many stories where the writing is an abomination but the plot and the characters are interestiong. Of course, there are also many stories in which the writing flows as easily as water making its way downhill but the story content is so warped that the reader is in a quandry as to how to vote. Dual scoring would solve that problem for me.

25. [apologies for the length…]

    A 1..10 (or 1..5) system seems like it should be a good guide, but in this case it’s hard to do because people don’t vote objectively. For the various reasons you described, the numbers are currently… unreliable.

    Also, ‘quality’ is difficult to measure here. Consider the various tastes of readers, and it becomes very difficult to have a single number indicate how good — i.e. ‘how much I will enjoy’ — a story is. It can be the best-written snuff story in the world, and it’ll creep me the hell out . Yes, story codes help guide here (‘hmm, includes snuff. I don’t think I’ll read this after all’), but if I can readily ignore people who vote high for snuff stories I’ll get ‘better results’ from the voting system.

    What I’d like to see is an affinity system. Show me what people who like the same stories I do like. This can be done several ways, but may require that votes be logged by userid (something that should probably be done anyway, to prevent fraudulent voting).

    1. Amazon style. “people who liked this story also liked …”. Well-solved problem.

    2. Profile comparison. “People who scored stories similarly to you also scored these ones in this way”. Not as well-solved, but doable.

    3. Explicit recommendation, strictly opt-in. “The following readers liked…”, then let the reader see how these readers rated other stories. Invasive compared to other solutions; even strictly opt-in it feels nasty.

    You could even expand things a little, though this may scare the tinfoil hat crowd. Many people only read stories that look like they will interesting. Log (user, story, completed). Then you can show “people who read this story also read…” and rate them accordingly. ‘completed’, above, is a flag indicating that the reader read to the end of the story. If someone reads all 118 chapters of _Jack and Jill_ by Old Fart, or all 167 chapters of _Dance of a Lifetime_ by Frank Downey, it indicates they actually found the stories interesting. Even if they don’t log a rating, this can still be taken as a ‘vote’ of sorts. Reading four chapters of either of these, then quitting, is another type of vote.

    Anyway, it all depends on the data available. If voting is currently just a big bucket of ‘number of votes’ and ‘cumulative total’ the above suggestions won’t be terribly workable. If data gets logged in sufficient detail, they’re doable.

    (To further complicate things, if we allow users to weight various story codes and authors then it can produce a weighted score. This could be something of an explicit method of doing the above.)

    CWatson: fwiw, I *taught* my C++ course 🙂 Yep, programming geek.

26. I agree with rougher63you only to get to vote on a story one (1) time the stories with a lot of chapters louse out the story my take a turn for the better or worse and you have all ready voted one way or another you should gwt to vote on a chapter by chaper base that willgive a bette idea how the story is going to the reader
    billyi47

27. (Me again.) I like .B’s idea of the default voting. The whole problem is that a story may get 1000 people who start it, but only 10 of them like it well enough to finish, and they all vote 10s. Instant skyrocket. .B’s system corrects for this. Another option would be to adjust a story’s score by comparing number of votes to number of reads. However, this falls afoul of the previously-discussed phenomenon of chaptered stories getting extra votes.

    Furthermore, BOTH ideas allow “score bombing”, when a troll and/or malicious fellow author gets tons of people to open the story and then close it again, thus sendings its ratings plummeting.

    It’s a mess.

28. I really don’t think the new system will have much effect, it will just be a new way of presenting the information. However, it is clear you have put some time into it so why not try it and see what happens. You run an excellent site and, as someone else has mentioned, the only one with a consistent scoring method. As to comment someone made about making stories complete before scoring I think that is a BAD idea because some of the better multi chapter ones go for years before completion. Anyway, maybe it will help some but as for me, I will just mentally adjust the scores resulting from your ‘handicaping’ and go on reading and using them to help decide what to read.

29. Yes, I am one of the guilty ones who votes tens. I also attempt to give positive feedback when I vote. In regards to the longer stories, the idea of holding off voting until it is a certain percentage complete has merit. Please give the author control of the percentage. Perhaps you can add the word descriptions to the numerical voting. Anything that can improve feedback to the authors is to be strongly encouraged. Keith has an excellent idea about rating the longer stories with a read all chapters when voting.

30. I disagree with the suggestion to weight the votes themselves based on how the voter usually votes. I think many of the people who give mostly 10s do so because they only vote on stories they like and avoid stories with low scores.

    The suggestion that all unvoting readers register as a 5 would have a rather interesting impact on stories. Combined with weighted rankings, it would tend bring the story’s score further away from 5 (i.e. either up or down, depending on their average score) if they had more votes. This has the interesting impact of causing the “nice” people who only vote on stories they like to give implicit input to stories they don’t. It also causes people like me who occasionally spend 30 seconds reading a story before deciding not to read it to give unfair votes. I think this is a bad idea.

    The suggestion of allowing explicit recommendation could be done without the nastiness of opt-in/opt-out by basing it purely on the favorites lists and reviews. This would tend to miss a lot of stuff, though.

    I think having a dual-scoring system is a bad idea. People are too lazy to vote already. Multi-scoring is fine for reviewers. Keep in mind that voting requires a mental effort by the voter to make a decision on exactly how much they liked the story (which is easier if the story is really great or really bad, hence the “nice” people who only give 10s).

31. I like it all. There has been”grade inflation” on SOL. I’m not sure that substituting descriptive phrases will mean that much. After all, there still are ten of them.

    On a related subject, I seems to me that long stories have a higher median grade than shorter stories. Any comment on that observation?

    Lazeez, thank you for your efforts.

32. I would like to also see some changes, though I think the wording at the top is too restrictive. I suggest the following:

    1 – allow voting for each chapter and provide the results with the statics you are already providing. This way if a story is improving or headed down hill, you can have a better idea of what is happening. There might also be a way to show a summary to the reader so he will know if a story is improving or declining. (Rising like a rocket or falling like a stone).

    2 – Require anyone who casts a vote more than 2 points off the current score for the story to provide a reason. It should be anonymous, but if no reason is given, or if the reason does not seem reasonable to Lazeez (or his designated judge) the vote does not count. (PS-lack of sex should not be a valid reason)

    3 – On multi-part stories, require at least 3 chapters be posted before voting is allowed (unless the story has fewer chapters).

    4 – Set up separate scores for Content, Character Development and Grammar.

    5 – Definitely set up a code or category for ‘needs editing’.

    Now, in the middle of this, I have to say that I’m one of those who probably helps skew the curve. I seldom vote unless I can give the story a 10. My reason for doing this is to not allow myself to be tempted to bring down another’s score for personal or selfish reasons. When I do vote, I will tell the author that I did and why I thought enough of his/her story to deserve a 10.

    For those that deserve less, I usually just tell the author how the story could be improved, but I don’t vote. Only once did I think a story was so bad that I gave it an honest vote of a 2.

33. i don’t know if this make any scence but a auther like cmsid who stories i read i would give a ten (10) but a auther like asa stronng when he first started i would have give him a 7 but as his story moved along and he quit some of his mistakes the story got to read better then the score would have been higher but i have allrerady voted a lower score i don’t have a chance to go and correct my mistake on a early vote as the auther improves like asa strong the only way is to tell him but the score is still low becase of early voting on more than 2 or 3 chapters stories you should have more than one vote like at chapter 5 then 10 and so fouth
    billyis6yhb

34. Why not have a technical score as well as a story quality score? Some stories that may otherwise have been an enjoyable read, are so poorly structured as to be a reading disaster. If a writer has no command of grammar, or the language, the results are often times a quite painful chaotic jumble of words. Even a poor story is elevated in its quality if it is readable.

    As far as telling the author one`s thoughts, any response that is not fanatically ranting about the world shaking brilliance of the endeavor, is often met with insult and derision. I rarely comment now as even the the most benign observation is not worth the result. Why not state whether the author actually wants a response that is the least bit critical? I have no talent for writing, however, I am capable of determining if a piece is readable.

35. I don’t vote until the story has either reached a good length or completed. I don’t give out many 10s but do give out alot of 9s.

    If I think a story is badly written I will vote low.

36. Another story site I read (a lot) at has an interesting system… stories are “rated” by the number of recommendations it receives by readers. So a top-rated story, for example, might have over 300 recommendations (“Recs”), while lesser-rated stories have fewer “recs”.

    To me, this type of “scoring” is much fairer than any type of numerical system. However, I do agree with other comments that the “mechanics” of the writing (grammer, proper use of apostrophes, commas, word choice, etc.) should have its own separate “scoring” area. While I am learning to (mostly) ignore many of the more common errors, they still get in the way of my enjoyment of the story.

37. I can’t make sense of why one of my stories receives a high score and why one I think is just as good receives a low score. It just isn’t instructive to me on how to improve my stories. I tend to look at the number of downloads to judge how my stories are received rather than the scores.

    Having said that, I wonder how valid the scores would be if a certain of top scores and bottom scores are thrown out as being prejudiced. I guess it works in athletic competitions.

38. I like to download and read the stories off line at my leisure. The only way to vote on a story is to access the story again, reducing your daily access count by each reaccessed story. Why waste a daily access just to vote? If it were possible to vote without having to be penalized to do so, then I would vote more often. After all, does it not make the vote more valid if the story is actually read before voting?

39. This is long overdue. Many “good” stories suffer from grammar, banal themes or over used expressions. They are still good stories but not fresh or imaginative. Now we can call a spade a spade, without having to call it a f……. shovel 🙂

40. I don’t judge by score – no point when everything scores so near ten as to make little difference. The number of votes made is another story, though – if a thousand people cared enough to vote, then chances are it’s pretty good. (especially when the score is high – a thousand low votes on the other hand makes me wonder…)

    Another useful stat for determining quality is the number of downloads in relation to the number of chapters. Lots of downloads and few chapters means a lot of people read it. The other way around of course means the opposite.

    A really nifty feature I’d like would be to automate that calculation. A simple near-static solution that’d be really cool would be to calculate an average number of downloads for previous chapters when a new one is posted, and list the change from the previous chapter’s total. That’d give, at a glance, an indication of whether a story is gaining readers, or losing them. (This of course presupposes that the download total always counts individual chapters, rather than counting each “session” once regardless of how many chapters were read…)

    At any rate, fixing the scores isn’t a matter of just weighting the existing ones, or even putting permanent weighting on them in place. To really fix the scores, you’d need to weight the scores of each individual user – and alert them to the fact that unless they spread out their scores, all those tens they’re giving out count as fives since they’re the median score awarded…

41. 1. I would like to see a transition period in which a dual system is employed where we can see the old and new score side by side. That would help us equate one to the other.

    2. I would suggest a system by which an author can be protected from a few low votes that pull a good score down. It might be from readers who resent the subject or theme of the work, promoting their favorite authors by hurting others with good scores, or other reasons.

    Perhaps a practice of dropping the lowest votes before calculating the average, or eliminating votes that below a stastical parameter, say 3 std. dev. below the mean.

    3. I would also like to see, in Author Stats, the distribution of votes by story. That is, how many 10’s, 9’s etc.

    Thanks.

42. I agree with your changes – however, perhaps you didn’t go far enough. Once the 10 factor was in place, a reader felt he was doing a disservice to the author giving even a 9 since it would lower the current score. Hence the tendency to go along with the other voters.
    If I am rewarding or punishing an author when I issue a score, he/she should know why. Hence, I propose a series of boxes addressing content, style, character development, TIMELINESS OF UPDATES, readability, etc and finally an overall score. The military has been using this structure for years now. It hasn’t eliminated score creep but it has lessened it. My best!
    justaguy!

43. Some good ideas have been raised here, but many of them will be difficult to implement.

    It seems to me that most of the problems with scoring are the trolls that love to tear any story down and our friendly folks that give a 10 to everything.

    Why not just discard a percentage of both those that vote high and those that vote low. Then you have a more meaningful value to work with. This I think is a viable solution that would be easy to implement.

44. I have two suggestions…I think the 10 point scale is to granular. Someone suggested five stars. Frankly, I’d go further to only three categories. “Don’t recommend”, “I liked it”, and “I recommend it”. Drastic I know, but its in line with what I use the ratings for. I look at the ratings for new posts and if its not above 9, it won’t get looked at until everything else has been. If its above about 9.7, its gets a much closer look. I also pretty much rate things 8, 9 or 10 depending on how much I liked it. Why no 5, 6, or 7 scores? Because I will rarely waste my time on things that scored that low in the first place.

    Secondly, I’d like to be able to change my vote at a later date…as many times as I deem it necessary. I did a very popular author a disservice by ranking a story low after the first chapter..mainly because I didn’t think he was going about the tail in a good manner…boy was I wrong. I learned two things. Give the author a chance (I don’t rate serials until at least the third chapter is out..sometimes more) and you can’t change your score.

45. I don’t see how you can ever get past the “bias” element of the reader. When I read something by cmsix or Lazlo Zalezac I expect high quality. So something that I might score as an 8 for them would have been a 10 for anyone else if they haven’t reached their usual standards. Accordingly, I wouldn’t vote then as I know I have bias. Similarly, a story on a subject I find distastefully done could score less. It wouldn’t necessarily be the writing style, it would be the treatment of the content.
    If I feel like that, I won’t vote as it is not fair. I am not being objective enough.
    I do use both content identifiers and scores to determine whether a story is worth reading and find it frustrating when a story that is barely literate still gets a high score, particularly when you have such excellent writers who may get similar scores. The system needs revision, but regrettably I have no realistic suggestions.
    Jon

46. I recommend going with 3 scores: Bad, Good, Excellent to simplify the process.

    I like the idea of waiting till the story is completed until voting, but that doesn’t seem reasonable. How about not allowing voting for multi-chapter stories until either 50 KB are posted, or the story is concluded (if shorter)?

    I understand how readers give high scores to encourage writers, don’t know what can be done about that. I also, tend to not vote for stories I find unacceptable, and probably also give higher scores than merited to encourage writers.

    More use should be made of emailing authors to make suggestions, etc.

47. I had another thought. You might want to split the vote like the reviewers do (Plot, Stroke, Technical Merit, Overall). It would be more reveallig to authors and, perhaps make readers think a little harder before casting thir vote.

48. I personnelly don’t look at the score. I read the story, if I like it I keep reading. I do score the story for the author, so that they get some feedback. However I only score the story once. I also don’t score story I don’t like, I just don’t read them.

49. I use scores along with the story codes and the author to find stories that I would like to read. I also use reviews for those stories that have them. To me scores are vary valuable, but are not the only criteria I use. I would agree with the first part, but not with the weighted average.

    Another possibility that you did not mention is to have more than one score like in the reviews. I would find that very helpfull

50. Weighted scores would make finding stories easier instead of just ignoring everything that’s below 8 points.

    That said, why not set anyone who reads a story a default score of 5? If 10% of the readers vote, scores would oscillate between 4 and 6, which wouldn’t matter because the score is weighted anyways…

51. First of all, thanks for all your effort, Lazzez. This is my favorite story site.

    I am not a programmer, so I don’t know if what I am going to suggest is possible.

    The voting as it stands is an overall score. What if you added the Plot, Stroke and Technical Quality (like in the reviews) scoring options as a seperate box so those so inclined could use it. If the point of scoring is to help the Author then this would be a great help. If it is only to help the potential reader then it is useful but not as important.

    I have read many of the Blogs and forums connected to many of the popular (and not so popular) authors and a common theme is the universal desire for feedback. So if a reader is predisposed to send a comment via email they will probably spend the extra time to vote on a few extra categories. Some who won’t take the time to write might still take the time to click a few times for the extra categories. Even if they don’t it is really nothing lost anyway.

    I also think that despite the unfairness of short stories recieving less votes than a multi-chapter story, that you should be able to vote on each chapter. This would help the author understand the trends for the story chapter by chapter.

    Since there is no way to create a perfect system, I believe that helping the author recieve more feedback is the priority. If there are clever mathematical ways to wheight or otherwise help adjust scores between one chapter and multiple chapters, I don’t know, but I think not allowing a vote until later in the story or casting only one vote for multiple chapters is not really helpful to the author.

    Since there is no way (I can see) of taking away the “human element” of bias then maybe giving more options for voting will help offset undesireable voting practices.

    Good luck and thank you for your time.

52. Lazeez:
    I really enjoy the way that you handle your business and the care that you take to provide a great experience for both the readers and the authors. Your quest to improve the voting is but one example of this care.
    Keith had some great comments about the issue of voting that I find very compelling and I agree with many of his comments. (dot)B also raised some good points.
    Personally, I think that the old system of numbers and their description was better than the current plan to just use comments, especially the comments that are proposed. I don’t think that descriptors like “Good Story”, “Not Bad”, “Some Good, Some Bad”, “Not Good”, and “Pretty Bad” tell either the author or other readers anything of substance. I don’t remember the comments with the old voting system, so I may have just shot myself in the foot. As one other person commented, what does “Amazing; Impossible to Improve” really mean? Yes, the numbers are inflated, but at least they are an indicator to fellow readers, just as the number of downloads is an indicator (does that really mean downloads as in xxx number of people pulled down the zip file or does it count the number of people who have/are reading the story?)
    I think that the best voting system would be one that is simple and tells people how much one would like the author to keep on developing the characters and plot. For example,
    1) I will not read more;
    2) I will continue to read;
    3) Story captured my imagination.

53. After I posted my comments, I thought of another change to the scoring system That I think worth considering, and that is voting for long stories that are published in chapters. My proposal is that when ever 20 chapters (or some other number, I am not hung up on 20) of a story have been published, that the readers be allowed to vote again. This would encourage the readers to vote as the story progresses. I personally vote for every story I read, but on serials, do not vote until it is complete. I take my vote seriously and do not think that voting for an unfinished story is something that I want to do, because I do not know what the future chapters will be like. By being able to vote again after there has been significant number of chapters added, I would be willing to vote on what I have read so far

54. I’m definitely against the new wording. Strongly. Trolls are enough of a pain in the butt as it is.

    I’ve never liked scoring systems on any site, because you simply can’t make them fair. You can’t KNOW who honestly didn’t like the story and who is just being a jerk.
    Scores don’t really tell you anything, either. I’ve had someone e-mail me recently and complain that they didn’t like my story but they kept reading it because of the high scoring. Like it’s MY fault they let that influence them. Readers should judge on summary and actual content, not numbers. I certainly can’t help the scores someone gives me.

    And NO WAY should “timeliness of updates” be a factor that can be voted on. Penalizing someone for writers’ block is rude and just plain wrong. The people who write here do it for free, and they have lives. They shouldn’t be punished if that gets in the way of updating in what someone else thinks is a timely manner.

55. Let’s say that a 10 shouldn’t be given. No story can be THAT good.
    The same goes for 0, 1, and 2.
    If a story is that bad it has no place on this site.

    b.

56. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

57. A couple of thoughts:
    Can you trap the “trolls that like to give out 1s to everybody”. I’d just toss those votes, myself.

    I admit to giving very high votes on average. But usually because if finished the story and really liked it. So your proposal dilutes those votes.

    One problem not addressed by either the numbers or equivalent phrases is the lack of content. I have read in several places authors asking for more explicit feedback – What did you like/dislike. More work, but a system that lets a reader flag attributes they like and those they don’t? I very often write a note to the author about what I like most. Clicking a few radio buttons in a form could really provide more information.
    Hal

58. SOL in years past used to allow multiple votes for a story… OK, OK, I admit I voted “10” about a hundred times for Al Steiner’s “Aftermath.” But I think that serves to offset the Long story/ short story “problem” – as later chapters are posted you could offer a different vote. Combined with the new category descriptions, I believe that would serve to separate the field. It seemed to me that the votes were less compressed before you instituted the current system.

59. Another site I visit went through a very similar reworking of its voting and scoring system recently. They do three things which I think are very useful:

    1) Each user can only cast one vote per story, and if the user wants to change their vote later on, they can.

    2) A user must provide comments when casting a vote. This splits the divide between usefulness to authors and usefulness to other readers.

    3) Comments and votes are made public. This makes voters accountable, gives authors feedback in a way pure numbers cannot, and also, for readers, allows us to get a sense of what the votes of others mean.

    As a reader, I honestly have no problems with the current scoring system. Yes, votes are “inflated,” but there are many good reasons why this is the case — why the distribution of votes would not be normal — and all it means is that I get to decide for myself what the threshold number is for a story to capture my interest.

    I do like the suggested descriptions for the votes, with two caveats. Anything can be improved, so for 10 I would suggest something like “Amazing, Absolute Best of Its Category”; similarly 5 is a little vague, and I would suggest “Some Good, but Equal Amount Bad.”

60. There are several changes I would suggest, one being that stories with multi-part chapters not be allowed to have votes posted until at least 2 chapters have been posted.

    One thing I would change is “Not Bad” to something like “Needs improvement/Editor” and I like .b’s idea of automatic 5’s until a different score is posted, but keeping track of several million readers votes could be rather cumbersome.

    Another idea would be for a user to be forced to vote to read more than … say … 50%, or 5 chapters, of a multi chapter story. (Or an automatic vote of 7 … after all, if they DIDN’T like it they wouldn’t continue reading.)

    If you DO look at automatic votes, how about rewarding authors who put inordinate amounts of time in their stories, like cmsix, Morgan, or John Smith (whose story ‘Robin” is nearly 7MB and has been an ongoing serial for 2 1/2 years) by assigning an automatic 9 or 10 to a reader who reads more than 20 chapters.

    Another option is Asa Strong’s idea to DISCARD a percentage (10% sounds good) of the highest and lowest scores before averaging the rest. This would severely discourage the trolls who only give 1’s or 10’s and force people to be fairer in their voting. As an addition to this, if you discarded 25% of the highest and 10% of the lowest scores for all stories then change all remaining scores to the new average, you wouldn’t need a NEW scoring system.

61. I relate the scores to how I would score a story if it were in print. So, 10 means “I would buy this.” (ie, some of Al Steiner’s stuff.) 8 and 9 mean “This would be worth checking out from a library.” Below that, it’s not worth reading (to me).

    I do like the idea of splitting scores, a la reviews, for plot, stroke, technical, and overall.

62. If you want to make a change to the voting, I think the best change you could make would be to allow voting to happen at the bottom of any page, not just the last page.

    I suspect that people who don’t like a long story don’t bother skipping to the end of it, just to vote. So the only votes are those readers who enjoyed it enough to read to the end.

    I’m not overly thrilled by these changes. It’s not that hard to tell which stories are likely to be good.

    Thanks,
    Ersatz

63. Weighted scores? Talk about placing a bell curve to the process. It’s just not a good idea. Unless of course you wipe out all the old scores before you start. Then your still left with the fact that the scores are being manipulated down so that a story is being penalized for being on the site. Somehow it just seems to be a bad idea. Why should a writers score be influenced by the scores of all the stories? It doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.

64. I’ve gotten used to the way things are on this site. I bookmark completed stories that look interesting and are rated 9 or above. If the subject is interesting enough, I may go to something in the 8’s.

    If I get bored with a story, I quit reading it. Usually, I allow myself to be bored for a couple of chapters on a long one before dropping it in case it gets better.

    I tend to write multi-chapter stories. I also tend to start out slowly and build once I get into it. Quite frankly, it bothers me when a bunch of people vote on the first chapter of a story of mine. They are offering an opinion about something they know almost nothing about. (Insert political comment here.)

    Would a story of mine survive if nobody voted for it for the first 20 chapters? I doubt it.

    I know that the fact that this blog entry has been posted means that a change is going to be made. I’ll go through another learning curve and figure out that anything above 7.3 or 8.7 is a potentially readable story and continue bookmarking. I might as well bite the bullet and see if scoring can be improved. With this in mind, I have a couple of suggestions for long stories. If it’s a one chapter deal, people should be able to vote once and only once.

    First, set up your description of each voting level however you wish. Most awesome, bestest ever, I don’t care. It should reflect an accurate description of what you’re attempting to rate.

    How about a dual score? Allow everyone who reads a chapter to be allowed to vote on that chapter. There will be an overall score which reflects all the votes. There will also be a current score that reflects only votes made on that latest chapter. The writeup in the scoring section should inform the voter that even though he’s voting after reading that particular chapter that the vote should be for the whole story so far. An overall 8.3 and a current 9.4 would tell me it started out slow (or unpopular) and got better. Of course, only people who had read that far would vote for the current chapter. I never said it was perfect.

    Another possibility is to use cookies to allow a reader to update his score. I don’t know if this is possible – I just know what I want the mighty computer to do. Reader A reads the first chapter, gives it an 8. A few weeks later, he reads chapter 2, thinks the story’s 9 material, he votes 9, the 8 he voted earlier is upgraded in the score. Each person only gets one vote, he’s just able to modify it as he reads more of the story.

    A word about every author’s favorite – the troll. We all get them, we all complain about them. All I can offer is a comparison. I’m working on my fourth page of listings as Old Fart, have 4 stories under another name and co-author another 4. That’s 40 stories, most of them completed. I get emails every day telling me what a good writer I am. When I look at a person whose only creativity consists of voting a 1 and dropping somebody’s score, I feel sorry for the guy. I wonder how many emails he gets praising him for his contributions to the site.

    The OLD FART

65. I don’t have a problem with having a better scoring system. I just don’t see the new one as fixing the things the authors are complaining about.

    The new system just replaces one simplistic point system with a different one. A rating based on words rather than numbers is better, but only goes part way.

    I see two things that effect scores.

    1. As stated earlier new stories enjoy a honeymoon period with high initial scores.

    2. The other is that many stories with high pruriant interest average higher scores. This is often without regard to quality or quantity.

    I have seen several very mean emails from anonymous readers about stories that had no sex in them, even when the stories stated there was no sex in them

    Quality should not be about the stroke value. It should be about imaginative writing, the proper use of English, the editing and yes about how long a story is. Writing and editing is hard work. Ratings should reward good work.

    How can you compare a full feature Cmsix or Al Steiner novel to a 5k story of any ilk? I don’t think you can.

    I rarely read any stories of less than 50K in size. I can’t stand to just get into a story and then have it end.

    A decent rating system needs to take into account many factors.

    Quality of Writing
    Imagination
    Size of Story
    Character Development
    Editing

    This would better reflect the authors efforts.

66. Actually I don’t think that either of these changes are productive.

    Score compression and scores are one in the same problem from my POV.

    Very seldom does a story rate a 10. But I often give 10’s because that’s the only way I can really send a signal that the story was good.

    Yet every so often I rate a story a 1 because so many people have rated it high – a 9.5 or something and it’s really (IMO) an 8 and the only way I have to reduce the score is to be one of the first couple dozen to rate a story and rate it down.

    Often, stories that are otherwise pretty good have some grammatical oopses – you know the kind – where you’re reading along and instead of using the contraction for you are the author uses your instead. Coarse for course, and a half dozen more of the same sorts of oopses.

    I have nothing to give but a 10 or a nine. So if the story is well constructed it gets a 10 – if the grammar oopses and story construction (logical progression) isn’t the best it gets a 9.

    But maybe it really deserves a 9.4. Pretty good story, but not outstanding.

    So the suggestion is to institute 10ths into the scoring system and see if the range changes.

    Another writer suggested a dual scoring system. That might work if one score was for the overall story likability – plot, characters and setting and one was for construction that includes grammar, spelling and logic.

    I’d still suggest scoring based on 10ths though.

    Finally, if the story deserves a 10 it should stay a 10. If the story is ‘only’ a 9 it should not be compressed to a 7.4 (or whatever)

    Bottom line? I use scores to see what I want to read. As another poster said – I seldom – and I mean really seldom – even glance at a story that is rated less 9. If the description sounds good I might give an 8.8 or above a glance. But if the author has spelling or grammar issues – I’m outa-there like a shot and I may give the abomination a 1 to boot.

    To authors – want a good score (regardless of the system used), 1) run the damn spell checker with the grammar checker turned on. 2) Ask for help from an editor – not a proof reader alone – to help with logic continuity, words that are spelled correctly but misused and homonyms that don’t belong.

    Finally, another poster suggested that raters would have to post a comment. Nah. I won’t even rate a story unless it’s outstanding. Not worth my time to compose something for a story that has problems.

67. Discarding a percentage of votes –either high or low — is a BAD idea. You are making assumptions about why a reader voted, and inherently demean his input. I use the full scale when I vote — for the record, I have never given Asa either a 10 or a 1 — but I have given those scores to other authors.

    Any “discarding” of votes will result in me not voting.

68. I think you also have to weigh number of votes;

    A story with 175 votes at 9.6 does not equal a story with 175000 votes at 9.6.

69. I just realized that my previous entry didn’t address your direct questions in your blog but only gave a wish list of more work for you to do. 🙂 (I still believe more voting catagories would be better)

    About weighted scores; My thought is that I have learned through experience what the votes represent under the current system. All the changes will do, in my mind, is make me learn all over again what the numbers really represent. It is all relative.

    So will the rating system changes end up being beneficial? Only time will tell. Call it the great experiment.

    As to the Descriptions; If you are just asking people to vote on wether they like the “story” as in plot then this is an improvement over the old way.

    I like changing the descriptions for 1 thru 10. I agree with those disliking “Amazing; Impossible to Improve” for a 10. I propose dropping “impossible to improve” and just use “Amazing” or some other superlative. Maybe: “One of the best I’ve ever read”

    Good luck!

70. I wonder if making the voting more accurate. You should allow the reader to vote on areas like the story reviewers do. Plot, Stroke Ratio, Technical Quality, Appeal to reader. That way when a reader votes, they are addressing specific areas for each vote. Somehow I just think if the voter has the ability to say, good plot, bad spelling. The scores would be more accurate in determining the real overall rating.

71. I think the new voting is good. You should think about not letting the score show until person votes on story. That way you have to determine how you feel about the story after you read it, not how everyone else reviews it.

72. I agree that it’s time for a change of the scoring system. To me, the best thing would be the thing you say you won’t do, and that’s scrap it altogether.

    One of the problems that I have with the current system, is that it is easy for people to tank a story, by giving it a 1, just to lower the score. I have seen this happen time and time again, where a perfectly good story gets a bad score, because a reader or group of readers give it a low score just to sway the score.

    Another problem is that people may score a story low based on the first chapter, and to an epic novel, that’s not really fair. There is also no way to change your score if your opinion of the story changes. One way to fix this problem, is to only let a story get voted on if it’s completed.

    Personally, I never vote on a story unless it’s completed. I have read a lot of stories that start OK, but for some reason, go in the toilet long before the end.

    Another problem with scoring, is the second way stories are rated, and that’s by the number of “downloads” it gets. The thing that I have noticed, is that the more chapters a story has, the more downloads it can get if the story is uploaded or read 1 chapter at a time. Each chapter’s downloads get added to the total. However, if a story gets read all in one sitting, or is uploaded complete, it only gets 1 download for the whole thing.

    Regarding the “timeliness of updates” thing that was mentioned, that’s a bad idea for many reasons. That said, however, I won’t ever post another story until it’s done, and at least in the editing stage, if not ready to post as complete.

    Anyway, that’s my 2 pennies worth.

73. I won’t lie, I haven’t read all of the comments that have been left. Just way too many of them.

    I like the idea of being able to give and get votes on a story I’ve written or read.

    I agree with others here who say that voting on a multi-chapter story should be done ONLY when the story is complete and I think only those who read the entire story should vote on it. I write this as someone who has written both long and short stories.

    I also agree that a Two-part scoring system sounds attractive to me. One score for the story (plot, character, etc.) and one score for the technicals (Typos, Spelling, punctuation, etc.) My longest story is my best rated story. Sadly, it also is my worst edited story. For this I apologize but it’s true.

    One other thing I agree with that others have mentioned. Is it possible to track who is voting for what? Maybe have the vote of someone registered on the site count more or differently than someone who is logging a vote anonymously. Combined with allowing only a single vote per story, no matter how long it is and forcing readers to vote at the END of the story, this could stop people voting mulitple times and would stop the ‘drag’ caused by those who always give stories a ten and those who always give a story a one. Just an idea.

74. Frankly, if you start playing statistical tricks with people’s votes, so that when they say ‘9’ and it really is an ‘8’ or maybe an 8.5 if more people like the story than not, people will wonder why they should bother to vote at all, if they have no idea how that vote will translate.

    The voting system is arbitrary; there’s nothing that can be done about it. People vote their favorite authors up; if they decide they personally don’t like an author, they vote the author down, particularly if there’s another story by one of their favorite authors running.

    Forget statistical games, just let people vote. No matter what method you try, it will still be arbitrary. I’ve seen several people here who say the same thing about scores I do: I read things about 9.5 if I like the story description or if the story is by an author I like. I could go on, but everyone knows what I mean. Change the text for the point values if you want, don’t bother with playing statistical games. If no one can figure out how the voting works, fewer people will vote and the more effect the bad apples will have.

    If it was up to me, I’d change the number of choices to three: “Liked it” “It was okay” and “Didn’t like it” and the first score would be worth a 100 points, the next 99 and the next 98.

    Gina Marie

75. I’ve been a strong promoter of the curve for scoring for a long while now. Since this will be implemented, I can only suggest to the authors who feel that some of their older works might be judged unfairly by the new curve working on their old scores with the new score bloat taken into affect, perhaps it’s time to revise and repost those stories a little? Or maybe I’m just giddy about exposing new readers who might not otherwise see some of the real gems on SOL because they’re buried under newer work?

    I also like the idea of the dual (or more) voting system. Voting on the technical merits (or lack of) some stories has long been my dream, and I’ve gotten lazy over the years and usually don’t find the effort worth it to write a comment to an author to tell them that a spellchecker isn’t an optional piece of software for them. Similarly, once divorced of excruciatingly bad plots or plot implementations some people probably deserve the credit of being able to just sit down and knock out an effortless looking piece that doesn’t do anything for you.

    Someone mentioned the Amazon ranking/recommendation system. This would be really exciting, but I’m unclear on how much trouble it would be or how much value it might actually have. The trouble, as I see it, is that the story codes probably already fill that role to some extent already. If you’re an avid reader of monkey scat porn then you’re probably already filtering out everything but your hobby based on the codes, and/or you’re going to merely end up making recommendations along the lines of the story codes + scoring. That might add something, but I don’t know it would add enough to make it worthwhile for Lazeez to implement it.

    Finally, I think the people who suggest alternatives to “impossible to improve” are spot on. I comfort myself by knowing I’m a critical sort of person, and I simply don’t know if I’ve ever read anything that I couldn’t imagine something to be improved upon somewhere. The single vote per story per account (changeable)issue also sounds like a good idea.

76. . May I begin by thanking you for your efforts with respect to this site – I think that it is the best run on the Web. Insofar as the naming changes are concerned, I don’t care, although I find the”impossible to improve” to be ridiculous. I find your mathematical perambulations too complex for my simple mind. Remember the title of the Kentucky Fried Chicken Franchisees’ Manual – the KISS manual – Keep It Simple, Stupid. You want to encourage people to vote, so make it easy. I would require every author to certify that the story has been proofread by someone else and insist on a pithy descriptin and accurate codes.

77. In the 4 years I’ve been with SOL I have never used the voting score to determine what story I should or should not read. Nor have I used the download count of a story. And I will never read a critic’s review. If a story’s description interests me I will download it regardless of the score. I have as a result found many 6, 5, and yes even a 4 that where a pleasure to read. The spelling or grammar may have been a bit of a bother, but the imagination of the story was always worth the time to read.

    As an author I’ve never cared or bothered with reviews, critics, reader scores or reader comments. They are not why I write.

    My suggestion would be to dump the whole voting system.

    But this is your site and you and others seem to want it, so have at it. For me, I’ll go on using the story description written in the author’s own words to determine if I’m interested in reading a story or not.

78. I agree that titling the highest category “Impossible to improve”
    has its problems and so “Outstanding” maybe better…

    A problem I find is where the story is released as a work in progress the author asks for comments on the work as is…
    these work in progress scores …
    should be tracked separately to the Final/finished work..

    maybe you should consider as some others have suggested taking the
    individual’s scoring into account…
    possibly including not actually
    using a score until the individual has registered vote for 5/10 stories…

    to address the area of Story vs Style/technique/proof reading/spelling etc

    why not have a similar set of scale boxes for these… they should just be reported to the author on a vote basis.. and not
    averaged..

    excellent site
    thank you

79. Someone mentioned the Amazon ranking/recommendation system.

    That would be me, I think.

    This would be really exciting, but I’m unclear on how much trouble it would be or how much value it might actually have.

    “How much trouble” depends on what data’s currently tracked. If scoring is “total accumulated” and “total votes” (I suspect this is how it’s currently done) then the extant scoring information wouldn’t be useful for this. However, a new scoring mechanism that allows Amazon-like behavior (and incidentally changing votes over time) is pretty simple. Space-intensive, but straightforward.

    The trouble, as I see it, is that the story codes probably already fill that role to some extent already. If you’re an avid reader of monkey scat porn then you’re probably already filtering out everything but your hobby based on the codes, and/or you’re going to merely end up making recommendations along the lines of the story codes + scoring.

    Anyone interested in monkey scat porn is has a fairly narrow set of codes to look for. Other codes (rom, slow, MF) are almost useless for searching. Heh, I found a site that had stories marked ‘piv’ and it confused the hell out of me, until I discovered it meant ‘penis in vagina’. You’d think that would be a meaningless code.

    *ahem*

    Anyway, codes can be useful for coarse filtering, but it doesn’t handle subjective evaluation. Most codes are binary and give you an idea of content, but not *quality*. The current numeric system doesn’t really do a good job of indicating quality because of value inflation and compression.

    That might add something, but I don’t know it would add enough to make it worthwhile for Lazeez to implement it.

    I think it would add quite a bit. As I said, the current numeric system isn’t a lot of use, I think. A affinity-based system could be quite valuable.

    I don’t much *care* what Mr. Monkey Scat Pornlover likes. If I can find out what people who like a story by Nick Scipio, Frank Downey, or Al Steiner like, well *that* is something that will lead me to other stories I can expect to enjoy.

80. To me the scoring is an integral part of why I read a story. I usually look at the description, codes AND the score of a story to decide if it is worth reading. If a story is at least a 7.5 the codes mean almost as much as the score. If it is a serial story from an unknown author, I usually wait several chapters to try to see if it will be completed or left hanging. I have emailed Lazeeze once or twice about this very subject. He said the problem is trying to use one thing to satisfy everyone. But, as long has Lazeeze is asking… my preferences for the voting system is using #1 to try to get more votes and a combination of #2 and #4 for the scoring.

    1. Create a voting system like SoL’s email responses. Once a week the member when he/she signs on will get a page that lists ALL non-voted stories read or downloaded by that member in the past week or since last sign on which ever is longer. On this ‘sign on’ page show story name, description/codes and dropdown score bar. If the person signing on has elected to use the category voting system, display the categories instead of a single score option. Have a vote button at the bottom of the page that inputs the score(s) and sends the member to the page originally requested/bookmarked.

    2. The problem with automatic scoring of 5 is, we only get ONE vote per story. I have read some stories that were wonderful, but the ending absolutely sucked. Three Pieces of Silver is one example. Give us one during the story and one to replace that score after it is (final). That would encourage me to vote on a story in progress knowing that my vote would not be wasted on a story with a lousy ending. OR, allow each member to vote as each chapter comes out, and a final score to replace the chapter scores.

    3. Create a weighted system that scores grammar/spelling, story plot, stroke and how well you like the story (“Its 3am and I cant put this story down!”). Allow the votes collected in this system to count as two or three votes in the overall score.

    4. OR, keep the simplified voting and create # 2. only allowing authors, authors/editors, authors/editors/select-members(i.e. ME! lol) to vote in the categorized.

    Now as for the rescoring…

    If a story stayed on the All Time Long/Short Classics lists for more than x weeks then give it a higher weighted score to start off. Depending on the number of weeks it stayed and where it stayed in the list.

    Display each stories current score until it has at least x number of votes under the new system. Then show an asterisk or remove the asterisk next to the score to indicate it is a new score. After a few months, just show the new score.

    JR|away (Fawks)

81. I don’t think this has been mentioned. Scrap the scores altogether and use the terms. Have a pie-chart indicating what percentage of voters voted for each term. Several advantages.
    1. It’s simple enough to avoid scaring off potential voters.
    2. It nullifies the “vote nicely” tendency since you don’t have a single figure to compare to.
    3. You could have a seperate catergory (“did not vote”) to capture the lazy ones as well.
    4. If you’ve got a record of previous votes, old stories can be easily converted.

    Personally, I don’t think weighting the votes will work. People will continue to vote biased, but they’ll take their mark off the new, weighted score.

82. I suggest you borrow what the imdb algorithm for movie rating used to be (they changed it a bit with registration) that, basically, gives everyone the average score until it gets enough votes. That is, if you tend to get 100 votes per story and the average story gets a score of 6 then when you get 10 votes for a story that are an average of 9 you actually get something more like 100 mean votes and 10 votes of 9 making the story more of a ~6.3 story.

    I think the actual algorithm used was a Bayesian rating scheme where the rating was = ( (avg_num_votes * avg_rating) + (this_num_votes * this_rating) ) / (avg_num_votes + this_num_votes).

    This means that only once you have a typical number of votes can you see that the stories score will be halfway between the voters score and the average score. This also helps to not have the inflation you see.

83. As a new author with a slow, starting story, I really hate people voting too early (see my SOL blog for statistical mutterings about its impact).

    How about letting people score like they do now, but let the author decide when they can score (they can always vote, if the story is marked finished).

    But instead of the raw score, show the percentile. So instead of showing 9.35 you show, that this story is better than or equal to 75% of all other stories.

    I also like the idea of multiple scoring parameters: idea, execution, technical style.

    Also, as an author and statistics nut, I would really like to see the flow of votes, so a time (or voting-number) depending graph would be cool. The reader could also use that for gauging if the story has lost its focus (a lot of the really long serials could be a lot shorter imho, as they are just recycling the idea over and over again).

84. I like the new wording but the rating thing is kind of confusing. I know you’re doing it because older stories don’t have scores as high but I think that’s mostly because most people can’t read them unless they go around looking. And I meen looking by using the search function. Maybe if they were easier to find they’d get more readers and higher scores?

    The other thing that might be nice, and one person wrote something close to this, is to be able to vote just on a chapter or section and a vote for the story over all.

    That or being able to change your vote as one chapter can really effect an entire story and if you’ve already voted you can’t change it.

    I think that would make things a little more acurate.

85. It would really be nice if a story could have two scores or a “story” score and a comment or other rating.

    I read a lot of stories which have a well developed plot and a great story but drive me to distraction with spelling, grammar, and other “proofreading” errors. I hate to downgrade the story score because of the mechanics but they would really be much more enjoyable if someone would proofread them.

    Your new descriptive ratings are an improvement. However, no story is impossible to improve upon. I’ll never give a story that rating.

    Maybe there could be another list with multiple boxes where the voter could check “other” items such as poor grammar, poor spelling, excessive time between chapters, etc. etc., allow multiple items to be checked, and just report the number of voters who checked each item.

    It would also be nice to close the hole which lets a person vote multiple times for/against the same story.

86. I’ll stick my oar in and probably get shot down for doing so.

    I’ve seen a couple of good idea’s mentioned here. But unfortunately I haven’t got the time available to read them all.

    It would probably be too difficult to put into operation, but I think the idea of two separate votes on every story is a good one. One vote for the stories technical interpretation (that would keep the grammar boys happy and might encourage some more writers to use editors) and one vote on the stories actual content itself. I’m not sure how you would then rate the stories, maybe an average of both.

    There are authors on this site who are extremely good technical writers, but the content of some of their stories isn’t to everyone’s liking. There are authors whose technical grasp of English is wanting (and I don’t exclude myself from this group). But who’s stories to some readers are compelling to read.

    If every story that is opened, also had an automatic middle of the road vote on them. It might encourage people to go down and lower the vote, if the story didn’t hold their interest or the presentation was so bad that they felt they could not continue reading. If they did get to the end of the tale, raise or lower the votes accordingly. It’s just my idea to encourage those who don’t bother to vote to do so.

    Also unusually high or low votes that are entered by fans or trolls should be either automatically filtered and brought into line with the general voting on the story or should be discarded completely. I would suggest that the current voting position is displayed at the end of the story as well. It might encourage readers who disagree with the current score to vote either way.

    The Wanderer

87. I agree the scoring system, as it now stands, is meaningless. My suggestion would be to implement the system you now use for the reviews. Simple, descriptive, and much more meaningful to a reader.

88. Excellent points, The Wanderer, but that won’t work. No one owes the readers at StoriesOnline more than I do, no one.

    When I wanted a Silver Clitoride, they made sure I got it, flabbergasting the establishment at Alt Sex Stories Repository. To confound them even further the readers at StoriesOnline made sure I got the one the very next month also, prompting a change in the rules so I couldn’t keep getting every one.

    I believe I’m still the only author to receive two straight Silver Clitorides for the same story. It was NanoVirus, just in case there is somebody somewhere who hasn’t heard.

    At the end of the year I received a Golden Clitoride for that same story. Since then I’ve asked every year that I not be considered for any more awards, Silver or Golden. Even red necks like me have sense enough not to be gluttons.

    All the above is to let you know how I feel about the readers at StoriesOnline. They are wonderful, but, some of them are also assholes.

    No matter how the scoring mechanism is twisted, turned, or manipulated it will always come back to people giving the highest marks for stories they want to do well and the lowest marks for stories that they don’t want to do well. The ones that vote have their own reasons for voting, and after all, it is their vote. They deserve to get some form of participation. If they want to give me a low zinger, more power to ‘em. If they want to give me a 10 simply because I’m so handsome, well that’s all right too.

    The scores at StoriesOnline will always be a popularity contest. They can’t be a marker for technical merit because the wonderful readers, as a whole, are not qualified to comment on technical merit. I don’t mean that as a slam, it’s just the way I see it. Hell, I’m not qualified to comment on technical merit. Take it any way that you want to. After all this time you still can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

    I’m also not saying that Lazeez shouldn’t keep trying, if that’s what he wants to do. One of the very best things about StoriesOnline is Lazeez’s constant devotion to improving the site.

    In the mean time, if you’re an author, and you want higher scores, try harder.

    cmsix

89. I like the new descriptions, rather than the number system. However “Impossible to Improve” should be replaced with “Worthy of Publication”, or a similar wording.

    I will freely admit to not voting for stories that are either poorly written or just don’t hold my interest. So, just too make things a little bit more difficult, weighting the voting might even the system.

    I choose stories on some basic criteria. i) stories codes ii) decription/blurb iii) length (the longer the better) iv) age of story (earlier stories with a rating of 7 plus are usually worth 10 or 11 compared to some of the latest postings. The greatest problem with any rating system is that people will use it for personal attacks on authours. Anyone brave enough to post their work should be encouraged not flamed because of it. However anyone that can come up with a fair and balanced system should patent it, as it will be a first.

90. Wow! Lots of opinions! Which is good to see. Of course, most, if not all of these folks are the ones that vote as they should. I think I read about half of the listings before I wussed out.
    I agree with most of the posts that I don’t normally read anything less than an 9. Until I run out, then I troll for good descriptions or previously read authors. Yet, even then I normally won’t read something that has a 7.5 with a good number of voters.
    I would like to make a suggestion.
    I think voting should be tied into commenting. You should not be able to vote, unless you have made and sent a comment to the author. This would be a pain for the reader, but it would certainly be a deterrent to the “easy clickers”. It would be like saying, “To mark a vote, you need to care enough to send a comment to the author.”
    😉 just my 3.4cents (inflation ya know)
    ~Jay

91. After I wrote my last comment, I went to my library and voted on a half dozen stories I’d recently read.
    I looked over the various descriptions and voted accordingly. I think the votes were mostly 6’s and 7’s. These are on stories I enjoyed and read all the way through. The screen would come up telling that the score was now [9.21 – 9.51] on the ones I did.

    With the old wording, I would do exactly the same thing. I would read the descriptions and vote accordingly. I recall a few 8’s in the past, but most of my voting has been 9 or 10.

    If I spend 30 hours a week writing “Jack and Jill – The Second Book” and end up with a score of 7 or 8 simply because we’re making it “fair” (see graduated income tax, minimum wage, big brother knows better than you how to run your life), I doubt I’ll continue with it.

    There’s just something about seeing a 9.27, inflated though it may be, that makes me want to continue to write. I call it appreciation.

    The OLD FART

92. I for one would say that a reader can vote a second time on a serial that recently finished. The first description I would sugest something along the lines of “Future classic”.

    I have been keeping track of the scores recieved by my latest story and approximately 10% of the readers put it in their libraries.

    Only about 4% have voted so far about what I would expect since its a serial.

    Knight Ranger

93. Some interesting comments, but I don’t really see how much can be improved. I hope it can, but I won’t hold my breath. VotERS are fair, scoring systems are not because they can be defeated by anyone who wants to cheat and skew a score. A fairer system will be cumbersome and fewer readers will vote.

    Even the number of downloads isn’t really as indicative of the popularity of a story as authors think. I go into a story and read the first few paragraphs then decide I don’t like it. I quit reading and back out before getting to the bottom of the page where the voting form is found. I counted as a download even though I didn’t read enough of it to matter. A good teaser generates a lot of that sort of download, even if the story or writing is junk.

    I judge the stories I pick to read by the scores given, on other readers recommendations, and on the story codes included with the teaser. I seldom vote on stories. Ones I do vote on get high scores. That’s happened maybe 10 times in the approximately 2 years I’ve been reading on SOL but has not happened in probably the last year. I never vote low scores because I never make it to the form. I tend to prefer longer stories, and do not see how anyone can vote after just one or two chapters. You can judge the writing, but not the story in that case. Instead of voting, I send authors constructive criticism and or point out typos. If I took the time to do that, I like what I read, even if I thought there was room for improvement (there is always room for that).

    Canyondick

94. I don’t check the scores or download numbers and rarely vote since story quality seems to have no factor in scores. Scrapping the entire voting system would be my choice but you already said that was not an option.

    How about adding something on the user preferences page for us readers that don’t care to participate in voting so we can choose not to see scores and download numbers in the story list. If I really like a story I send a comment to the author in the box at the bottom of the page.

95. Perhaps one of the things I like best about the SOL website is the rating system, flaws not withstanding. I’m one of those who doesn’t bother even trying to read a story if the scores are too low.

    I’ve seen lots of ideas toward the changes. Many of them are good. An equal number of them are impractical. I don’t envy you as you try to distill these ideas down.

    I wonder if it would be appropriate for a very small comment box to be included with the voting. I don’t want to discourage people from actually writing the authors and giving them long and glowing regards, or lengthy feedback. For example, when a person leaves feedback on eBay there is a small comment box. Sure, there will be a lot of “WOW what a great story”. But there may be some useful comments like “Spelling mistakes distracting – liked story otherwise.”

    I also wonder if it would be practicable to allow longer stories to have two voting tiers. One set for voting along the way as the chapters are posted, and one set for those who get to the end of the story. I see a few benefits to this. Some people are just not going to like the story subject, and will want to vote before the story end. Sometimes a story starts out great, and I’ll give it a decent score – but then the author loses inspiration and the story tanks in the end. I’d like to see both scores presented.

    I’m sure whatever scoring system we end up with will have a lot of thought put into it.

    Thank you for your hard work.

    Emily

96. I have longed for a system where we could enter a grade i.e. 82 or 94. A story may only be worth an 82 but, I did like the story and he posts twice a week and I do want to encourage him so the 8 becomes a 9.
    Require a vote before a reader is allowed to view the next story. If a reader abandons a story and logs off, require a vote at the next logon. Multiple choice. Codes, stinks, not worth my time etc.
    There are some stories where I will not vote after reading the first chapter posted. These stories usually involve unfamiliar authors.

97. Forcing me to vote on stories before I can continue reading would make me cast another vote, the much bigger vote of no longer logging in. SOL enforcing voting would not be a positive step.

98. how to implement the new score system without squashing older stories votes?

    How about NOT making it retroactive.
    and after a story makes some many votes, or the score stabilizes, freeze it, then age won’t wither…

99. I haven’t had the time to scroll through all the comments, so this may have already addressed.

    Have you considered allowing voting without commenting? There have been times when I’ve considered voting but really didn’t have much to say about the story. Let’s face it, “Great story,” or whatever really doesn’t tell the writer much. I appreciate both positive and critical comments on my stories, but when you have a couple of thousand people reading and only four or five voting, generally only those who really enjoyed or hated it are going to comment.

100. Disregard my previous regarding comments…forgot what site I was on!

101. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to force someone to vote – what kind of votes do you think you’d get from people forced to make a vote? It would dilute the votes of those who cared enough to vote without the use of a carrot or stick.

     I’m not sure it’s possible to make the voting ‘fair’ (non-inflated), unless you have a voting population who is motivated to vote in the first place without being pushed to do so, and then have a system where the votes were rationed into whatever histogram it’s desired for the votes to be. For example, they’re permitted to only give 5% of their votes as a 10, 10% as 9, 15% as 8, etc. But, you don’t want a system where someone has an incentive to find another story to lowball just so they can give an extra 10 to a new story.

     Perhaps add an 11 category for “Really Really liked it”, and limit that choice to X times per week or Y times per month. That kind of feedback might be informative to readers and authors, since it provides an idea of how many readers spent a limited vote choice on a particular story.

     Another kind of vote could be to allow readers to rate stories within each author – either to pick which of that author’s stories they would recommend to other readers, or rate their top 3 in order. This vote could be changed at any time to replace a previous vote. It might be necessary to limit this vote to stories that have been finished for a set period of time, to avoid inflated votes given to whatever is the author’s current story.

     This feedback would be helpful to readers when looking at a new author’s stories, as a recommendation of which story to start first.

     It also might be feedback to authors to know which of their stories are liked the most. I suspect that quite a lot of authors would find that their highest scored story would not be the one that gets the most “i like this one the best” votes.

     I’m not sure it’s a good idea to statistically downgrade votes or change their weight, as that can discourage votes if they think their votes don’t count equally with everyone else’s. Or, it could cause people to inflate their vote intentionally so that it downgrade to what they feel it should be.

     Everyone is already familiar with the current voting system, so it would take a while before readers would be comfortable that they know what a 7 or 8 or 9 means under the new system. It seems to me that readers evalute current voting more like a relative preference than a story being “excellent” or “very good”, so perhaps keep the existing vote system, but also have an option to tell the reader that a story was in the 90th percentile of scores, top 5%, etc.

     maroon

102. Lazeez, the current system of 1 to 10 provides a nice range for grading a story. The problem is most stories which should score below a seven are so unreadable that the average reader stops after a few paragraphs and does not go to the bottom to score the story. This creates a bias toward higher scores as the stories that deserve the lower scores tend to be unscored.

     If you really want to change the scoring system and make it more meaningful for both the readers and the authors try this. For stories with more than twenty votes provide a distribution of the scores as a percentage of total votes. This works best if you reduce the scoring range from 1 though 10 to 1 through 5. Using this system the following is a sample score.

     Average Score 4.25; 5’s 55 percent; 4’s 30 percent; 3’s 7 percent, 2’s 1 percent, and 1’s 7 percent.

     This way the reader and the author can separate out the troll factor. The same system works with 1 though 10 but it would require a larger display space to show all categories.

103. I like the scoring system in general, it helps me see whether I may like something. Part of the problem I see is that you can’t rate a single chapter. After all, most of the stories on the site are fluid, and the authors aren’t always consistant.

     An easy way to do public reviews might help the authors get more feedback also. Or maybe a bbs where authors can get dialog on their stories and chapters.

     I agree that as it stands now, it’s very hard to tell the difference between a 9.2 and a 9.7; but that’s okay too because peoples’ basis for their votes can be wildly different. Someone can love Avatar for the relationships and tolerate the BDSM. Others might love it for the BDSM and tolerate the religious aspects. The only way to help that is to be able to leave a comment or review with your score.

104. I don’t like the new scoring. As a previous writer said, the score is the main incentive to contnuing to write, as there are precious few comments filed. If a story I have that was a 9 is now a 7.1, what is my incentive to contnue, or the incentive to others ro read. I doubt I would look at a story that has a 7.1. Of course, that would probably change over time.

     More of a problem than inflated scores is radical scores that change a rating. How about throwing out all scores that are more than 2 sd’s above the average for that story after so many votes are cast. If a story is running at 7.0 after 20 votes, and somone casts a 5.0, throw it out. Obviously a disgruntled reader. Conversly, in the same example, someone casts a 10.0, throw it out. Obviously someone just inflating scores.

     How about also allowing votes after each chapter, with the above proviso? Sometimes a story gets better or worse, but you have alreadt cast your vote.

     I think if you reduce your scores, you are going to lose authors. Many of us are not going to put all the tiome and effort into this for a 7.0, that would have been a 9.0 before. What difference does it make, anyway, if the scroes are inflated in your opinion? People are not going to continue reading a bad story anyway. I have seen many more examples of a 7.0 that is a good story in my opinion, than a 9.5 that stunk.

     Or, if you want to make voting meaningful, how about: to vote, you have to write a comment. The cokmments are more useful to us than the votes anyway.

     Just some ideas and thoughts.

     unknown1000u2

105. Wow. Lot’s to think about. I’m not sure I like the fact that all my stories will now be rated as an 8 or below. I think it will keep people from reading them, since the vast majority of people won’t be reading your blog. But, it’s your site.

     I do think that the scores are over inflated, and that’s a problem. When I read a story, if I don’t like the story, I don’t always finish it. Sometimes I’ll still vote on it though, often with a low score.

     I give high scores to stories I like, but only if they don’t have a bunch of grammar and spelling problems.

     Personally, I’ll read something even if the score is low, if I like the content.

     Anyway, I think this move will cost a lot of the authors a lot of new readers, but, like I said, it’s your site.

106. Lazeez,
     I agree with your post, go for it. One thing I wouldn’t mind is a way to leave a short comment on stories similar to Amazon’s reader’s reviews. I know you have the review pages already, so, maybe a link from the story itself to the corresponding Reviews page(s)?

     Regarding the comment on older stories getting shorted because of the upwards drift over time in median scoring, could this be taken into account so that a slightly revised formula be applied based on that year’s median?

107. I work hard on my stories and to see them drop in score even when they’ve not been voted on, simply to keep things “fair” somehow doesn’t seem fair at all … even if it does happen to everyone else, too.

     And maybe I’m wrong in this … but I see my 9s eventually becoming 8s and my 8s becoming 7s and my 7s becoming 6s just to make/keep things “fair” … Somehow that’s not inspiring at all as a writer.

     As for voting …

     Under the old system I rated stories 9s or 10s … and sometimes 8s. With the wording of the new system, the stories I read will be getting 9s and 8s and 7s. With the way 10 reads now, I can’t see myself giving it anymore … unless there’s something out there that really knocks me out of my chair.

     No matter what you do, I still think you’re going to have:

     a) readers who will give 10s and 1s for whatever reasons

     b) readers who give scores that are low, but won’t write and tell the author why

     c) readers who won’t vote

     The same old thing, but with different numbers that will simply be lower. And how inspiring are these lower numbers going to be to new authors? Not to mention us older authors who enjoy seeing a 9 even if it is inflated now and again.

     I don’t mind an 8 or 7 under the old system … I knew what to expect when I posted the stories … but under the new one an 8 somehow doesn’t look as nice.

     Seems to me you’d be just as well off to drop the 10 and don’t let any votes go lower than 5.

     Stormy Weather

108. As an author, I find myself siding with JaySpeed, who said,”…I don’t normally read anything less than an 9…. I troll for good descriptions or previously read authors. Yet, even then I normally won’t read something that has a 7.5 with a good number of voters.
     I would like to make a suggestion.
     I think voting should be tied into commenting. You should not be able to vote, unless you have made and sent a comment to the author. This would … certainly be a deterrent to the “easy clickers”. It would be like saying, “To mark a vote, you need to care enough to send a comment to the author.”

     I commend Lazeez for his constant attempts to make StoriesOnline better. And he is right, the current voter’s seem to opt for a 10 if they like a story, and either a 9 or an 8 if they don’t. Of course, there are a few faddists who muck things up with deliberately low scores for perfectly good stories too.

     By now, I realize that my own writing has leveled off, and while one story may be better than the next, they’re not that far apart. Therefore, I’d much prefer hearing from the reader.

109. This has to be the most commented on blog you’ve written yet. Then considering how any scoring system raises the specter of ‘unfairness’, I guess that’s to be expected.

     We’ve come to expect fairness in everything we do. I’m sorry folks but in MHO fairness only works in the stories we write. Everything else in our life is in our own abilities. (sorry for the rant-it’s been a bad week.)

     Personally, I look to the number of downloads for my stories not the score. Even if the reader only looks at a paragraph or two that means something to me.

     For multi-chapter stories I look for a increase in downloads with every chapter posted. To me that means I’ve held their attention one more time. That means more to me than the than any score.

     The other coment is that I like the improved comment section. Good, bad or indifferent, it’s all good to me.

     So I guess I’d vote for, leave the scoring system as is or get rid of it all together. Someone will always be unhappy, no matter what you do.

     Allen Wilson

110. Hey. This score matter is a very tricky one, – and the problem of getting the “non-voting” to vote is another matter. A little “tecnical” proposal….:
     Lets say I download a story to day,
     next time I log on and select a story to download, – I’m reminded that I owe a vote, – and the vote-page for the story pops up – in a way so that I can’t download without voting, – something like clicking on a link on the crack- and porno-sites…?
     Personly I use the scores in selecting stories to read, as I seldom go for a story below 9, if I do,it has to have the quite right description.

111. Lazeez,

     I’m OK with the new system. My only comment would be to delete the last three options. Quite frankly, I don’t need the comments of anyone to the effect that the story is “Pretty bad”, or “You call this a story?” Those people I want to tell “you got what you fucking paid me for — which was nothing.”

     So, Go with your word descriptions but I’d recommend deleting those truly negative options.

     Tom Land

112. I’ve posted a follow up to this blog post. You can read my comments on the various suggestions here

113. I have a problem with only one category of rating for a story. A system like for other subjective judgments i.e figure skating, gymnastics etc. would help.
     One mark for artisic merit: plot development, character develoment, originality of story etc.
     Another mark for technical merit: grammar, punctuation, spelling, sentence structure etc.
     The two marks can be given equal or different weightings to arrive at a composite score.
     gbin269

114. As an author, I think the two-tier scoring system will work best. (One for content and one for readability – grammar, etc.)

     The total of the score, whether a 9 or a 2, doesn’t matter much to me. There are thousands of readers out there who read and don’t vote or comment; I get about one note per 500 downloads.

     The current system is okay as far as numbers; the intended improvement will help weed out some of the trolls. I’d like to know if I can improve my stories, but I’m dependent on feedback for that to happen. If a reader downloads it and doesn’t vote or comment, should his/her opinion count?

     I like the new wording, except for the top and bottom. I don’t have any suggestions for replacements, sorry 🙂

     Janna Leonard

115. I think the new system will initially tend to lower the scors for stories, not all a bad thing if the numbers you quoted are correct. I have 120 stories posted with an average score of 8.90 and I have found that if a new story scores above 9.00 after the first 11 votes it tends to stay high, i.e., voters tend to vote higher when they know others have voted high too.

     The only “problem” I have ever had with voting is there are a couple of voters that seem to dislike me personally and always vote a 1. I have never read a story that is bad enough to warrant a 1 so I take that personally. I know that there isn’t anything you can do about people like that so I just accept it a spart of being an author.

     Please keep up the good work and I for one appreciate your site.

116. Hum… Well I am not sure I like the idea of a waited system. It seems like you are putting a Band-Aid on to fix a problem. And yes I will find it very hard to have my stories drop from 9s to 7 or 8s. I am not saying I will quit writing, but I know I will not have my heart in it to post new story’s here. The only real way I can see to address the issue when you institute the change, is for you to delete all the old votes. I know this sounds impractical, but frankly It would be easier for me to take if I knew my story’s had 7s or 8s because that’s what the reader voted. Having the score artificially lowered, well it just goes against the grin. I realize every author will be in the same boat. But frankly, the new score will be artificial and completely meaningless to me as an author. That is if I get over the shock of loosing so many points.

     One problem with your suggested approach is that this alienates the voters opinion of the process in the first place. I truly think that if you subtract points from what votes already voted, you will alienate more voters from the process. And If I am understanding correctly all future votes will only be counted at the lower values. I tell you what. If I am the first person to vote on a story and I gave the story an 8. Then the results come back, that I am the first vote and the overall rating for the story is now a 7. Well I would go ballistic to find my vote didn’t count for what I voted. To overcame this, I would either vote all 10s or not at all. And could easily see others voting 1’s or not at all in repose to the change.

     The most objectionable part however, is that a someone else story doing poorly is going to make my story look like it is doing poorly.

     So maybe I am thinking more about the unintended consequences of the change. In either case, the only real choice I can see is to restart the voting process from scratch under the new value system. That and forget the weighted scouring.

     I can’t tell you for sure what my reaction will be if my story’s drop one or two points in value overnight. The only thing I can say for sure is that I will not be a happy with it.

     Timm

117. Hi, Lazeez:
     Have you thought about decile scoring? By that I mean, regardless of the numerical score (or word score) after a period of time — 1 month? 3 months? — the stories would be rescored as 10s if they were in the top 10%, 9s if they were in the second 10%, and so forth.
     I don’t know if you save scores for any period of time, but if you did for a long enough period the computer could convert each score to its relevant decile location and then the total scores for a story could be recast.
     It would eliminate the vote compression that’s certainly a problem now.

118. Change is needed as there are too many high scores. I have given up on all but long stories. I agree with multi- chapter stories how can one really vote until it is over? Could there be a voting form on say chapter 2 which gives a work in progress vote to encourage (or otherwise)the authors then nothing until after the last chapter when teh score goes back to zero until votes are again cast? Too complicated for you perhaps?

     Other thoughts for the descriptions:- Highly recommended,
     will read again, enjoyable,worth a read,Killed time, have seen better, not worth reading , not worth writing, Ugggh!
     All subjective but they pick up on the emotions and feelings generated by the works

119. I agree some reform is desirable, and feel as do others there are too many choices; three or five would be better IMO.

     New descriptions as just applied are better but note that the follow-on member bookmark system is still using the original numeric score. Also, lists such as the Rising Stars report still rely on numeric score and may become broken as the scores are redefined.

     Finally, I would suggest moving away from representing score numerically in order to break away from the current system and prevent adverse comparisons when the weighted scoring drops the new scoring levels; see comment above about rising stars etc.

     Whatever the outcomes, thanks for what you do for us – it is appreciated.

     – S

120. I never forget that the authors post their stories for free so I admit normally only scoring a 10 or not giving a score at all. Therefore a description based system will enable me to give more variation to the scores.

     That said I have to say that to me a “great” story is surely better than an “excellent” story.

121. I like the new system and to make things fair I would toss out all old scores. Let everyone start over and that will get rid of the old system once and for all.

122. I have to say that I really like the idea of the “description” tags for the vote, altho the weighting dosn’t do much for me. I’m not sure if this will enter into it or not, but for referance, I’m one that generaly does NOT vote the first time I read something…however, I almost always reread a story then vote…let’s me “sleep on it” as it were.

123. I like your views as a reader at your site. I also noticed that change is good ,so do as you intended and let the othere either fish or cut bait. I have talked with a few writers and they do get nurvice over the votes cast as compared to the reader count. My only exception to your new standards would be to remove the number of hits that would confuse but also level the field.

124. I have not read all the comments. So what I am saying might be repeating some of the previous comments.

     I think your first sugestion is a good idea. I do not completely understand your second suggestion. So I cannot comment upon that.

     That said, I usually do not read stories with themes that I do not like. So naturally I end up reading stories which I will like and so the stories end up with a rating of 8-10. That is probably the reason for high scores.

125. I love/hate the scoring system because people do not think in terms of the same criteria; therefore an absolutely objective scoring system is impossible. Yet it IS a helpful tool to determine what’s good and what’s not.

     I wish you could come up with a system to allow scores on (1) the value of the storyline, (2) the entertainment value of the story as written, and (3) the distraction of poor grammar, with the combined (or averaged) score being the actual score for the story from that reader. I suppose this is too complex to be implemented. Thus said, your suggestions are an improvement. If I can’t have it my way, I’d rather have it as you suggest!

126. Two things: First, ratings should be on separate things, did you like it, and does the author have any idea how to write? One can like the idea of a story, but be turned off because the author never graduated from first grade as far as spelling and grammar goes. It would really help authors who truly suck at writing, but have a decent plot idea, if they understood the difference.

     Second, you may want to consider automatic ratings based on reader behavior. For example, when Al Steiner posts, I would bet that 90% of readers read his story within a few hours. They tend to know approximately when he will post the next chapter, and look for it every day as the time approaches. You could come up with something that would rate a story based on how many people continue to read a story as new chapters are posted. Poorly written stories tend to be forgotten, and readers tend to ignore them when they see them post an update.

127. One problem with the present voting system is that some stories may really appeal to a small number of readers, but turn others off completely, (things like extreme violence or extreme filth like scat, etc).
     In the above case the story would perhaps end up with a very low rating and yet be very appealing to the few.
     One way around this may be to give the number of votes for excellent, very good, etc, right down to the poor, horrible, useless end of the voting range. This way people can at least see that the story appealed greatly to some readers.

128. problem with voting is that all the stories have a select group of readers and so a select group of voters.
     so any score will always be selective and baised.
     i think that a voting like with the reviews is better!
     just my 2p, cheers

     ham

129. Just a few observations.

     I come to the site to read the stories. I pay the fees for access. I do not want to be required to vote. I do not want to be required to jump through hoops just to read. Does this make me a troll, or as one of the authors here indicates of some readers, an asshole?

     Just what is a troll, that entity that so many of the authors are condemning? Is that anyone who does not hold their writing in the same high esteem as they do?

     Should there not be a category about stories that are too awful to finish reading?

     There are many good stories here, but there are many more that are just a mess. I do not come here expecting to find marvels of great literature. That is what I find in libraries, at least to some extent. I come here for a particular type of literature normally frowned upon by polite society.

     Anything that makes coming here less of a pleasure and more of a chore, will not be good for the site.

     Requiring comments to the author can be a waste of time. Good praise is always welcomed. Any criticism is just the troll at work, to be ignored.

     Ignore many of the votes, high low or whatever? Why bother to vote at all if that is to be?

     There are some proposed complicated and amazing vote evaluation, weighting, and super voodoo accounting ideas popping up. Just how complicated should a porn site be?

     Hide the votes until the reader has read the story and then voted? Just what would the purpose of the vote anyway? I thought the idea is to serve as a general guide to help people find the stories that they want to read. How could you reconcile yourself if you find out after reading it and see the other votes, that you enjoyed a bad story?

     I find the votes of others interesting but usually of little value. When I see a story that is one massive paragraph with score of 8 or higher, I begin to wonder if I am the only one who noticed.

     The authors say that they want comments. I am quick to thank a writer for sharing their efforts. I appreciate the effort to create and present their work, especially when there is no return.

     However, if there is nothing praiseworthy there, does it serve any purpose to comment? I have been cursed by several writers who would not know the difference between a comma and an amoeba.

     Allow people who care to vote on story and technical ability. These are just guideline opinions anyway.

130. I tend to vote high (because I really liked it, and want to let the author know) or low (because I want to warn off other readers). With the comment system, I will sometimes vote for a middling story, because I can also let the author know that I think they have potential, and should not be discouraged. Otherwise I find it a distraction to vote — especially as, (like some others have mentioned) I mostly read offline, which makes the whole process a nuisance as well as a distraction.

     I would very much like the ability to revise a vote on a multi-chapter story, or else at least vote seperatel on each chapter. Someone mentioned the possibility of a voting form (or better, perhaps just a link to one) on every page, for when one drops — for whatever reason — the particular story one has been reading.

     Multiple catagories for evaluation (eg. the story itself, the quality of the writing, plot and character, overall satisfaction, etc) might be a good *optional* addition to a general all-purpose vote — but I wonder how many catagories would be sufficient, or excessive.

     Is a perpetually recalculating curve really better than an occasion adjustment? I don’t know, myself. It does sound like a perpetually self-adjusting bell-curve mechanism might bother some readers/writers, who may feel it denigrates the readers’ input.

     The descriptions themselves are pretty good — but I read the first one as “Impossible to Remove”, which while awkward, makes more sence to me than “Impossible to Improve”. I thought the proposal of “Future Classic” was going in the right direction. One quibble: I would consider “Great” to be higher praise than “Excellent”; but maybe that’s just me.

131. I think that it would be helpful if the votes were not averaged. Perhaps a breakdown of the votes like how many voted which score would be more advantageous.

     I have posted stories that have scored highly until one person decided to put in a very low score. The average then dropped like a stone.

     Averaging out does not in point of fact, give a particularly accurate representation of whether most of the voters liked or disliked the stories they have voted for, it merely states the median.

     It may well be too much information for the site to hold on to, but if you’re going to provide a service, it would be more helpful for us authors to know how many voters said ‘great’ and how many said ‘rubbish!’ as well as those in between.

     At least then, we would know the majority view, or be able to see the scoring trends.

     I also like the idea of scoring serials (those published in chapters or bits at a time) on a chapter by chapter basis. As someone said to me, many serials have a tendancy to be waffle and never reach a conclusion.

     In addition, it may be as well to have a two tier scoring system whereby an author is marked on the spelling, punctuation and presentation (as this is one thing that will make a story easy or difficult to read) and another for the story itself.

     I know it’s difficult to rate stories at times as their appeal is subjective, however, it’s nice to see that it has been realised that the current method is somewhat flawed.

132. I seem to be with the majority. I generally will give a look to a story that has a rating of at least 9.4 (and) the story’s topic appeals to me. I rarely grade stories below 9.

     That being said, why all the fuss and bother. As the wise muse said, ‘If it ain’t broke, why try to fix it?’

133. Instead of making scores relative to the median of all scores, why not make scores relative to the median of all the user’s scores.

     That effectively washes out all the “always scores 10” voters, while still allowing extraordinary stories to be recognized.

134. Two suggestions.

     I want to read the story off-line, and then come back to score it. Currently, I cannot do this without increasing my downloads for a story I have already read. This makes me not want to score the story. Maybe you can add a score button on a story after I have read it, and don’t subtract from my download totals. Or, you might want to allow scoring for each chapter. And then average the total for each chapter at the end. But that would make more voting, and I don’t see the average person doing that.

     You might want to have a simple and complex score. That is, simple based on what you have listed above. Complex, as another score, that would allow details to be asked (i.e. story plot, uniqueness, grammar, etc.). I would envision the complex score to be something that would help the author (and editors) and that it could be weighted and combined with the simple score, to give a better picture of the story type. I have scored wonderful stories a little lower, because of bad or no editing. While this is indicative of the entire story, the author does not see my reasoning, and is not as pleased, even though it might not be all his fault (editors see things the author cannot see, that’s why they are there). Think of the complex score as what your English professor would give, and the simple score as what most individuals think of the story. Both have merit, but neither gives a complete picture.

     I do not score any story based on anything other than the story. Although I have never scored anything lower than a 5 (If it is that bad, I drop out of the story long before I get a chance to score it. But I know that others do score for multiple reasons. That being said, you might want to be very specific in what you ask. Some will still lie, but with more details, you should be able to get a better picture of the entire story.

135. Maybe I’m seeing things through rose colored glasses, but I have found the scoring system to be useful. I’ve found that a story that has a seven or below is pretty deserving, in general, of that kind of score. Conversely, I rarely pull up a story with an eight or above that isn’t pretty decently written, and captures my interest. As a screening tool, in conjunction with the codes, it has worked for me in trying out stories.

     Is it possible that we just have a great quantity of really good authors at SOL? If you rated the singing of everyone in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, would you be surprised if they all scored above nine?

     If the purpose for scores is “Bragging rights”, then yes, change the system. If the purpose for scores is to indicate an interesting and well written story, I say it’s just fine for that already.

136. The scoring system is immensely useful, but it does need to be changed, as score inflation has become ridiculous. While some posters say that the system is fine now, because 9.5 and above means it’s a good story, wouldn’t more dispersed scores that utilize a larger portion of the scale yield more information to readers?

     I also second the desire to set the bar for a “10” very high, so that this score doesn’t get abused. Personally, I think something like “Deserves Print Publication” might work. Ranking a story’s content and writing separately sounds interesting, but in practice I suspect it’ll only further cloud over issues, since it’ll involve even further participation from readers.

     Lastly, a plea should be made to all readers to not only score the stories they like, but also score the ones that let them down, even if they haven’t finished the story. In this way, they are strengthening the viability of the scoring system and potentially saving other readers’ time.

137. I appreciate a scoring system, and I would appreciate one that gave more opportunity to provide feedback to the writer. I have had some negative reactions via email in trying to be constructive, but I suspect other authors might appreciate constructive feedback.

     All of this is very subjective. Stories strike an emotional response with readers, and our life experiences, and where we are at in our lives, will affect those responses.

     Having said all this, I like what the_Scot suggested, to separate out the content, the style, etc. There are stories that can strike a chord, yet which suffer from grammar and incomplete and disjointed sentences. I might really like the story, but will not enjoy the telling of it.

     But the site is still the best around, and I truly appreciate the effor5ts of Lazeez and the authors!

138. I am pleased that sites like yours exist. You do an excellent job of keeping it updated and current. The scores are an indicator of how a story is received. It does not mean one story is better than another. It means more of those that read it enjoyed it. If you want to separate the wheat from the chaff, perhaps you need fewer choices with numerical values farther apart. Whatever you decide will be fine, however.

139. Scoring system changes have been canceled. Too many authors asked for the removal of their stories from the site if the change were to take place.

     Sorry for all the trouble.

140. Oh well…

     Would these authors object to the added voting catagories on top of the usual overall score? Adding a separate box under the usual voting box that had plot, technical quality, and perhaps stroke?

     Also, were they objecting to voting on every chapter in a serial that is for there use only, again seperate from the overall score?

     The main thing is these additions would not affect current or past scoring that is shown to the readers.

     I think these are good ideas, if they are not too much work for you personally.

     Thanks for trying to improve your site.

141. Scoring is problematic and I have had my share of woes with it, as well as any other author out there has. I believe wording, instead of numbering is better suited, as it is our psychological outlook that tells us to follow numbers. We see this in competitive sports all the time. We aren’t here as athletes, and frankly the scoring is there for the reader, not the author. Saying that makes me hypocritical, I care what my score is. I know the higher the number; the more people will read it.

     I am writing one of those multi chapter stories. So if I was writing for the numbers, here’s how I would do it. Write small chapters and post them two times a week. Readers love chapters coming out fast. Small chapters mean more of them, so more chances to vote. The day you post is also important to votes. Readers pick up stories on certain days, so if you post then, you will get higher scores. If you want to play that game, you can win. That is, if that is what you are writing for. Anyone who knows my story, knows that is not what I write for.

     I wish the voting could show different things. Have talked about it, but the consciences was, it is hard enough to get the reader to vote in the first place. If they had to vote with several categories, it might cut the number down further.

     I feel the idea of how things are being changed is very good. My only problem is that the new stories have been getting better scores. I don’t think they are better than stores that were posted several years ago; it is just a change in how the reader is voting. Older stories could suffer with a lack of readers looking at them, if their scoring dropped with the averaging system talked about. (I am thinking of some of Al Steiner’s wonderful stories. They were the ones that got me started writing.) Maybe if the average for each year of a stories post was the benchmark and then the adjustment made from that. Without knowing how hard different types of information is obtainable, it is hard to give suggestions about how to make that work effectively.

     I don’t think that there is going to be a system that works for everyone. I am pleased to know that this isn’t the first time the scoring system has been revised. It probably won’t be the last. For me, personally, it shows that there is a care for the overall website. Lazeez’s commitment of time and energy is comendable.

142. I am one of the 95% who seldom vote on a story. Not because I am too lazy, or I do not have an opinion on the story, but I find that the voting options are much to coarse. In my mind there is a world of difference between a 8 and a 9… I would be much more likely to vote if I could assign a score of 82 or 85. As the system stands I find it hard to give a 9 to story that in my mind is an 8.5, I simmilarily feel that I am cheating the author if I only assign an 8.

     This decision is MUCH harder in the gap between 9 and 10 and when the score is lower than 4. Just my way of thinking. Scoring from 1 to 100 would (yes I am deliberately leaving out a 0 score) would make a lot more sence, and the math would not have to change all that much.

     Weighted scores are not a good answer, especially as you point out that a story’s score can change even if it has not received any new votes. Confusion reighns supreme!

     A suggestion for multi-part stories, one that I am sure would result in a bit more work for Lazeez, but would make a lot more sense to my mind anyways:

     +—————-+—————–+————-+———+———+
     | Chapter # | Date Posted | Downloads | Votes | Score |
     +—————-+—————–+————-+———+———+

     This would be visible only if you open the story, the Updates page would show the over all score of the story (which could just be the average of the chapter scores). This would give the author and the readers an idea of how the story is progressing.
     The Carnie