o Grammar (or Readability)
o Story (or Plot, Character development, Creativity, Originality)
o Sex (or Erotic enuf/Pornographic enuf)

This is a Sex/Erotic/Pornographic story site and voting shd be biased towards this. You shd be treated accordingly if you wear ultra-minis to church or a nun’s habit to a strip-joint. Writers who include ‘no-sex’ code shd not expect a high vote in a sex story site; however, shd be encouraged enuf by the high download counts (if his/her piece is really that good).

I DO give 10 and 1 scores but they will always be a comment sent out to the writers, explaining why they deserve them. I hate to have to put any writer down, and therefore gave more 10s than 1s, opting not to vote for those that I shd have given a 1. If you write trash, I shdnt even give you the time of day?

I disagree with those that said a 10 has to mean ‘the best ever’. I think this as more of a ‘bestseller’ list; this week’s bestseller may have a lower quality than last year’s, but it may be ‘the best in awhile’, therefore deserves my 10. The ‘best of the best’ will then be seen from the download and vote counts.

Lazeez, whatever voting method you move to, pls find a good way to keep them moral Nazis from coloring the votes. For eg, if I’m homophobic (or anti necro-scat) and I only see ‘mm’, ‘ff’ and/or ‘scat’ codes there, I shd have known to stay away. Some Nazis will take the trouble to go in and simply vote these stories down without any merit. Perhaps your system could keep a user’s ‘voting average’ (ala betting average) to be exposed just to the writers?

At the same time, I wld like to see a voting system that discourages writers fr churning out unerotic, unsexy and demoralizingly emotional stories and getting high scores just because they have popular/fitting endings – cheaters & homosexuals finally ended with AIDS, cheated (aka losers/lamers) lived a happy-ever-after life, etc. Protagonist can lose and antogonist can win – that’s life, deal with it! Get down fr yr soapbox and take yr bleeding heart somewhere else! This is a sex site where sex & eroticsm wins in the end!

However, I think to address the issue of score inflation, you might want to consider using the kind of descriptors (like you now use with the old scoring system) instead of the 1-10 numerical scores.

There are some authors on SOL that I do not read anymore. All of them are among the top scorers. I did not like the stories I did read – usually because either the author or a character got up on some inappropriate soapbox and started ranting.

Other authors I have enjoyed so much that I look for their stories, and ignore the scores.

That’s how I operate when I like/hate the author. If a story is in-between, I probably won’t remember the author’s name until I have read several stories by that author.

Likewise, there are some story codes that I will not read, and other story codes that I search for.

I only vote when I want to give a thumbs up or thumbs down. When I want the author to know I like them, I send feedback. When I want the author to know I hate them, I don’t.

What does that all mean? It means that if I hate an author, I don’t read or vote on their story, and the story’s score is unaffected. If I like a story, the author gets feedback, and I give the story a high score to promote it.

Conversely, a story’s score only matters to me if I don’t recognize the author’s name, and I am indifferent to the story codes.

Cast your detailed vote for: “storyname”

Technical Merit: Select Score 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Spelling, grammar and overall readability
Plot: Select Score 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Creativity, storyline and character development
Personal Appeal: Select Score 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Story’s emotional and/or intellectual impact on you

Switch to Basic voting form
Expanded voting form is now your default

Now to see if there’s more realistic, honest voting;
& thus if it can actually become an useful & usable tool…

thanx Lazeez; again, you’ve gone above & beyond, nicely done!
w_newd (editor for hire)
nonof_urbiz@sbcglobal.net

My main “gripe” in seeing the scores that my fellow readers attach to each story. I have read many stories where the author and editor doesn’t know the difference between there, their or they’re. This ignorance extends to you and you’re. The watering down of values goes along with the dumbing down of standards in our schools and colleges.

Thanks for all the work you put into the site, and to all the authors (yourself included) for sharing.

From my point of view the three categories breakdown as

Quality: whether or not the author used/needed a good editor–these are issues that can detract from the story. A rating of 1 means it was so bad that I couldn’t read it and a rating of 10 means that I didn’t notice anything.

Plot: How well the story was written–both characters and storyline. Again this is a rating of the author’s skill at storycraft, not whether the subject appealed to me.

As-Advertised: How well the author told me what the story would be about–both synposis and codes. Again not did I like it, but did I get what I was told to expect. I would expect this category to have the votes heavily shifted to the ten range.

A high score in the latter two categories would tell someone that they will like the sotry if they like the codes and synopsis. A high plot with a low advertised score would mean well written story, but you will have no idea what it is about until you read it. For example, the inital advertising of Miracle on 34th Street made no mention of Christmas or Santa Claus because it was released in the summer.

I may start reading a story, and find that I don’t like it, but if I have a chance to rate it on whether or not the author did their job as opposed to how well I like it, I can do a much better job of leaving feedback for both the author and for other readers.

I also think that you need to give authors the chance to respond to ratings and remove a certain number of them when they make a revision. For example, if someone posts a story and it gets a low ‘as advertised’ score because there is no sex in it. After adding the correct code, the previous ‘as advertised’ rating is no longer valid.

My final comment about the scores is to show each area instead of trying to combine them. This allows the readers to decide how to weight them. For sorting purposes, you could use the advertised score a percent to multiply times the plot.

I think showing each category is important since a Plot of 10 may outway a technical of 5 (if I am engrossed in a the story, I may not notice that ‘the too of them wlked two the store’–which I would rate a lot lower than a 5).

If I am reading the comments from several of the autors I follow correctly, their biggest complaint with a scoring system seems to be with being compared with other authors and having their stories rated low because someone doesn’t like it which may have nothing to do with the quality of the story.

I would also suggest that you do away with anonymous voting. Give readers a check box to hide their identity, but make them log in and keep their identity with the vote. That way everytime a person votes on a story, they are changing their vote not posting an additional vote.

Also, the one useful statistical tool you could apply would be to have how I vote compared to others. You could present a raw average for each category and a weighted average. The weighted average would look at the fact that I generally rate stories in the 7 range because I am trying to give meaningful feedback and want to reserve higher scores for what should be award winners, but if most readers vote in the 9-10 range, my votes would be scaled in the weighted average.

The final suggestion I would make would be to say you can vote 4-7 for plot without comment, but a very low score or very high score would require a comment. Similarly, I a score below 8 for as-advertised should require a comment. If the comments are gibberish or obviously pasted boilerplate, the author could appeal to have the vote removed. I would also suggest scoring guidelines. If we were starting over with a fair system, I would expect plot scores of 10 to be works worthy of Hugo and Nebula awards, and an 8 or better would mean that the story is good enough to be published. If the average rating of plot for stories is above 7, then you know that people are inflating the votes.

One additonal point about the ratings to continue using the previous example. I have read some stories that have one Hugo and Nebula awards that I have hated, but they have all been well written. To me, that is the value of the plot rating for the authors, the reader is saying how well they did their job.

I would also suggest having a page that anyone can go to that shows the current averages across all categories for all the stories. This would let everyone see if the scores are starting to inflate.

Hmmm…this might be an interesting concept.

You could have stats like:

Story A -
54% up
46% down

Story B -
87% up
13% down

Story C -
28% up
72% down

Though if this measure took off, it would completely alter the scoring and I am not sure people would like that.

I believe that if you limit the range to three scores: Poor, Good, Excellent the problem of score inflation will be largely solved.