Lazeez’s Corner

Upcoming RSS feed changes

When I started implementing the site’s various RSS feeds, I took the easy road and I used a token in the URL itself for authentication. It was an acceptable solution all that time ago. However, with the proliferation of RSS aggregators and their facilities for finding RSS feeds, I found that I could easily subscribe to any member’s RSS feed that uses those facilities like Google reader.

The upcoming change will have an impact on some of you.

From next Monday on, RSS feeds on the site will require authentication. Most news readers these days support the authentication protocol required. Usually, it will only require that you enter your storiesonline’s user name and password once, and after that, your news reader should take care of the rest.

If your news reader doesn’t support this functionality, then you need to change readers.

Sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause; but there is no way around this, especially with the existence of the library RSS feeds.

Update: I’ve created additional non-authenticated feeds for the New stories and the updates pages. However, for various reasons, not all stories show up in the non-authenticated feeds. So if you choose to use these feeds, you may miss stuff. But, I figure it’s better than no feeds at all. To find the various feeds, including the non-authenticated ones, check the RSS feeds page.

Second update: Firefox does not work properly with the new authenticated feeds. It asks for authentication once and if you create a live feed, the second time around you’ll get ‘Live bookmark failed to load message’ without telling you why. The only way to make firefox work with the authenticated feeds is to follow the hack outlined below in the comments.

SOL is back up

Storiesonline.net went down at 4:00 am EDT for reason still unknown.

I am still investigating the issue. Your patience is appreciated.

UPDATE 11:30am: As it turned out, we got hardware failure in more than one server. We need to replace few servers. This will take a while folks.

UPDATE 2:30pm: We managed to get the site back up on minimal capacity at 1:00 pm EDT.

Not everything is running as it should, so the site could be slower than usual. To bring everything back to normal we’ll need to do a maintenance run. That will happen sometime this week when I get replacement servers. I’ll make an announcement on the site about when to expect this to happen.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Small Changes

Today I implemented a couple of small changes that may be of interest.

First one is on the readers’ side. For premier members, the Universe/Series listings page now allows you to sort by multiple criteria. You can have the page sort the listings by Universe or series name (the default), by author name, by story count and most importantly, by update date. You can have this sorting be in ascending or descending order.

The second one is for authors, and it’s a minor thing. I added the ‘Flash’ story genre for those stories that would benefit from it (less than 500 words).

Stylesheet tweaks for visited links

I’ve made an experimental change to the storiesonline’s listings pages stylesheet that causes check marks to appear next to visited links.

The reason for this change is to help those with color blindness who are unable to see the difference in color between visited and unvisited links.

There is no functional difference from before, and since this is a stylesheet thing, it means that it depends on the browser and the history setting of the browser.

Let me know what you think about it.

Story Delivery Changes

I’ve implemented some important changes in the story delivery mechanism today. The new system has the ability to deliver long stories or long chapters in multiple pages.

Explanation:

Storiesonline is a busy site. Very busy site. In order to keep the site running smoothly and responding as fast as possible to readers’ requests, the reply time for those requests must be kept short. The servers have limited numbers of connections. So the faster each reader got their file and their browser disconnected, the faster the server could respond to another reader. In order to keep connection times short, I tried to keep files as small as possible. That meant for long stories that took a while to reach the readers’ browsers, I used to divide the story into chapters and long chapters into sub-chapters. That’s why some stories have ‘Chapter 1A’, ‘Chapter 1B’ etc…

While the old way was perfectly functional from the story delivery point of view, it created some undesired side effects. The side effects were mostly in management and database size. Each story and each chapter has two database entries, one for the meta data (title, size, etc…) and one for the text itself.

Each time an author wanted to repost a story that had been divided for size, one of us (me or the author) had to make sure that the replacement matched the old divisions. Many readers didn’t realize that chapter 1A and chapter 1B were the same chapter, simply sliced in two in order to keep each part short. It lead to confusion on everybody’s end. It was a mess.

The new system works around all these shortcomings.

So, the new system has ‘Pages’. From the readers’ point of view, it’s a little different.

Each long story (that doesn’t have any chapters), whose size exceeds 60,000 characters (including all html formatting) will be delivered in pages. There will be a mini navigation bar for the pages. When the reader first clicks on a long story, they’ll get a part of the story with the small navigation bar listing the pages. When they’re done reading one page, they click to the next and so on.

Long chapters also get pages.

That change affects on-screen reading only. Downloading archives and using the ‘V’ link to download individual chapters from stories still works exactly the same way as before.

The implications:

Not many implications. For long stories, instead of seeing ‘Chapter 1′, ‘Chapter 2′ etc… you get pages and you click from one page to another. And for stories with multiple long chapters, you won’t see ‘Chapter 1A’, ‘Chapter 1B’ etc… anymore. You’ll also click from one page of the chapter to the next.

For authors, no more ‘Chapter 1A’, ‘Chapter 1B’ in the wizard. Each chapter stays as one entity.

For stories and chapters that were divided under the old system, they’ll stay that way, for now. It’s too complicated to fix for now. Maybe sometime in the future when I have a good chunk of free time for programing, I’ll whip a script that joins those parts.

While I tested the new system extensively, I can never be sure that I worked all the bugs out. So if you stumble on some unexpected behavior, please let me know about it. If you have suggestion for enhancements, I’m all ears.

Scoring Changes Follow Up

This is a follow up to my previous blog entry about the changes to the scoring system. If you haven’t read that one, please check it to see what this whole thing is about.

This follow up is to address as many of the comments that have been received so far as possible.

A simple clarification: the voting system itself is not really changing. It still works the same way. It’s the results representation that’s changing to allow for a clearer distinction between tiny variations in the scores. I’m just shifting the median for all scores from whatever it is now, to an artificial one of 6. For example, the current top scoring serials on the site contains eight stories with a score of 9.77. The new representation would simply magnify smaller variations within the .77 bit.

As for suggestions offered, there were plenty, and that’s good.

Few things to clarify with regards to the nature of the site, to shed light on why some things are the way they are and why I can’t/won’t change some things related.

The site gets accessed from all over the world. In most places, internet access is not unlimited. Many, many readers pay for every minute that they spend on the site. So a large chunk of the story accesses are for quick downloads to read offline. Can’t force those readers to vote. Voting works only when reading a story while on line.

Many of those world wide readers don’t have English as their first language, hell, I don’t have English as a first language. More than half of the readers don’t feel and definitely aren’t qualified to judge the grammar and sentence composition of the text their reading. Can’t force them to cast a grammar vote. However, they can tell whether they like a story or not.

Things not doable:

* Forcing readers to vote: Not good.
Readers should never feel that they must vote. This action would cause a lot of junk voting. It would be worse than not voting.

* Forcing readers to comment: Not good.
5% of all readers vote and less than 1% actually comment; trying to force those numbers up will drive people away from the site. Not good.

* Dropping a certain percentage of votes from the top end and the bottom end: That would require keeping individual votes indefinitely. Not doable; requires too much resources.
Unless everybody is willing to chip in for a larger disk array for the site ($15,000 +) and for the cost of hosting it ($600 per month), then it is not possible to keep votes indefinitely.

* Allowing readers to change their vote later and allowing voting for stories previously downloaded: Not doable.
The site has a system in place for blocking score manipulation. Those changes would break it completely and make scores open to easy manipulation. That’s a bad thing.

* Changing voting method for an additional criteria like grammar: Not exactly fair.
Older stories that had their votes cast already would be at a severe disadvantage. Plus it would require readers to vote for multiple criteria.

* Disallowing votes for serials until their completed: Not fair.
Many authors rely on votes to give them motivation to write. No votes means way less feedback.
Plus, doing that would create even more bias towards serials. If scoring is only allowed after a story is completed, the only those who stuck with the story till then end would vote, which by default means they liked it and their votes would automatically be very high.

* Automatic vote casting for non voters: Not Good.
Since there is such a large difference between the number of downloads and the number of votes, casting a 6 for each non-voter means that the scores will never go above 6.5 or below 5.5, that’s even worse than it is now.

Things Doable:

Adding an additional voting panel for individual chapters. The results of this panel would be simply sent to the author, but not displayed on the site.

Adding an additional voting panel for grammar and stuff. The results of this panel would be simply sent to the author, but not displayed on the site.

—-

Thanks to Aleph Null’s suggestion. He provided the solution that I needed for the new system to be more fair for older stories. It’s so simple, I can’t believe that I didn’t think of it first. The new system will calculate the median for each year and then calculate each story’s weighed score depending on when it was posted or last updated.

—-

Everybody seems to think that I’m doing this as a spur of the moment thing. I’m not. I created the initial code more than a year ago. I knew it would piss a lot of authors off. After all, having your scores go down from 9+ to 7+ is a bummer.

I’ve been thinking about the issue and monitoring the median for the last year and a half. And now, the median has reached a ridiculous level. The effect of the extremely high average of the scores was evident in the comments posted. Many said that they don’t read anything that has a score below 9. Why is that?

From the authors comments, it was clear again that the authors’ expectations of the system are misplaced. Every author wants the system to be the equivalent of the film critics. Unfortunately, it’s not and it can never be. It’s like a poll at the door exit from the theatre.

Just look at the reviews. There are 30 people on the site able to post a review for a story. I would invite everybody to count how many reviews are submitted per month.

I tried the multi-criteria voting system in 1999 where it asked readers to rate three things: story line, quality and appeal. In its first week 8 votes were cast. Just Eight in a whole WEEK!

It was an abject failure.

People don’t want to think about it. It has to be a single easy choice. Anything other than that would be used by a slim minority of those already voting.

The new display method would be closer to showing what people are thinking instead of showing what they’re doing.

As for the ‘Impossible to improve’ option. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s on purpose.

The reason for it is best illustrated in Stormy Weather’s response:

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.

The new wording is meant to keep the 10 for those who knock your socks off with their work. How do you really reward those authors that put so much work into their stories and have a great creativity that results in truly great story? Do you give them the same as you’re giving everybody else?

Is a 9.5 really meaningful when almost everybody is getting over 9.2?

I want people to stop and think for a bit before casting that vote.

And it seems that the new wording is being fairly effective. From a sampling of the most recently posted stories, the scores seem to be a bit more realistic.

The first two weeks after the new score display is implemented will be very rough, especially on me. I know I will hear about some extreme displeasure with what’s happening, and I’m definitely NOT looking forward to it.

We’ll all just need to get used to the new numbers. Lower our mental line in the sand for the new scores from 9 to 7 and everything will be fine soon.

+------------+------------+--------+
| From Date  | To Date    | Median |
+------------+------------+--------+
| 1998-01-01 | 2001-07-01 |   8.25 |
| 2001-06-30 | 2003-01-01 |   8.44 |
| 2002-12-31 | 2004-01-01 |   8.60 |
| 2003-12-31 | 2005-01-01 |   8.65 |
| 2004-12-31 | 2006-01-01 |   8.93 |
| 2005-12-31 | 2006-12-01 |   8.87 |
| 2006-12-01 | 2008-01-01 |   8.33 |
+------------+------------+--------+