But, that was all reader stuff; what about authors?

Well, I’m pleased to report that the site’s income has risen sufficiently to cover costs and a reserve fund for emergencies and future hardware upgrades and a bit more.

So, I’ve decided to share some of the excess income with authors. However, due to how small the actual amount is, it’s not possible to pay everybody. Well, we can pay everybody, but I don’t think few pennies a month would make much difference to anybody.

So, I’ve decided to institute a monthly prize for stories posted for free here on the site. There will be separate prizes for short stories and long serials.

I haven’t hammered out all the rules for eligibility yet, but that will come later.

However, while thinking about the rules, few issues stood in the way and they need addressing before anything can move forward. Those issues will affect how things work now, and the changes needed to fix those issue will affect authors generally. There are other issues that I want to address with the site.

Winners of the monthly prizes will be decided by reader votes and downloads. That creates a problem with long serials.

Authors’ ability to turn off voting when they feel like has always given authors the means to manipulate their scores in a way. Turning off scoring on a serial from the start until almost the end or until posting the final chapter always ensured that the serial will score high. After all who would vote then other than those who stuck with the serial? And how likely would it be for somebody to stick with a serial for a while and then at the end give it a low score? This makes it unfair to those authors who keep voting always on for their serials.

So, to solve this issue, I need to make a choice:

1 – Take away authors’ ability to change voting. Voting stays on for all stories.
2 – Mark a story as permanently ineligible any time its author changes its voting status to none.

Another issue is download counts. Currently, download counts are cumulative and that gives a big boost to stories with frequent updates, no matter how small the updates are or how frequent they are.

There is a simple solution for this. Divide the total download count for every serial by the number of instalments made to post the whole thing. It’s easily doable as the site keeps track of each individual part, and it’s easy to count how many instalments the author made. So when I make the change, download counts will change dramatically from what they are now.

Another issue that will affect some authors this year: Serials that lapse into ‘incomplete and inactive’ status will stop counting towards premier status.

One thing that will probably change on the site too is TPA voting. So far, from what I can see looking at the large set of data that has accumulated over the last 5 years, is that TPA voting is effectively useless. The vast majority of readers using the TPA are not even qualified to use it. There are some who definitely are qualified, but the 1% qualified to use it is usually ridiculously overshadowed by those who aren’t.

I put in some safeguards into the TPA, like automatic banning from using for anybody who casts mostly identical scores. Like casting 10.10.10 or 9.9.9 or 8.8.8, basically using the TPA as a glorified basic voting system. The percentage of users banned was surprising.

So, I’ll probably remove the TPA system from the site and keep the basic one only.

I’m open to your thoughts on these issues. If I encounter other issues while making the changes and hammering out the rules, I’ll update this post.

First place goes to Argon for ‘Witch Eyes‘

In Second place is Switch Blayde with ‘The Princess and the Cowboy‘

Finally, in third place comes in Silkstockingslover with ‘What Mommy Doesn’t Know Will Fuck Her‘

Congratulations to our winners!

However, all the eReaders that download the EPUB format seem to be case-blind on codes. So the MF, mf, mF, Mf codes look the same to those readers and they get all lumped in one big MF category.

Since we use the codes’ long form in the EPUB format, we changed those long definitions to make it easier on those eReaders to handle correctly.

The long code changes are:

MF -> Ma/Fa
mf -> mt/ft
Mf -> Ma/ft
mF -> mt/Fa
FF -> Fa/Fa
ff -> ft/ft
Ff -> Fa/ft
MM -> Ma/Ma
Mm -> Ma/mt
mm -> mt/mt

This change will not affect the codes displayed on the site in story listings.

We forced the recreation of all the EPUB files on the site, so if you desire these updated categories, you must redownload all the files that you have.

Authors shouldn’t rush their submissions. There will be no repost or changes to submissions until the contest closes and the winners are announced.

Similarly Tagged Stories Links

The feature uses MySQL’s FULLTEXT indexing on the story tags field in the database. It compares the current stories tags with all the stories on the site and it returns the ten highest rated stories by the MySQL engine. Hopefully, the MySQL engine does a good job of matching stories.

In the future, I may refine this feature by eliminating stories that the reader has visited already in the same session. We’ll see.

If you notice bugs, please let me know. I didn’t test it much.

Also, if you find it useful, let me know too.

If it’s successful, then we’ll try to have contests on regular basis.

Please read the contests rules before participating.

Have fun everybody.

Of course, the same limitations as html format still apply. In fact, the wizard will receive the submission in Markdown, run the markdown converter on the text and then pass it through our html converter/stripper.

In order for text to be converted by the markdown converter, the file name must end with .md.txt. Otherwise the markdown converter won’t kick in.

Alright, time for some decisions.

I guess after all 130+ comments, it’s agreed that the new system should be implemented. It will take a little while to do, but it will get done.

Some changes will be required, like the clear definition of what is filtered out and what’s not. What will fall under this filter is any story containing any of the codes ‘pedo’, ‘lolita’, ‘boy’, ‘gi’.

The definitions of those codes will be amended to make them crystal clear.

boy, gi will be persons under the age of consent.

pedo will be person over the age of consent initiating sexual contact with a person under the age of consent.

lolita will a person under the age of consent initiating sexual contact with a person over the age of consent.

Since this is part legal issue, we’ll define the age of consent at 14 years since this is the lowest legal age of consent anywhere. That’s how it was in canada and still is in some states and other places in the world. So ‘boy’ is any male 13 years of age or younger. ‘gi’ is any female 13 years of age or younger.

Since this system will rely on correct coding, I will add a link at the end of each story for readers to report missing codes. We’ll do our best to enforce proper coding for those four codes. I’ll also change the submission wizard to ask the question whether the story contains sexual contact between a person over the age of consent and another under the age of consent.

Since filtering out database results by codes is computing intensive, I won’t be opening the current category exclusion preferences system for free accounts. Each story will be flagged filtered or not according those codes when posted or when the codes change. So this filter will apply strictly to those 4 codes.

For those concerned about ‘censorship’, this isn’t censorship. This is choice. Censorship would be if somebody else gets to decide whether you would be allowed to read something or not. Choice is when you get to choose.

Update 2010-05-07: Due to feedback and reading various references, I reverted the definitions to 12 and under instead of 13 and under and rephrased the pedo and lolita definitions to be in harmony with the most popular definitions I found.

Pedo: An adult initiating sexual contact with a pre-pubescent child (boy or girl, 12 or under)
Lolita: A pre-pubescent child (boy or girl, 12 or younger) initiates sexual contact with an adult (I know lolita doesn’t work properly for boys, but what else can we use? Lolito?)

I added the ’12 or under’ bit to the pre-pubescent part to remove ambiguity. I don’t want to hear the line, ‘but my character got her period at 10′.

In the last three weeks it happened two times prior to this. One time a redirect iframe got injected into the database and the second time, another iframe got injected into the site’s index page. I cleaned them up each time after changing all my passwords from the database’s password to the sftp to the management. Everything! I changed each and every password only to get hacked again.

It turned out that the hosting company, Network Solutions got all their servers hacked. They’re battling the problem, but as far as I can tell, they’re losing the battle. The proof was yesterday’s intrusion.

However, this time, it happened just as Google was checking the site and found the malware on it and blacklisted the site. And since I host most of the images used on storiesonline.net here on storiesonline.org, SOL.net got partially blacklisted.

That was the straw.

I moved the domain to a new host (one that I trust much more) and started the site from scratch, just in case the old site still had some backdoors inserted somewhere in WordPress’s complex database structure. I created a fresh wordpress installation, along with a fresh new theme (do you like it?) and imported the articles through an xml file. As far as I can tell, nothing got lost other than the malware.

After that, I requested a new review from Google and the new site passed with flying colour. Now it’s just a matter of time  until all browsers fetch the new listings from Google and the warnings will go away.

I’ve decided to phase out support for externally linked stories. As of today, the ‘New External Story’ button in the site’s submission wizard is gone.

[Update: 2010-04-15]: Transition is now complete. There are no more externally linked stories on the site.

Impact:

Not much really. The certificate still works for encryption, so no data is ever compromised. All a user has to do is to make their browser accept the certificate temporarily (allow an exception) and all will be well.

What happened?

Why such a lapse in security? Well, this is interesting.

The current (expired) certificate was obtained from Entrust two years ago. It had a duration of two years. And as it turned out, Entrust has interesting new policies.

First: They only alerted me last Wednesday about the impending expiration of the certificate instead of their usual 30 days. So I didn’t remember to renew on time. It would have been fine if we simply renewed.

Second: Entrust’s new amazing policy of not accepting any purchases for less than $1000.

A single, standard URL certificate for 4 years is $538 with Entrust (it started at $299 per year in 2003). That’s what I usually get and the site doesn’t need any more than that. So if I were to keep dealing with Entrust, I would have to buy something else; something that I don’t need. I would have to invent a domain to get a certificate for it.

So, I decided to get a certificate from Verisign instead. They are much better priced anyway and they accept my insignificant business dealings of $356 for the same type of certificate for the same period of time.

However, certifying a site requires verification of the business entity behind the site and that takes 4 to 5 business days to finish and produce the certificate.

I started the process on Thursday, and hopefully we get the new certificate by tomorrow.

So for now, just accept the current expired certificate and everything would work as usual.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Update 2009-11-11 2:00 pm: The issue has been resolved and a new security certificate has been installed and activated.

I will be rolling out support in other pages gradually.

For now, if you stumble on bugs, let me know and I’ll correct them. Also, if you have other suggestions that could help, let me know.

However, the site is not back up to to its old normal self. We’re still missing the hefty hardware required for content search. We’re running on a single database server with large memory. The current speed comes mostly from the database being completely cached in the RAM. So disk access is strictly for flushing MySQL’s memory back to disk.

We’re now looking for either a decent disk array to hook up to the server, or a server with decent hard drive space and high processing capability to replace the current one. So content search (where you can search for stories according to text contained in them) is still missing.

Well, it turned out that the hosting location that I have the servers in, is in the process of being closed down. They didn’t give me prior warning. So there were people moving servers and racks to a new location (our turn will be on Friday).

Somebody knocked the power cord from the database server’s array and that took it offline. We spent the afternoon and the evening trying to recover and rebuild the array and each time it starts to work then reports a failing disk. After the third time and a report of a different disk failing, we figured that it’s the array itself that’s hosed and not the disks.

At midnight, we removed the array and replaced it with a server with some drives in it and restored the database from the morning’s backup. Due to this, we had to forego the Content Search function until we get a new solution.

So the net result is that we lost nearly 12 hours worth of data and an expensive piece of hardware.

Since we’re moving on Friday, we will deal with the Content search problem and the new hardware after the move.

So this is the first announcement that on Friday, June 19th, the site will be offline for few hours. We will need to move the servers physically to a new location and have the DNS entries updated to point to the new IP addresses. So that may take anywhere from two to six hours. Hopefully as close to the lower end as possible.

After that, we’ll need to get new hardware to replace the old one and when that happens, we’ll need to take the site offline again to make the replacement. But that will be about 15 days or so after the move. I’ll make the appropriate announcement when the time comes.

The lesson learned?

You can never have too much redundancy and backup backup backup…

Oh yeah, before I forget, the site will be offline again on Friday June 19th. Sorry for the inconvenience folks!

From now on, instead of posting delayed stories and chapters at midnight Eastern time, it will be at 9pm Eastern time.

Last night, a network outage 10 days after the last one.

Tonight, a catastrophic hardware failure in the database servers’ raid at 8:15 pm on the 27th. We’re scrambling to find and configure a replacement. It will definitely take a while and some data has been lost.

Sorry for the inconvenience folks. We’re doing all we can to get things up and running again.

Update 1:55 am: Well, we’re piling it on. On top of the hardware problems we’re having, the replacement server raid that we got turned out to be faulty AND Rogers (the backbone provider) is doing a network maintenance just like last night, without any warning. The tech working at the data center can’t communicate with the outside world to make sure that we get new software to install of the hardware (which is dead at the moment too).

Update 6:30 am: Things are coming along well. We’ve managed to get the database for the storiesonline.net domain going. It’s fairly operational. However, we lost everything that happened from 4:00 am EST on the 26th, so roughly 48 hours of activities have been lost (the latest back up was corrupted, the previous one worked.)

The secure connections over https (for log in and for payments) are not working. We haven’t figured it out yet. The admin pages aren’t fully working yet. So be patient about updates.

Not everything is as it should be, but it’s definitely better than being offline completely.

Update 28th, 2:25 pm: well, the site is almost back to normal, but the submission processing is broken. It needs some work. It will take until the evening to get it done and start processing submissions again.

Your patience is appreciated.

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.

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).

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.

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.

First thing to report is that voting is up. The number of basic votes cast per day added to the number of TPA votes cast per day is about 30% higher than the previous week’s number of basic votes cast. So it seems that many people were not using the old system and were encouraged by the new one. So for those who were afraid that the new voting system will lead to people moving away from voting, rest assured, it didn’t happen.

Second, the voting form wording change is affecting scores mildly. The median of votes cast after the change is lower. It currently stands at 8.00 compared to 8.82 prior to the change. Of course, the Q Score is compensating for this difference and the Q Scores are more consistent.

The number of TPA votes is about 30% of the basic votes number. So, it’s quite high. I didn’t expect it to be this high. So, I’m not going to keep individual TPA votes indefinitely. I can’t. I haven’t decided how long to keep them, I’ll wait for future development to guide this decision.

Implementation changes:

The Appeal component of the TPA is now a part of the Q Score. It’s processed as a basic score.

During the implementation, I changed the minimum number of votes needed to show the score on the site from 10 to 15.

The expected developments are that some authors and few readers are still trying to find a concrete relationship between the Q Score and the regular score and since they don’t have any hard numbers, many are just ending up being confused and already declaring the new system to be a failure.

My advice to those who are trying to correlate the scores is: Don’t. You don’t have the numbers and if I gave you the exact formula, you will still be missing the data used in the formula to calculate things.

Yes, relative positions of stories may change between the old score and the Q Score and that’s because different posting and updating dates of stories affect the Q Score a lot. So unless you can dig the data from the database, the exact formula won’t be much help.

The unexpected development is that so far, I’m getting a lot more support for the Q Score from readers and few authors. I’ve received many requests to remove the old scores completely and just leave the Q Score and the TPA (many of those requests came from premier members). Reasons given in the requests are that the score next to the Q Score are confusing things and that with all the data presented in the tables, there is too much info to scan through making the site harder to use.

I’m starting to lean in that direction already. If I receive more requests of the same, I will start the process of removing the old average scores and just leave the Q Scores. When/If I start that change I will make it so that the TPA score is also hidden if the number of votes is below 15.

Today, I implemented the display changes to show the new system in action.

You can read the previous entries in this blog to see how these changes came about.

First change is the voting forms. The old form has been redesigned with the new look and the wording has changed. It’s very close to the temporary change that I implemented at the beginning of December, but with one major difference. The 10 is no labeled like before; the current version says ‘Most Amazing Story’, which makes it more attainable.

Another change is the reversal of the order of the grades. It used to be that the 10 was the first item under the mouse, now it’s the furthest one. This is a subtle change, but one I implemented to encourage readers to think before they cast their vote.

The second change is the availability of the Expanded voting form. I designed the system to switch easily between the two forms and be able to set the default from within the form itself. This functionality relies on some JavaScripts. For those of you who run without JavaScript or your browser doesn’t support the advanced functionality, if you want to use the Expanded voting form, you need to change the preference in the ‘My Account’ page. There is a new entry titled ‘Edit Voting Form Preference’.

The third change is the display in the listings. I added a new column to most listings pages titled ‘QScor’ (the ‘e’ is missing from the word score to keep the column as narrow as possible).

For those of you who didn’t read the previous blog entries, this column contain a new score calculated by comparing the story’s usual score with the median of the scores of all the stories posted in the same period as the story in question.

For example, if the story you’re looking at was originally posted in 2000, the Qscore is calculated based on the median (the midway point) of all the scores of all the stories posted between 1998 and 2001. After 2001, it goes by year, until today.

This calculation is designed to take into account the general voting patterns of the period to compensate for the constant upwards score creep. Stories posted in earlier years have lower scores generally, regardless of the quality of the story.

Both scores will be displayed side by side for the next year or so. After that, the average story scores (the old ones) will be removed and only the Qscore will stay.

Due to the change in wording of the voting form, newer votes will tend to be lower generally, resulting in lower average scores than what you’re used to. The Qscore is designed to compensate for that, so for newer stories, the Qscore will be more consistent. So you should start getting used to seeing and relying on the Qscore instead of the average score.

Theoretically, a Qscore of 6 and over means a good story. A Qscore of 6 is the equivalent of an old score of 8.8.

The last change is the addition of the TPA score. It stands for Technical/Plot/Appeal score. It’s a composite score derived from the new (optional) Expanded voting form. It works almost like the old form. It’s an average of all the votes cast, but each category is on its own and no fractions. So if somebody gives a story a 9 for Technical Merit and 8 for Plot and 5 for Appeal, then the story will have a TPA score of 9.8.5 if another person give it 4, 5 and 10, that means its TPA score will become 6.6.7, the count of the TPA votes is to the left of the TPA score.

The TPA score is designed for authors and those readers who prefer to give detailed feedback to the authors.

The regular voting system still allows for 1 vote per reader per story and you can’t change it. The new Expanded voting form allows you to change your vote. However, if you vote with an expanded form, you can’t change your mind to an overall vote and if you vote an overall vote you can’t change it to an expanded one.

It’s a lot to digest, and the additional info displayed definitely makes the site’s pages more crowded, which I don’t like. But for a while, we’ll all have to live with it the way it is now, until most of you have gotten used to the Qscore and the TPA scores.

Six months from now (maybe earlier, we’ll see how things go), the top listings pages will get sorted by the Qscore.

A year from now the ‘Score’ column will go away.

90 Days from now, the overall voting form will lose the numbers and will have labels only.

Update:

I’ve posted a follow up to this article:
Scoring Changes Implementation Follow up

The form will have three separate criteria for the reader to select values for and I want it to be clear enough about the meaning of each. So for each criteria, I need a short, concise sentence that goes under each option, to explain what the reader is selecting. It has to be as clear as possible as to not leave the reader confused about what they’re selecting and short enough to be simple. So far I’ve come up with:

Quality:
0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Spelling and Grammar

Plot:
0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Thoroughness of the storyline

Appeal:
0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Appeal to your personal taste.

Also, I can’t display all the numbers, so I must combine the three criterias into a single value to display.

So far, the relative score is going to be in its own column and the expanded score would be in another column.

So it’s going to be:

Size | Dnlds | Votes | Score | E Score | Q Score

The E Score is the expanded one and the Q Score is going to be the Weighed score. (It’s going to be really confusing for a while.)

Authors can already see the Q Score in the stats page.

Now, to calculate the E Score value, I’m thinking:

Quality: 20%
Plot: 50%
Appeal: 30%

Quality can be easily fixed with a proofreader’s help. Appeal is a subjective value that varies by the reader’s personal taste. So the emphasis is on the Plot.

I would like to hear as many opinions as possible about the wording of the form as wells as the distribution of the values to be calculated.

So, the weekly counters will now reflect a story’s downloads in the last seven days regardless of which day you view the listings.

Previously, the site kept track of weekly downloads starting from the weekly reset time of Sunday night. So, if you view the download listings on Tuesday, you get the tally of two days’ worth of downloads. With the new system, viewing the top downloads list on Tuesday will give you the cumulative downloads since last Wednesday.

The current system had the effect that any story posted around midnight on Sunday, had the biggest chance of staying on top of the download list of the rest of the week. Some authors took advantage of this by posting their updates and new stories on Sunday after 9pm EST; which of course is completely understandable, who wouldn’t want to have the biggest possible advantage.

With the new system, that changes completely and closes a long standing loophole. Posting time has no advantage at all anymore. And posting in the middle of the week has no more disadvantage.

The full effect of this change will only be felt next Monday. The system doesn’t have the daily stats for the last 7 days. It starts counting tonight. For this week, the weekly downloads will behave exactly like the previous system.

I’ve made up my mind on how to proceed next with regards to the voting system.

While I don’t like to lose any authors or readers, the current state of the scoring system is pitiful, and if left as it currently is, then it will only get worse over time, which, to me, is unacceptable.

The suggestions by many were interesting to say the least, but a lot of it, while could be useful and helpful, is not feasible to implement. Everybody has to remember that the site is a busy one and I don’t have unlimited resources. The site serves millions of pages per day and any change in the page, in the processing, in the data stored can have a huge effect on the site’s performance and its ability to cope.

For example, keeping scores indefinitely, in order to allow for dropping a certain percentage of votes, or comparing previous voting patterns for each reader, is not possible. While the data stored could be relatively small, the cumulative numbers are huge. And it’s not just about storing the info; processing power needed to handle all that grows exponentially. Searching a database of millions upon millions of data rows is expensive in processing power. Also, backing up the data and shuttling it around the net for off-site backup gets really expensive, really fast.

Also, anything that requires processing of each bit of info on the fly is also a no-no. For example, the suggestion that the story’s highlight color changing with the score requires the evaluation of every story’s score against the median for each page displayed. That requires multiple IFs for each row of each table. The site serves over a million listings page per day, with each page having 10 rows or 20, that means for each additional IF that I add to the process, the server farm has to execute it 10 or 20 million times per day, that means each listings page would need more than double what it already needs, that means I would need at least double the processing power that the site uses now and that’s without taking future growth into consideration.

So, any solution would need to be simple, fast to process, easy on storage and easy on processing repetitions to be acceptable.

I understand what the system needs to do, and I understand what it takes to do the things that needs to be done. And, I’m the only one to know what it costs to do each little additional thing.

So, in order to balance the needs of the authors, with the needs of the readers and the resources available, I’ve decided to implement the following changes:

1 – A rewording of the current voting form. Not as drastically different as the previous rewording, but something more sensible. The change will be implemented in two stages. First stage the wording will be changed while keeping the number values associated with each description. 90 days later, the numbers will be removed and the voting form will have descriptions only.

2 – The previously noted vote weighing system will be implemented (it is very necessary), however, both scores will be displayed side by side for a whole year. In the first six months, the listings pages ordered by score will use the old score, and then in the next six month it will be sorted by the weighed score. After a year, the average score will not be shown anymore (remember, displaying both scores requires more bandwidth).

3 – The voting form will have two optional variations. The current reworded form will be the default one. Readers will have the option of using a more elaborate form that has three separate criteria to judge: Plot, Quality and Appeal.
Which form to see in the story by default will be an option in each user’s preferences and will have a switch in the form itself.

I haven’t decided how I’m going to display the scores from the elaborate forms in the listings pages yet, or how it should affect the sorting in the listings pages ordered by score.

Two options in that regard, display the average of each value or have a single combined representation. We’ll see.

In the beginning, I will keep all the scores from the elaborate voting forms. Depending on how many people use them, I will decide later if I can afford to keep that data indefinitely or not. Users who choose to use the elaborate voting forms will be able to change their votes as long as the votes are kept.

Authors will be able to view how many of each vote their stories received.

Chapter voting, I’m not sure I’ll implement it because of abuse possibilities. To stop abuse, I must track some data from each vote for each chapter. With over a hundred thousands possible users, combined with over 50,000 individual chapters currently on the site, the size of the data can be huge.

On the other hand, individual chapter voting can be done for authors’ eyes only and each reader can vote as many times as they like for each chapter, which in return, makes chapter voting almost useless, but if authors really want it, then it can be done and please don’t suggest to see vote value distribution, that would require keeping a lot more data.

Eventually, I will implement the capability to allow paying members to vote after the fact. They can download stories to read offline, so they should be able to vote on their next visit to the site for the stories that they downloaded in their previous session.

No mandatory voting. No mandatory comments while voting. No default voting for non voters. Non-voters outnumber voters 20 to 1, no matter how wild the actual voting is, it wouldn’t make a blip if non voters were counted as average. Let’s say the default vote is a 6, that means no story could score higher than 6.19 (with all 10s) or less than 5.76 (with all 1s).

As they say, hindsight is 20/20.

I now realize that the changes proposed previously were too much too fast. Hopefully, with the new gradual phasing in approach, people, both readers and authors can acclimate to the coming changes.

If you haven’t read my two most recent entries about changes to the scoring system on the site, you should read them.

The gist of this blog entry is to tell you that ALL changes to the scoring system have been canceled and reverted.

A recap of what happened.

For the last couple of years, story scores on the site have been edging up higher and higher due to various psychological reasons. The median for all scores of last year is about 8.87. Which means that half of the stories are scoring more than 8.87 and the other half below 8.87. The results of this median is that story scores are in general, extremely high.

Over the last year, I kept hearing from many authors how ridiculous the scores are becoming, and from readers how they can’t trust the system to guide them to the better stories. The phrase ‘I don’t read anything that is not scoring over 9.25′ came up very frequently.

So, because of these things, I set out to correct what’s causing these issues. I planned to do two things:

The first is to change the wording of the voting form to be more consistent and somewhat realistic of what those votes reflect, which is the reader’s feeling about the stories they read. The current wording is somewhat confusing, some grades are related to feelings, some others are related to the quality of the work. I seem to have made the grave mistake of wording the top score (10) entry in a way that few readers really could give a 10 but to the really best of stories (which logically is the way it should be).

The second was to create a different score evaluation system that took into consideration what date the story was posted and the average of all the stories posted in the same period of time. The new system would have taken care of the over-time creep up of scores and made the playing field between old and new, more level. It would have also leveled the playing field between older stories that were scored using the old wording and the newer stories scored using the new wording. There wouldn’t have been a large discrepancy between the meaning of older stories and newer ones.

This new valuation system would have shifted the median of scores down to a more logical median. My goal was to have a median of 6.

I guess I aimed too far down.

On December 1st, 2006, I announced the upcoming changes, and implemented the vote form wording change.

The wording change had its intended effect and stories posted after the change had a more moderate, more reasonable score average. Many seemed pleased with the change, although, I only received two approvals, one from an author and the other from a reader.

However, the opposition was far more vocal and came from authors. I received many worried notes and nearly ten authors asked for their stories to be removed if the score weighing were to take place.

Since I’m not in the business of pissing everybody off – and to me, ten vocal opposing people represent a 100 opposing silent ones – I canceled the score weighing system implementation.

I left the new wording in the forms and the newer stories continued to be scored lower on average. I received few notes from authors angry about unfairness of the lower scores and one demanded that I remove his stories from the site.

I agree that having lower average scores is not fair, considering that readers won’t really know or care why the older stories have higher score average than the newer ones. They’ll understand the drop as a drop in story quality. I even received one note from a reader asking why all the newer stories were crap (based on scores).

So, last night, I reversed the change in the voting form, and in an ironic twist, had to use the same code that I created to calculate a weighed scoring system to raise all the score of the stories posted after the wording change to a level more in line with the scores of stories posted before the change.

And now a week after the start of the changes, we’re back to the same old system that many mocked and distrusted and complained about. We’re back to a kindergarten-like system where everybody is a winner and everybody gets an A for their effort.

I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I’ll think of something to keep the scores under control. I really don’t want to see the scores on the site compress any further and lowest scoring stories reach 9+ and high scoring stories reach 9.9+.

If anybody has any suggestions to make the system work better, without confusing the hell out of authors, I’m all ears. And please, no suggestions of a complicated score weighing system. I had the perfect one and it was rejected. If there were supporters for the new system that I planned and announced, they mostly kept it to themselves.

Update: Please see my following entry about the subject.

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 |

+------------+------------+--------+

To authors it’s even more troublesome. Many authors expect the score to tell them how they did in their writing, they wanted it to reflect the effort that they put into the story regardless of the story’s content and its subject’s appeal to the readers.

Those concerns and expectations are not something that I can really address. Authors need to simply realize that the score simply reflects how much a reader liked the story and whether they recommend that others read it too. It’s like a thumbs up signal.

However, there is a problem with the scoring system that I can address: Score compression.

Score compression is when votes, like they are now on the site, tend to be mostly on one end of the scale. Last check revealed that the median for all scores on the site is 8.62!

A median of 8.62 means that half the stories on the site have a score of 8.62 and more. That means about 8000 stories have about 1.2 points spread. That means anything below 9 didn’t get a good score. 8.62 is so close to the top, it’s making scores meaningless.

The reasons for this compression are multiple.

• Some readers never vote anything but 10; they’re nice people, they don’t want to hurt the author’s feelings.
• Some readers vote only for stories they like. For stories they don’t like, they abstain from voting.
• The psychological effect of high scores. The higher the scores the higher the readers will tend to vote.

So, I’m introducing two changes to the system to be rolled out gradually.

The first change is the wording accompanying the number scores in the vote form and I’m removing the numbers. I’m proposing the following as the new list:

Amazing; Impossible to Improve
Excellent Story
Great Story
Good Story
Not Bad
Some Good, Some Bad
Not Good
Pretty Bad
Hated it
You Call this a Story!?

This way it’s not mixed signals. The old list was a bit misleading to authors as it implied that the score may represent the readers’ judgement on how well the story is written. Words like ‘Needs Work’, imply that the reader noticed the errors in the story and commenting on them.

This list is not final. I’m open to suggestions of a better wording that improves the distinction in your minds about the meaning of the score you’re casting.

The second change is the more drastic one. I’m replacing the current scores with weighed scores.

The new scores shown on the site will reflect the story’s score relative to the median of all scores on the site. This will have the effect of lowering all scores. I’ve implemented the formulas that calculate the weighed scores and here is a sample of scores and their new values:

Old Score -> New Score
(average) -> (weighed)

10 -> 10
9.85 -> 9.56
9.5 -> 8.55
9 -> 7.10
8.62 -> 6
7 -> 4.93
6 -> 4.28
5 -> 3.62
4 -> 2.96
3 -> 2.31
1 -> 1

One thing to remember, the weighed score is relative to the current median. So a story’s score may change even if it received no new votes. If the median changes, then the story’s score will change.

Hopefully, the wording change will make the votes that readers cast more reasonable, so that automatic 10s change to something more meaningful.

One problem I don’t know how to address is the fact that the more recent the story is on the site, the higher the average score is; this is related to the psychological effect of higher and higher scores. So if you have a reasonable solution, I’m all ears.

I know that scoring is a controversial subject but let’s all try to be as objective and reasonable as possible. I’m trying to make the system work for everybody the best possible way. I appreciate everybody’s contributions.

And before you fire off your reply, one thing I will not do, I won’t ever scrap the voting system. So don’t even suggest it.

The first two changes are in the way the voting mechanism and the feedback mechanism work at the end of stories. I’ve added some JavaScripts to make the forms submit to the site and return feedback without having to reload the whole page.

The reason for the change is to make a better user interface. Previously (and currently if you don’t have JavaScript active in your browser or doesn’t have a supported browser), when a reader clicked the vote button in the voting form or send button in the mail form, the whole page would change, so to do both, one usually had to hit the back button once.

With the change, the form simply goes away and the text changes to reflect the result.

Overall, it works very well. Most people have recent browsers and most people have JavaScript active.

The transition for the voting form was almost trouble free, but the one for the mail form was quite bumpy. The reason for the bumpiness is mostly my inexperience with the new technology that I’m using in the new forms; I’m learning it as I implement it. Many readers had the mail form fail to send or return any results and it took me a couple of days to sort out why it’s happening and how to go about solving the issue. But it also took longer to sort because very few people reported the problem; only two people reported it.

To help me fix any current or future problems with the site, I would appreciate it if those problems were reported to me. The webmaster link on the site provides an easy way to do it.

So, if the new forms are not working for you, let me know. In the Webmaster’s contact page, select the message type as Bug Report.

» Webmaster’s Contact Page

The third change affects only premier level members and authors.

The site’s download system now provides TEXT archives for all stories, not just single-part ones. The TEXT archives are available for download as .bz2 files. The BZ2 format is similar to the ZIP format but way more efficient for TEXT files. I found it on average to be about 40% more efficient than ZIP.

Mac and Linux users should have no problem opening .bz2 files but some Windows users may have a problem with them. Usually, WinZip should have no problem decompressing BZ2 files. But in case you don’t have a recent version or a version that can’t handle it, the site’s help page has links to utilities that can.

» Site FAQ

I’ve made few more minor changes to the site as well for premier members:

The Category search page now has shortcut buttons to search and sort by date (newest stories first) and search and sort by score (highest scores first).

The library’s active serials list now retains concluded serials until you access the last chapter.

New features:

1. Shortcuts:
   Designed for authors with multiple similar postings. For example if you need to post several chapters of a novel, separately, instead of clicking the wizard, then selecting a pen name (if applicable), then selecting ‘New Chapter’, then selecting the story – for each chapter, you can save the pen name, submission type, story, progress status, opt out of new categories, opt out of story’s end-note, opt out of moderator notes.
   Also works for new stories, but of course with appropriate options (for example you can’t opt out of categories because they’re required). Basically, the version saves a lot of clicking.
2. Delayed Posting:
   For authors that like to post something to appear later on the site.

Other changes include some JavaScript enhancements to reduce the clicking required; as well as removing some ambiguities when editing existing submissions.

If you’re an author, give it a whirl and tell me what you think. Of course, bug reports are appreciated as well as suggestions for possible enhancements.

From now on, all non-anonymous email messages coming from the site’s feedback system will be coming from ‘feedback’at’storiesonline.net’ with their ‘Reply to:’ field set to the real email address submitted by the feedback sender.

The net result of this change is that less feedback messages will have the chance of being blocked by spam filtering software/services. And that’s because the site’s mail server won’t be pretending to be the sender’s mail server in order to deliver the messages.

What will this change mean for authors? should be nothing.

All email services and email clients, whether desktop based or web based respect the ‘Reply to:’ header and when you click the ‘Reply’ button in your email client, the ‘To’ field should be filled with whatever email address is set in the message’s ‘Reply to’ field/header.

If you filter messages based on the ‘From’ field, then you may have to change that to the ‘Reply To:’ field.

Anonymous messages will still come from ‘anonymous.at.storiesonline.net

With this change, all email being sent from storiesonline’s servers will be from the storiesonline.net domain. Also, the new mail server installed on the site, which is responsible for receiving mail sent to the storiesonline.net domain, is configured to scrutinise incoming messages as much as possible to cut down as much as possible the amount of spam being received by the mail server.

All in all, this change will make the site a better net citizen.

So in order to address those requests, I’ve created a page that shows a sample uses of the Library system on the site.

I linked the new page from the various help pages on the site.

The page can be found here.

The new page shows how to use the library for tracking active serials, to remember stories for reading later and for managing bookmarks on the site, on other sites and on your own computer.

Of course, other creative uses suggestions for the library are most welcome.

A small request

The last section of the new page details how to use the library to bookmark stories on other web sites and on your own computer. In that section I give a JavaScript snippet to use as a bookmarklet for adding stories from other sites and from your computer to the library easily.

I created the code, but I must admit, I’m not an expert in coding JavaScript. I was able to make it work on the Mac with Safari (my browser of choice), Camino and Firefox. I couldn’t figure out how to make it work with Opera (it does not send the cookie in with the request) and couldn’t make it work with iCab either (it wouldn’t even initiate the connection despite allowing popup windows). Currently, I don’t have access to a Windows computer, so I cannot test the code snippet on IE (theoretically, it should work). So if you have the expertise to change the code to work with the browsers above or other browsers like IE or any of the linux browsers, send me your changes and I’ll add them to the list.

Currently, the site uses codes to classify stories, but this method has significant shortcomings in my view. It does not distinguish between main themes or story types from minor activities.

I want to create an additional classification system that focuses only on main story types or genres, for example: Science Fiction, Western, Horror etc… and of course each genres could have some sub-genres.

So far, I have no details about the supported genres, but I definitely want to make it in a way that stories can’t have more than one genre. Main genres will replace some story codes like Scifi, horror.

So, this is a call for suggestions of what genres to include in the new system, and if a genre definitely needs sub-genres, what they are. Try to keep in mind that a story can only have exactly ONE genre and ONE sub-genre.

What’s puzzling me the most is what genre can plain sex stories have? They’re about human relationships, so what genre would that be?

Also, I intend to create a flag for sex and non-sex stories. The ‘no-sex’ category is not adequate.

So with this new classification a story can be, for example, Science Fiction: Time Travel: sex story, or Science Fiction: End of Civilization: non-sex story.

With the sex/nosex flag, all stories currently on the site would be classified as sex stories and it’s up to each author to flip the flag if it is needed for their stories.

Currently posted stories would have no genre classification unless it’s something already expressed currently in the categories.

So, what do you think, should I or shouldn’t I?

I revamped the review display page completely and made it accessible to everybody. The old reviewing system has been integrated with the site. No more need for a separate log in page and different ID. Reviewing is easier than ever for those with reviewer accounts.

A new reviewers section has been added to the site and it’s only
accessible for those with reviewer accounts.

The funny part about this change is that it came with no real planning. I know I had discussed a new reviewing system on this blog a long time ago, but it seemed that I could never really plan it and implement it properly within a reasonable amount of time. So I kept putting it off for later.

The way this started was with me thinking that the old reviews listing page is not particularly useful to either authors or reviewers if only premier members could access it. So I decided to give access to everybody and started by revamping the interface. Before this change, the reviews page was just a list by reviewer. It was static and listed all the reviews without any particular sorting, so new reviews could not be easily found by interested readers.

Bit by bit, the changes came and before I knew it, I had finished
reintegrating the old reviewing system, which had separate login and separate everything, into the site’s current structure.

The old plans for a review system accessible automatically by everybody have been changed into a review system with set number of slots for reviewers.

I’ll start with 10 new reviewers. If you’re interested in becoming one of the reviewers contact me and let me know.

All reviews for now will be moderated by me. There are few rules to stick to. Basically, reviews have to be positive. Not necessarily glowing with praise. They have to be at least positive in that they aim to either guide the other members of the site to good stories, or at least help the author with constructive criticism. So it must help. If it doesn’t help anybody, and is aimed to put down the author or drive them away from writing, then the review will be rejected. If it warns the reader to avoid the story without giving a valid reason why, then it will be rejected.

If I reject more than half of your reviews, your reviewer privileges will be revoked and the opening will be available for another that wants it and want to do good with it.

The system supports more than one review per story, so even if a story has already been reviewed and you have a differing opinion or more things that needs to be said about the story, you can still review it.

Be aware that a reviewer account needs a valid email address. And that email address will be visible to readers and authors. It could be different from your main email address for the site. Editors and authors will have the priority in becoming reviewers. And there is a limit to the time allowed without submitting a review. If you go 90 days without a single review, then your slot will be given to somebody else.

If the new system proves to be useful and helpful, I may expand it later and implement the missing part, which is review moderation by other users.

So if you’re interested in becoming a reviewer, use the site’s webmaster contact form to let me know.

In order to encourage those who are reluctant to disclose their email address to still send feedback, the mailing system provided allows for anonymous messages.

The system works very well and storiesonline, according to many authors, is the source of the most feedback received; which is very good for authors.

However, like every system, it is possible to abuse it. Hiding behind the afforded anonymity, some cowardly people abuse authors by sending them abusive messages through the anonymous system.

To deal with the problem, the mail system has been updated to allow authors to refuse all mail, or to refuse just anonymous email.

When an author chooses to refuse all email, the site won’t show any mail forms or links.

When an author choose to refuse anonymous email only, then the forms on the site will have the reader’s email inserted by default.

Since this is a risk of privacy for the reader, every reader is given the option of having a specialized contact email address in their account for such cases.

The main email address or the contact email address can be used in contact forms, however, either one have to be confirmed within 30 days when used.

Email address confirmation is done through a confirmation message sent to your email address, and requires you to follow the instructions in it to have your email confirmed.

Messages sent to authors who refuse anonymous feedback from readers who’s email addresses have not been confirmed are put on hold until the email address confirmation is received.

Of course, authors who refuse anonymous feedback are assured to receive less feedback.

If you are a reader that would like to send feedback to authors, but you don’t want to use the email address that you used to subscribe to the site, then get another email address and add it to your account using the ‘Email form settings‘ page. The page is always accessible through the ‘My Account’ page on the site.

The system needs to make sure that addresses used are still active after their first usage. So if you want to send messages to authors refusing anonymous feedback, your email address used must be confirmed at least within 30 days.

Some readers may find this practice highly annoying, but you have the option of ignoring the author. If you see your email address in the form, and you don’t like that, the mail form preference allows you to hide all email forms that don’t accept anonymous feedback.

Additional features of the mail feedback system is that you can have your email address automatically inserted into all mail forms to save you the effort of typing your own address into the forms that accept anonymous feedback, and also you can have the system send you a copy of the message that you send to authors.

» Edit Email form settings

Hopefully, the recent changes can address both authors’ and readers’ concerns.

If you have any comments or concerns about the new system, other than ‘this is a bunch of crap and I should be allowed to do whatever I want’, please use the comments section to voice them.

Inexplicably, still, some people are unable to access the site. The servers are online as usual. The DNS entries for the site are configured correctly. So why some Comcast, then Earthlink and now MSN users are unable to access the site? I don’t know, and can’t figure it out yet. Most of the problem areas were cleared yesterday about 1 pm – as evidenced by a sustained usage spike on the site; and for a period I thought the problems were cleared. However, today, when I got to work and checked my email, there were several messages still complaining about the inability to reach the site.

To help with this problem, I’ve added two links on the left of this blog. For a long time now, since 2002, I’ve owned the domain storiesonline.xxx, but since.xxx is not supported by the ICANN, normal DNS servers don’t lead you to the site if you simply typed ‘http://storiesonline.xxx’ into your browser’s address bar. The company selling those domains, New.net has instructions on how to access their DNS servers. But, since it requires the installation of a plugin for Windows users, I never made it public (Mac users can just type ‘new.net’ into the search field of the network control panel and gain access to the whole new.net network, including storiesonline.xxx).

However, on the weekend, it was brought to my attention (thanks cmsix) that anybody can use http://storiesonline.xxx.new.net to access the site without any need for plug-ins.

<Geek speak alert>

The second link is the direct link to the site’s main IP address. Accessing the site at this URL bypasses any DNS servers. However, if the site were to move to a different IP address, that URL won’t be valid anymore, so don’t bookmark it.

The two links are now permanently linked at the left, so if you bookmark this blog, you’ll always have alternative ways to access the site, if the need arises.

A side effect of the problem is that the site should be slower for everybody. To accommodate the new links I’ve temporarily redirected the stylesheet links (.css) to the main server, instead of the offload server at storiesonline.org. So the stylesheets would be served from the same server as the other pages and it should work for any URL that you use. But that puts a great strain on the site’s main line (an extra 100k hits per hour) slowing access for everybody. 24 hours after I stop getting complaint about the inability to access the site, I will redirect the .css links to the bandwidth offload server at storiesonline.org.

</end Geek Speak>

By the way, for those who experienced the inability to connect to the site, before you try the new links, flush your browser’s cache before trying one of the new links. Sometime browsers cache the error pages and keep displaying them even when it can connect to the site with no problems.
 
Another topic is the ongoing beta.

So far, response to the new layout has been positive in general. So as soon as some of the new features are tested extensively, the beta period will be officially finished and the new layout will replace the old one permanently.

Some of the new features added and changes made yesterday:

- The ability to center the stories’ text in the window — with purple bars on both sides instead of just on the right. By the way, this is one feature that few have noticed. The Story Style Page allows you to almost completely customize the look of the stories’ display for your eyes’ comfort — font size, background color, text body width; all can be customized.

- The ability for premier members/authors to bypass the confirmation of deletion from the library and bypass the extended info form for the addition of bookmarks to the library. The default is like before: to confirm everything. To set the new preferences go to the library’s preference page.

- Renamed the ‘Read’ link to ‘Home’. I received the most complaints about the lack of ‘Home’ link.
 
Privacy

A topic that is near and dear for everybody that I know is personal privacy. A while back, I found a new tool that helps personal privacy greatly. It’s called ‘tor’ from EFF.org (Electronic Frontier Foundation). It’s a proxy server that needs to be installed on your system, and once it is, it can reroute all the internet traffic that you initiate from the computer you’re using through a maze of anonymizing proxy servers. So no one watching your traffic can tell where you’re going and sites can’t tell where you’re coming from.

I’ve added the link to tor in the blog’s links on the left.

It’s a good tool. Although, it’s bad for services offered by your ISP like usenet access. Most ISP-run NNTP server for usenet rely on the IP address to allow you in or deny you access, so if you use tor to access your ISP’s news server, chances are that you will be denied access.