Lazeez's Corner

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  • Scoring System Changes

    Since implementing the scoring system on the site in 1999, it has been the only controversial part of the whole site. Many users found it useful, some didn’t trust it and some ignored it.

    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.

  • Recent Site Changes

    I made few changes to the site in the past few days. I thought I’d talk about them a bit.

    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

  • New Submission Wizard Features

    Today, Saturday, August 19th, 2006, marks the deployment of a new version of the site’s submission wizard. It’s not a complete re-write but a significant one nonetheless.

    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.

  • Email Feedback System: A minor, but important change

    I’ve made a small change to the email feedback system that all authors should be aware of.

    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.

  • Library Usage Examples and Tips

    Lately, I’ve been getting many requests for certain features for the library system, even though those features already exist in the Library, like update dates and a way to track serial stories.

    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.

  • Story Classification

    I have a problem. Or should I say, I’m dissatisfied with something. Story classification.

    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?

  • New story reviewing system

    Well, the new reviewing system is mostly finished.

    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.

  • More beta stuff and site accessibility

    This was a frustrating weekend.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    <geek>

    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.</geek>

  • The site’s new layout

    I’ve been receiving quite a bit of comments and reports about the site’s new layout currently available in the beta area of the site. Some favourable, some not.

    The most common negative common so far is that there is nothing wrong with the current layout, so no need to change, and don’t fix what isn’t broken.

    Maybe from a reader’s point of view, who’s been using the site for a while and used to the current layout, nothing is broken. However, from my side, it is broken, and broken badly enough for me to put a big effort into fixing it.

    Each day, at least once, somebody contacts me and ask how they go about posting their stories on the site. And as often, somebody requests a feature that is already available on the site.

    The first issue is the most frustrating. The links to post stories are on the front page of the site, however, currently, they are low enough to require people to scroll down and look to the left of the site’s home page.

    It seems that no one scrolls down to see what’s there. Most simply come to the site, look at the links on top (in the navigation bar) and use those; as though scrolling takes such an effort.

    What makes this worse, is that I would like to add new stuff to the site and if I do like I’ve done before, and add new links below the other links, then nobody would see them.

    So, the site’s new design makes maximum use of the prime real estate on the home page (the top 400 pixels). It makes it look a bit busy, but at least most people won’t have to scroll down anymore.

    Another change is the existence of two distinct areas on the site. One for the readers and one for the authors/editors. The reason for this is that many authors don’t read much on the site; they spend their time in pages dedicated to them. So, to minimize the effort for them to reach those places, I moved them to their own area and brought them forward to minimize the clicks that the authors need to reach them.

    Having two distinct areas requires two main pages. So the new home pages (I hate that term), make that ‘Main Pages’ are titled ‘Read’ for readers and ‘Write/Contribute’ for authors and editors. Both pages are bookmarkable (as are all the pages on the site by the way), so authors can bookmark the ‘Write/Contribute’ page and readers can bookmark the other.

    The other issue that needs fixing is the fact that a large number of features on the site seem to go unnoticed/unused and I get requests for them. It seems that most people don’t go exploring on the site, they don’t try various links to see what they do and what the pages offer. Many people don’t even know that they can change their own passwords, or update their email address, or change the font size in the listings or stories.

    The way that I can try to fix this is by posting using tips on the front page. Those tips will go in the ‘News’ section on the main page. And since people don’t like to scroll down, the news section needed to be brought up closer to the navigation bar. For the free area users, that has been the case all along, but for premier members who actually need most of those tips, the news section was always hidden below, pushed down by the random story suggestion mechanism. The new three-column design brings the news section up right below the navigation bar.
     
    PS: for those asking that I post more often on this blog: I’m a man of few words, so if I don’t have anything significant to say, I don’t say anything, so there would be nothing for me to post.

  • Biting more than you can chew, without realizing it!

    As many of you who’ve read the previous entries in this blog know, I’m working on a new reviewing system for the site. I have the feature set ready and have already started with the implementation. However, I’ve hit few snags.

    Let me tell you a bit about my way of developing features. I don’t work in a conventional manner. I learned programing on my own, as in no formal training, and over time have developed my own way of working. One of the most important issues for me is the user interface.

    When designing something, I start with a feature set, then with the interface, then the actual implementation. The reviewing system has a feature set, but no user interface. While it was easy to decide on how to make the review submission system work and where to place the link to it (the end of the story of course), I still can’t figure out how to give the users access to already submitted reviews for editing (where do you put something like that?). How to display the reviews and where? How to manage the moderating system? where to access it from?

    Another stumbling block is the fact that I’ve always wanted to implement multi-language support into the site. So I thought that I should start that by implementing the reviewing system in a way to allow support for multiple languages, and that lead to the start of the redesign of the site’s infrastructure. So this is taking way too much time; definitely more than I first anticipated.

    One thing led to another and now I’m contemplating the redesign of the whole site, layout-wise.

    While doing these separate things, there is always the day-to-day things involved, from helping readers to helping authors. It seems that no one can actually find the help page that cover everything most people would need help with. I typically answer about 25 – 50 help emails per day that contain nothing more than a link to the appropriate help page. Does anybody check the help link at the top of all pages before they email me?

    I realized that the homepage, while it’s been working for the longest time, isn’t the best way that it can be. Most people with smaller screens don’t seem to bother scrolling down and it seems that author services extend way too low on the screen for most authors to find the services relating to them.

    So what started as a project for a review system has suddenly turned into an extensive redesign of the site, from the basic layout to the main infrastructure of the site.

    At this time, I have no time frame for anything. One thing for sure, the site’s interface will be changing and the thing that I’m dreading the most is the angry emails that I will receive for daring to change what people are already used to.

    So the first thing you’ll see will be the interface changes, I’ve decided that there should be two distinct areas of the site, one for reading stories and one for writers. They’ll both be easily accessible by everybody, and two distinct areas will allow me to reorganize features and pages in a more streamlined and logical manner.