I’ve made an important change to the site today. Tonight will be the last night that weekly counters are all reset to zero. From now on the system will keep track of the last seven days individually for each story.
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.