Looking at the detailed data of some stories’ ratings, we can’t help but to suspect that some authors are trying to manipulate them. It’s quite easy to do that using anonymous ratings (you just have to use different IP addresses to be able to give an anon vote repeatedly). That’s why I’ve changed the impact of ratings done by logged in users to count 5 times as much as anon ratings.
Still, it now seems that some people are creating accounts just for the purpose of up-rating their own stories. First of all, they are cheating themselves that way. What good is a high rating of your story, if you know, you have manipulated it yourself? That is no confirmation of its quality at all.
And also it’s not fair to all other authors either. So please don’t do it.
If we see that, we will interfere. We have the tools. Please inform us, if you think a story’s ratings might be manipulated. Especially on challenge contenders, we will be quite strict with that.
I’m glad to see this. There have been some stories that I felt were not as good as others but had high ratings. I agree with your point on authors just cheating themselves by creating fake accounts. Take constructive criticism and grow. If I find a story enticing I’m sure to leave an encouraging comment and if not I just don’t leave one. If you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say it kind of thing. Though I try to provide feedback for grammatical issues and such.
Tangentially related question - how exactly does the rating system decide when to display the little icons beside the story when browsing the site? I’ve published two recently. One has a little over 20 ratings per category and the other has a little under 20, but it’s the one with fewer ratings and likes that gets the icons to pop up. Not saying the system is broken; I’m just curious as to how it works.
The Weighted Rating is the one that matters. It’s an average with ratings from logged in users having 5 times the weight as the ones from anon users. Also, the total number of votes is taken into account, it can give you a small bonus (up to an extra of max 0.5).
The Percentile shows you how well your story does, compared to all other stories. The percentile of 6.3% in that case means, that this story is among the top 6.3% of all stories in that category.
The top 1.25% get a golden icon
The top 5.0% get a silver icon
The top 20% get a plain icon.
The stats and icons are recalculated 4 times a day. So you might have to wait up to 6 hours to see an update.
Yeah, I changed my name recently to something much cornier. Seemed fitting now that I’m writing and not just lurking. Didn’t realize it wouldn’t carry over to the forum.
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