Story Rating Feature

Good point Swiz: it would be nice to be able to send a private message to an author - particularly in the case of authors who prefer not to provide their email address (cubwriter28 is an example).

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This is the third time a private comment feature has been requested… so yes, consider that to be on my list of things to add…

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On mobile it is REALLY easy to accidentally rate a story as your scrolling with your finger. Was trying to scroll down to the comments of a story and accidentally gave crazy ratings like 1 star 5 star 1 star etc. Didnt realize what i had done till later.

Hm. Other than to make it quite complicated to give a rating; I don’t know any good way to avoid this.

In any case, there’s a fast link to directly navigate down to the comments. And the ratings can be fixed easily.

I understand that this is not optimal, if you have a good idea how to improve that, I’d be happy to listen!

Was just giving feedback. It was easy enough to remedy. Will let you know if i come up with anything.

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Feedback is always appreciated!

Why not just put a button that when pressed, would make the ratings visible, another way is to add a clear ratings without marking them 0 just make them null like if you never had given the rating, or you could add both of them which would be even better.

Also, thanks for all the work you put into the site.

Well, I want to make it as easy as possible to rate. I know how many people are reading the stories (it’s more than 5000 different people visiting the site each day) and compared to that, the number of ratings (or comments) is minuscule. Maybe 20 at most for each story.

I want to encourage readers to rate, not put more obstructions in the way. Even if that means that we get an accidental mis-rating.

5000 daily??! Is that counting bots? I had no idea the community was so large…:flushed:

Can’t tell if bots are counted, but Hugh already did everything to keep bots out. And it’s working, at least Google doesn’t find any stories if you enter story specific search terms.

And yes, the amount of silent readers is enormous.

I have a question, is putting the stars back at 0 would that make them null or 0?

If it’s 0 if you don’t want to hide the rating at least please put a clear ratings button, because once you rate something by accident I believe that, we would feel pressured to rate it and I don’t believe that would be an honest rating simply because of the pressure to rate it, and all that simply because we don’t know if sliding it back to 0 would in fact be rating it 0 or null.

I think it would be better to make it clear by putting a button to clear the ratings.

All this is just a suggestion, anyway I really like the site and you are doing a great job with it, and I will continue to visit it regardless :smiley:

Right now, setting the rating to 0 would rate the story with 0.

I could add an “clear” button without too much effort. The reason I didn’t do that in the first place, was because I didn’t think it would be necessary and because of the restricted space on mobile phones. Still, since it seems to be an issue for people, I’ll add that in the next update (which is planned for february, together with the “story of the month” and “story from the archives” feature).

Keep the comments coming, even if you don’t like something, feel free to let me know. Criticism is better than no feedback at all, so keep em coming - of course, you’ll also make me happy if you let me know that you like something :slight_smile:

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Hey Martin. Lots has changed in the past month! Love it.

Rating Visualization: I’ve always been a graph person. Would you consider having a public-facing heat map type representation, maybe with the “mc” on the y and “made me cum” (lol) on the x? If that ‘vector’ could be searchable, that might negate the stat stuffing you’re worried about. (I mean, why would you lie about ‘made me cum’?)

So the reader would see where they fell on the graph, and maybe the site could pull up some recommendations based on other people in the same area of the graph (and maybe the recommendations would take into consideration the other ranking metrics).

So the graph would be in place of the current rating system, and when tapped, it would show the current rating system.

Bah, now I sound like I’ve never done anything with websites. (You caught me.)

A slight tangent.

Recommendations/“Similar stories”, either by algorithm (using keywords and stats) or by the author, would be a good addition at the bottom of a story. It’s possible it would lead to people clicking away from the story before they’ve commented or rated it, but that could (possibly) be solved with a slight redesign.

I’ve told Martin before that part of the charm with the website is the ease in which one can access stories. That would make it even easier.

@xesulliv
Wow, that’s a quite elaborate idea, you’ve got there.

It sounds like something that’s not implemented easily, and what’s even more problematic is that it might be hard to explain to people. I had to read your text twice, to understand your suggestion…

@Foxtrotter:
The tags listed on a story already are something like a ‘find similar stories’ feature, aren’t they? That’s how I’m using them quite often.

Any solution I could implement would also use the tags.

BTW, did you get my last email?

Tags already do work that way, yeah. Using multiple similar tags in a search would achieve that effect. But an algorithm recommending (similar) stories based on both tags and rating could prove useful in both improving the tagging that is done and aiding in the discoverability of older stories. (The recommended similar stories should, at least partially, change with each refresh.)

I got your email! I’ve been swamped in thesis writing/editing, so I haven’t had time to send you a proper reply yet. The thesis is due today, so I’ll reply after I hand it in. I can explain the recommended story further in the email, if you’d like.

@Corin Haha. That was just my opening offer! :slight_smile:

I hadn’t realized you could search for more than one tag at a time, and the text! That’s nice!

Just a quick question about the story-rating feature – what does the grey “lg” category mean for ratings in the table?

“Ignored” (the others being “Anonymous” and “User”).

The reason is that I’ve realized that there are many ratings which are obviously set by accident - especially on mobile phones. Usually low ratings in just a single category.

Since they are tainting the results, I remove them from the “weighted average”.

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@Mr.Sandman wrote an excellent description for the rating categories which I’d like to add to this thread (and put up a link to on several places):


Hotness:
Straight forward if the most flexible, this is how exciting the story is, how much it arouses you in and of itself.

Mind control:
The degree to which the control is conveyed in an appealing and interesting manner.

Wanking:
Not to be confused as a synonym for hotness, which denotes excitability, this defines how much it actively gets you off rather than just how exciting it is. The climax to hotness’ prelude.

Writing:
The level of skill showcased in the telling. This is how good you are at telling a story versus writing a smut piece.

Idea:
How novel the story is in its concept. We all play along a similar driving point of control, but the method in which that control is asserted in each story varies. There are quite a few “I drugged you with a magic potion and now you’re my cockslave” stories, there are much fewer, say, “sentient clothing comes to life and takesover the world by converting men into dumb sluts” stories.

All of these factors are of course interrelated and affect one another, but by making these seperate categories we can more effectively denote the good elements from the ones that need improvement.

Though to be clear this shouldn’t be confused with a story being novel with being good, or a story following well worn tropes being bad. The retirement series by Edlam is a very classical story in terms of it being a traditional if enhanced “hypnotist makes guys unaware sluts” story but it’s told wonderfully.


Thank you very much, Mr. Sandman!

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