Anonymous star based rating/score for fics

[NumberSix]

It will be nice if there is some mechanism to give a fic a score rather than just like the OP/subsequent posts/follow.

 

[.We]

Star ratings don't work in real world. Everything under 4.5 ends up meaning a dislike. And most platforms reject concept of dislikes because that does not promote positivity. So we end up with a like system like QQ currently has.

 

[SnarkLord]

That sounds horrifically abuseable if it's anonymous
And if you don't leave an actual comment on the thread explicitly explaining why, the score is a worthless measure to both author and reader

 

[NumberSix]

That sounds horrifically abuseable if it's anonymous
And if you don't leave an actual comment on the thread explicitly explaining why, the score is a worthless measure to both author and reader

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It will have to come from a logged in user.
And maybe it should display who rated it, but not what the rating was.
Some safeguards could also be added, like fresh or "inexperienced" accounts not getting to vote. And blocking people who the OP blocks from adding to the score.

I view it as a faster and more exact way to review a work than writing a review, and more anonymous.
Some people who enjoy the work but don't see it as a masterpiece might find anonymous star reviews to be a better and easier way to give feedback.

 

[SnarkLord]

It will have to come from a logged in user.
And maybe it should display who rated it, but not what the rating was.
Some safeguards could also be added, like fresh or "inexperienced" accounts not getting to vote. And blocking people who the OP blocks from adding to the score.

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..that sounds like a complete and utter pain to even begin coding, let alone implementing.
There's also the question on how would you even judge what benchmark should be used for "allowed" accounts.
Kinda unfair to be account age if it's something beyond very short, and if it's very short it's pretty much useless.
Can't go for post count cause you have old accounts here who barely post
There's no single unique way you could judge "these accounts can vote" and not have it turn into a massive clusterfuck due to insulting members who for arbitrary reasons literally can't use a newly implemented function

I view it as a faster and more exact way to review a work than writing a review, and more anonymous.

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Issue is, again.
It's a vague number, it does not give anything of substance to the author.
"Oh this rated a 3 out of five..so what was the issue. Grammar? Too wordy, too short, too long, issue with x/y/z?"

Some people who enjoy the work but don't see it as a masterpiece might find anonymous star reviews to be a better and easier way to give feedback.

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It's the masterpieces you tend to have less useful feedback compared to praise.
Provided you word it politely, a vast majority of authors do really want feedback on how to improve their art.
While leaving a random ass number is vague as fuck, is unhelpful, and specifically because you left no commentary would have both the writer and readers going "so why did this get x score"
Which then loops/devlolves into readers going "this should totally be a higher/lower score, people are trolling with the rating", because personal opinion is random, and unique for each person


And that's avoiding the obvious issue that if it's anonymous, even if you put some limits on it, people will find loopholes and abuse it either for good, troll, or evil.
Which would then only generate extra work for the overlords who already only have a limited amount of free time per day they dedicate to this site

 

[NumberSix]

..that sounds like a complete and utter pain to even begin coding, let alone implementing.
There's also the question on how would you even judge what benchmark should be used for "allowed" accounts.

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Any user who has at least a few dozen posts and whose account is older than say a year?

And considering the fact thet this xf should use an MVC design pattern and appears highly extensible the actual backend code should not be more than a few dozen lines, with the ORM for the extra table.
Create a table, done via the ORM thet xf uses.
Add changes to the default view for an extra UI element and the like, should be easy as it is a common use case and probably even low/no code UI based tinkering to some degree.Update the templates thet the view uses to spit out stuff if required.
UI sends an API call to the controller, the controller receives it and validates it and sends it over to the model, the model checks if this is an update or a new raring by keeping the raw data, a map of users and ratings in a json object.Aftet the update r calculate the new averegr and store it in a separate field and increment the count of users who voted if needed.
Since the reviews are anonymous the overhead to the DB would probably be even less then thet of processing the likes/emoji.
Alternately you could have a fencier element thet also displays who voted but not how.Showing who voted how would also be trivial, nut bad for privacy.
Hell you could probably grab this and stick it into a prompt, then polish the vibe code it spews out and get something drcent-ish fairly quickly.

Also, some googling found a bunch of extensions thet appear to be doing this already.

[XB] Thread Ratings

Encourage meaningful feedback by letting users rate threads simply by replying. This add-on converts replies into ratings, allowing users to rate threads without any extra steps. It also provides flexible permission control, so ratings can be...

xenforo.com

Thread Types Plus XenForo 2 Add-on — ThemeHouse

Expand your community’s capabilities with new thread types, new forum types, and additional functionality to reviews, post comments, Question Threads, and voting.

www.themehouse.com

 

[SnarkLord]

So someone already made stuff like that. Great.
That's now an add-on that increases yearly maibtaince cost for no purpose whatsoever.

Look
Issues is
This can't be limited to story fics only.
Because QQ *does not* have any separation between story and non-story threads
So the rating would be applied to all the threads on the site.
The other alternative is telling the mods to go look through how many thousands of threads there are and separating fics from non fics

And again
You're overcomplicating for wanting a frwtute that's functionally useless for QQ

Yes, it makes sense for other forums where there are things where people publish recipes, actual physical products, etc... Things where a rating would actually be an useful thing.
A forum where the focus is stories ideas and discussions?
Blatant waste of time if you don't leave a, actually useful review to reflect the eating you give because how the bloody hell is an author supposed to know shat they should be working on fixing if they have no comments just a bloody random number.


And with introduction of ratings there introducing blatant favoritism and quality segregation. Because people will max rate authors they like, they will compare authors purely based on ratings, downvote people they disagree with regardless of actual content, and i honestly don't see this ending on a positive , or useful, note.

The crux of the matter is numbers are meaningless without context. You want to introduce numbers without context to be attached to threads for, what not wanting to bother to leave a comment, review? It is the exact opposite of what a forum at the heart is meant to be, a place to discuss and share feedbackx not a mess of impersonal vague numbers

 

[NumberSix]

snip

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A simple toggle can let the OP enable/disable voting, as I proposed above.
One more if/else statement to populate the table.
Trivial addition compared to the rest.

But now that you mentioned it, those add-ons all do let you have alternate forms of these and it would be lovely to have a mechanism to differentiate between story/quest and regular threads, too.

 

[SnarkLord]

*sigh*
In the end
You're throwing suggestions of "add this and that"
It's still not answering the base question on what good does it do.
I need you to pause.
And give thought to the question/scenario I'm about to give.

You're an author, that just posted the first/first couple of chapters for a story/idea you had.
You wait.
After a day there's not a single response, but multiple ratings that averaged the thread to..let's say a 4.1
So you're clearly doing *something" good.
But there's a higher rating which means something went wrong. Did you pacr it wrong, spent too much/little time on something, did something give the wrong impression are there grammar/logic mistakes you're not seeing?
You don't know, because no one is saying anything just leaving a number.

Similar scenarios
You're a reader browsing a fandom you like.
You see a recent thread that has a...again let's say 4.1 rating yet no one posted on the thread.
Is the story at fault, or is it something else? Do they not want to engage with the author? Are there sone issues here?
Again, you don't know because all you have is an arbitrary number.


The central issue here is, you're ssuggesting a rating system for something that is, at best, difficult to tste objectively. It's all thoughts of other people put down on paperx you *will* be subjective on how a certain story hits, what kind of opinion it forms.
And trying to rate it on modern literal standards because a vast majority here *aren't professional authors*. They just have stuff they like to share wwith othere. Sure, they welcome advice to improve, but not many want to use it to actually become full time authors.

So i want you to think about and give a clear answer.
What. Would a rating system you suggest achieve?
And saying "on just make leaving reviews alongside a rating mandatory" doesn't cut it. That's literally making posts in a thread with extra steps, complicated by adding a new extension to the thread and imposing ratings on people who do this for fun and relaxation.

 

[NumberSix]

.

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Rating systems add all sorts of benefits.
They provide faster and easier feedback for readers and let potential readers proritize longer works.

 

[SnarkLord]

...as i have just earlier stated in just one of potential hypothetical, cenarios, that's not any kind of useful feedback. That's throwing a number without any sort of context st a thread

And why do you think longer works would get prioritized

 

[NumberSix]

...as i have just earlier stated in just one of potential hypothetical, cenarios, that's not any kind of useful feedback. That's throwing a number without any sort of context st a thread

And why do you think longer works would get prioritized

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People's time is valuable.

Thread size, number of replies and word count alone do not entice you into reading something, having a ratings system and being able to see how many people found this a masterpiece, mid level or bad on the other hand is a concrete, fast metric.

This approach has been used by reviewers, bookstores and the like for years.

It is a massive convenience.

 

[BronzePlaceWriter]

It's a fun idea and I can get the thought behind it, but it reminds me of Literotica's rating system and that's not a great look.

Literotica's rating system is a poisonous put of vipers, for those unaware. Anything below four and a half stars is considered horrifically bad and because people have different takes on how stories should be, there is a bunch of band wagoning against stuff that they don't feel fits even if it's technically well written. There are whole rating wars between rival authors, organised groups who sweep through and downvote everything that they're against and even bot manipulation.

It is a massive headache.

 

[LurkingInTheDeceit]

Sounds a bit like Royal Road. Think I've heard of rating wars going on there as well, and authors basically have the attitude that 'anything less than 5 stars is active sabotage' when asking for reviews, so I'm not sure how useful a metric it actually is.

 

[Avernus]

Star ratings don't work in real world. Everything under 4.5 ends up meaning a dislike. And most platforms reject concept of dislikes because that does not promote positivity.

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Also, dislikes tend to result in people ganging up and mass-downvoting people (or whatever) they don't like for whatever reason. Like with games on Steam, where periodically some group takes a dislike to a game for some-non-game reason (usually something Rule 8 related) and mass downvotes it to tank its collective rating.

Spite is a powerful and often irrational force, and dislikes enable spite.

 

[SnarkLord]

I don't use RoRo/LitE so didn't know about it, but yeah, rating wars/intentionally skewing the result was Quite litetally the first thing came to mind when i originally saw this idea proposed.

Also, as i don't know hot those sites have it set up..is it just numbers, or are they required to leave an actual review along the rating?
Because the second biggest issue is, it's a subjective rating, and if there's no further context, how does a writer/reader know if its due to the vibe, the writing quality, the grammar, maybe the overall thread vibe rsrher then story vibe etc...

Thread size, number of replies and word count

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This is an honest question, not having a laugh here or doing a bit.
People actually look at those things before starting to read a story?

 

[NumberSix]

.
People actually look at those things before starting to read a story?

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When I decide what to read, usually utilizing goodreads or Amazon to do so I generally look at.
Do I absolutely hate the writer for some reason and have them blacklsited?
Genre.
Score.
Number of people who scored and read the book.
User that bought/read this also bought/read and enjoyed stuff I like already.
My friends on Goodreads's scores.
Have I read this writer before and liked what I got?

TV Tropes if I am looking for fanfics, and/or the kudos/subscriptions/bookmarks per chapter/1k words. If the fandom is big and there is lots of uncovered ground, that is.

I have python scripts that automate a lot of this stuff.

I like to have a concise, data driven approach before I touch anything, especially nowdays with so much self publishing and barely edited stuff.

 

[BronzePlaceWriter]

Sounds a bit like Royal Road. Think I've heard of rating wars going on there as well, and authors basically have the attitude that 'anything less than 5 stars is active sabotage' when asking for reviews, so I'm not sure how useful a metric it actually is.

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Yeah, that's another issue too. There are authors who will take anything less than 5 as being a personal insult and then there are also readers who consider anything less than a perfect five to mean the story is worthless and both those also can cause drama when they run into more reasonable people.

I remember when I posted on LitE - very briefly for these reasons actually - the general consensus was that if you didn't hit at least 4 and a half stars, you may as well have only gotten 1. This was made even more annoying by the way their rating system is set up, a small amount of negative reviews can tank a story in a way that requires a much bigger amount of positive ones to fix. This combined with how the community treated the metrics as pretty close to an objective measure of quality taught authors to be super defensive and paranoid of their ratings and encouraged a crab bucket mentality.

It was honestly quite nasty behind the scenes.

 

[NumberSix]

snip.

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There are ways to mitigate that problem, like showing alongside or just using the median instead of the average, or combining the mean and the median and dividing by two.And use ceil rather than floor when you output the numbers.
And only showing a rating after, say, 10 or more people have rated the story.
And as I said, this can be optional and done if the OP enables it.

 

[SnarkLord]

When I decide what to read, usually utilizing goodreads or Amazon to do so I generally look at.
Do I absolutely hate the writer for some reason and have them blacklsited?
Genre.
Score.
Number of people who scored and read the book.
User that bought/read this also bought/read and enjoyed stuff I like already.
My friends on Goodreads's scores.
Have I read this writer before and liked what I got?

TV Tropes if I am looking for fanfics, and/or the kudos/subscriptions/bookmarks per chapter/1k words. If the fandom is big and there is lots of uncovered ground, that is.

I have python scripts that automate a lot of this stuff.

I like to have a concise, data driven approach before I touch anything, especially nowdays with so much self publishing and barely edited stuff.

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Huh
More power to you I guess
Waaaay too much effort for me
If I narrow things down by genre at all, Most of the time just grab a title at random, if the title/summary/first page draws me in, sold
The only other thing I do is look at stuff I already got and look at "users who read/bought this also got X/Y/Z"

Honestly forgot TVTropes even has fanfic recs due to how rarely I used it

And only "statistic" I look at in fanfics is usually "is it longer then 1k/does it have at bare absolute minimum around 500 words per chapter"

And as I said, this can be optional and done if the OP enables it.

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Don't get me wrong, it's a valid option, but I genuinely feel that making it selective would then lead to elitism. One side of "Oh look how self-important this author is, he actually wants rating on his work" vs "This author feels like he's too good for the rating system, is he self concious because he knows his work is bad?"

 

[tacobowl8]

Honestly, from a forum staff perspective, this adds another method of communication between members on the forum, one which we would not have a good means of moderating. As such, beyond any technical realities of implementing this, we are unlikely to do this as it would introduce more work and time needed for maintenance of it that we would rather spend on other things.

 

[NumberSix]

Huh
More power to you I guess
Waaaay too much effort for me
If I narrow things down by genre at all, Most of the time just grab a title at random, if the title/summary/first page draws me in, sold
The only other thing I do is look at stuff I already got and look at "users who read/bought this also got X/Y/Z"

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Have you seen the proliferation of military science fiction, space opera and fantasy lately?

Both in size AND number of titles?
(EDIT: something like 200k(SF&F) with self publishing and digital only editions according to google. Also according to google something like 4-6 million books are published just in the USA. To find quality nowadays you need heavy excavating machinery, a shovel doesn't cut it anymore.)


Often samizdat with zero editing, at best it gets massively bloated, overdone in areas and at worst, which is often the common case, outright slop.

I am NOT reading a 1k page debut novel or a 22 part 600 page on average debut series when the writer should have written and sold short and medium length fiction and gotten the bamboo sword head bonking from a few editors starting to write longer works.

Honestly forgot TVTropes even has fanfic recs due to how rarely I used it

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It does but AllTheTropes often has stuff it misses.

And in general I look at the tropes pages, too.
Random wiki walks have found a few gems for me.

Honestly, from a forum staff perspective, this adds another method of communication between members on the forum, one which we would not have a good means of moderating. As such, beyond any technical realities of implementing this, we are unlikely to do this as it would introduce more work and time needed for maintenance of it that we would rather spend on other things.

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The communication would be one way, one time extremely limited and mostly anonymous and within a pretty iron clad set of guidelines, like no blocking.
Sure, you can argue that people will create sock puppet accounts, but that is already a violation and covered in other ways, and the overhead (extra disposable e-mail, registration, a "rep" score where you need n number of posts and n time on the forum before you can add ratings) would be similar to or even higher than the overhead you'd need to troll people via bad reviews and comments.

Amazon might police their reviews and return policy, but not their reviews.

Honestly I don't think it will be as big of a problem as what you describe.