A bug kicked my story off the feature box... · 4:08am Jun 6th, 2017
This morning, I woke up and noticed that Walk into a Bar has dropped off the feature box. At first I thought, “Oh well, it was due to go sooner or later”, even if it seemed strange that other stories of the same age and rating were still up.
Then, about five minutes ago I checked the story statistics.
Story rating: 163,000+.
Suddenly, my story becomes one of the lowest-rated stories on the site, even though the upvote/downote ratio wouldn’t suggest that. I’ve noticed it’s now very hard to find it through browsing by rating, too.
Oh well, I suppose a new site update is bound to come with a few bugs.
But I’m sad this story I like so much is going to have so much trouble getting exposure now :(
EDIT: Holy cow, this issue has affect like a third of my stories. Has anyone else gotten this also?
I’m not seeing the same issue on my end but I think there is absolutely something weird going on with the story rating math. Walk into a Bar already has four times more likes than my main story with fewer dislikes and yet the rating of your story is lower. That doesn’t seem right in my eyes and I firmly believe the calculation for story rating is messed up somewhere.
However, there is a bright side and you shouldn’t despair. Take Ofolrodi for example. At this moment, it is at the top of the feature list and yet the ranking on the same stats screen is 170,189. We already know that whatever math puts a story in the feature box uses far more than simply the rating value. I don’t doubt the story rating math will be fixed once the more critical issues of functionality have been cleared up on the new site.
Also, I’ll be very surprised if Walk into a Bar doesn’t bounce back into the feature box when you publish the next chapter.
Tricky tricky changelings.
Heat and ratings are just messed up, yeah. If you go on anyone’s userpage and look at their Top Stories, the order will usually be messed up- usually low-rated stories jumping to the top, or high-rated ones hitting the bottom.
Currently topping the box (”It’s new and I hate it”) is rated 170,000+. It’s fair to say that something is very, very broken.
Knighty just posted an explanation in the Discord chat:
11:45 AM] knighty: i changed our rating generation
[11:45 AM] knighty: and forgot to multiply by 100 at the end
[11:45 AM] knighty: like the old code does
[11:45 AM] knighty: so every story that gets an updatedf rating due to a like/dislike
[11:45 AM] knighty: now has a score like 0.9
[11:45 AM] knighty: instead of 90
[11:46 AM] knighty: which throws off everything using it
[11:46 AM] knighty: including related stories, featured stories and even searching
[11:47 AM] knighty: urgh thats annoying i missed that last night
[11:47 AM] knighty: because now i have to write a script to recache everything
4561399
Well, that explains it then! I suppose I should be glad it'll be fixed soon.
I think I'll wait till after the fix to post the next chapter of my story, though.
Related: Anyone know if Knighty is really adamant about keeping the uniform blue color for genre tags and the loss of portraits for character tags? I miss how colorful the site used to be.
4561403
Looks like the bug has been found and will be fixed as soon as Xaquseg is awake to push out the fix.
Yes, that seems to have been the loudest feedback (closely tailed by people who don’t like the blue color for the top bar).
It doesn’t look like that is going to change -- the reason given is that they’re looking to add more tags (exactly which is not specified) and coming up with different colors for each of them was not considered scalable. I think images for character tags have gone due to Genfic preparations.
People are working on userscripts that can restore them more or less on a user-by-user basis.
4561407
I am sad.
It's great that this site is going GenFiction... but the side effect is that this site is going more generic.
It’s a bug I identified earlier. Unfortunately it won’t be live for a few hours, but when it goes live it’ll sort it out.
edit: I see someone beat me too it
4561425
Wah Knighty responded to my obscure blog post! Thank you for the info!
Btw I like the new site, even though I wish it would be a bit more colorful. It runs a lot better on my phone!
Glad this issue got fixed. The feature box has been a wealth of fun little quirks and stuff lingering longer than they should or getting kicked off too fast quite a bit the last few days, but it seems to be over now.
Though, I admit it was fun having my story stuck as the default main page load for a good 8 hours or more.
4564048
Totes jelly.
Btw just noticed that our stories are listed together on the recently updated features!
4564049
Yeah. I just updated MAD for the last time. I should check out “walk” into a bar for sure, though... That’s got a collection of my favorite characters right on the front.