Truly random reviews · 6:45pm Jun 7th, 2015
Since I have not been very active lately, I somehow (possibly in a moment of utter insanity) decided to do more reviews here on Fimfiction.
Of course, a interesting question immediately comes to mind: How does one pick stories to review?
Knowing me, just browsing for candidates would not be a very good idea, since I would most likely just pick stories that I would probably like anyway and shy away from more... difficult stories.
So, what to do? Well, since I have a knack for mathematics, the answer is easy:
Pick a random, equidistributed number (the interval the number is picked from is estimated from the IDs of the last few newly released stories on the front page). Check if a story with an ID equal to this number exists (and fits a certain set of criteria) and add it to the set of stories to review. Repeat until the set of stories to review is sufficiently large.
Sounds like a good idea?
No, I don't think it is, either.
But, I'm doing it anyway!
So, here are the additional properties the story has to fulfill to be picked for a review (besides, well, actually existing):
- It has more than zero chapters and more than zero words (random stories have zero words more often than you would think)
- It is not protected by a password (otherwise, reading them would be quite a challenge)
- It is not poetry (the only real "personal" restriction, since I don't really read poetry and don't feel competent enough to review it)
If I do more than one iteration of this, I will probably add more rules (a cap on the number of words is, for example, very likely).
The size of the set of stories to be reviewed will be ten for this initial round.
Alright, let's see how this goes. No guarantees on how long this will take me (but since nobody reads these, it won't matter, anyway ).