Voting Question · 2:46am Jun 5th, 2017
It's a little perplexing to me, but sometimes I see fics that have gray voting bars. Even when someone gives an upvote or a downvote, it remains gray. At first, I thought it was because the author had made the stats invisible, but I couldn't find that option in any of my fic or account settings, so I ruled that out. Then, I figured it was because it was new, but once I uploaded a story and it got a single vote, I needed to rule that idea out as well. Finally, I just thought it was to mask fics that had more downvotes than upvotes so that it didn't negatively impact the possibility of someone reading the fic... until I found fics with far more downvotes than upvotes that were still visible. I'm just confused. Why are the voting bars gray? How did they get that way? Why?
I've wondered that too. I've only seen it on bew stories, but not every new story, and never on one I published.
4558431 It’s a relatively new thing, only been around for a few months, which may be why people aren’t so sure about it.
It’s so that early downvotes don’t kill a story’s potential momentum. So, most of my stories picked up a single downvote within a couple of hours of them going live. My most recent one at that stage only had a couple of upvotes, so the like/dislike bar was a disconcerting 1/3 red. That kind of severe ratio can put people off stories just on the basis of one negative opinion, which the mods were trying to avoid.
So now the like/dislike bar stays grey until a story receives 10 votes, at which point the bar becomes visible. However, you as the author can see what votes have been received right from the start.
Unless I’m very much mistaken, that is, in which case it’d be great if someone pointed me in the right direction!
4562033
Oh, that makes a lot of sense.
4562033 Now that, I can understand. It sounds the most plausible right now, so we'll go with it.