I suspect not many people will see this here, but it's where it belongs, and I'll signal boost it from my own blog.

At Bronycon 2017, I helped out on a panel with maskedferret, Sunchaser, ABagOVicodin, Corejo, Dubs Rewatcher, and Syeekoh about various editing topics, one of which is how to receive feedback. Eventually the whole panel will get posted to YouTube, but a few of the points deserve to be reiterated here in how they specifically apply to feedback coming from pre-readers.

The feedback is not a must-fix list. They are things we think need to be changed, but they aren't absolute. If there are a few things you don't fix for whatever reason, depending on how serious they are, it may not be worth sweating it. A story doesn't have to be perfect. If you get it above that threshold, we'll post it along with whatever flaws we think it still contains. I think it's in an author's own interests to post the most polished product we can, but at some point, it's close enough.

Feedback doesn't have to be a one-way process. If you think some aspect of the story is better left as is, then by all means, explain why. If you can make a reasoned argument that there's a net positive to having it that way, then state your case. But don't have that case be something like "I've seen the same mistake in published fiction before, so it must not be a big deal." Explain why it makes the story better than the suggested change.

A rejection does not mean the story is ineligible to be resubmitted later. If your story ever becomes ineligible, which is quite rare, we will explicitly tell you so. You also only get a strike if we explicitly tell you so.

Getting a lot of feedback is a good thing. It almost always means the pre-reader believed in your story enough to spend that amount of time giving you advice on how to improve it. Professional writers pay people to do this for them. You're getting it for free. That's a lot of time wasted if it isn't meant to benefit the author.

If you're told you can say your story is back from Mars, then you're almost there. It's quite likely that your story will be approved if you resubmit it. If you claim your story is back from Mars when it really isn't, it won't help you. We check.

There are advantages and disadvantages to whether you submit a very long story when it's complete or when it's still early on. Getting feedback on the whole thing is useful to the author, and we can see the actual finished product, so we don't have to speculate on how it'll turn out. But it also takes us a whole lot longer to go through it. Furthermore, problems we find in early chapters often pervade the whole story. If we can point something out at the beginning so that the author learns not to make that mistake, then it's less work for us to keep cataloging them through the whole story, and it's less work for the author to fix. If it gets accepted, that also means the author can add new chapters as they get published and get into story updates posts, resulting in more publicity. And simply because it's shorter, it will get a quicker response. We will always allow long completed stories as queue submissions, but the benefits lean toward submitting them before they get very long.

Again, thank you.