Suggestion: List the stories in a different random order for each logged-in user, but the same listing each time for the same user. Then we wouldn't have 6 reviews of the first few stories, and no reviews of some of the stories near the end.

3871655
I think this is a very good idea as well; it would help randomize voting innately as well, and also mean that the same story wasn't one of the first/last stories for everyone to read.

3871655
3871853
On the other hand, it has the disadvantage that right now, in chat discussions about the stories, I get the feeling people are comfortable referring to them primarily by number (I know I am)—and that a number of reviewers are already trying to account for this by modifying their own reading orders, which isn't terribly hard to do.

I personally think I'd prefer to have the fixed numbering, though it's not a strong preference on my part.

3871655
In addition to what Bradel said, I think it would be confusing to newcomers. Users don't really expect listings to be personally randomised.

If you can convince me of the issue with some data (e.g., significant correlation between # of reviews and order in listing), I'll do it.

3872955
I think it's a great idea, but honestly it'll just make it so that if you end up near the bottom of the order, you don't have to wait forever to get a review. I still think it's a great idea, and if you can implement it, you should, it's just not wholly necessary when you get right down to it. Not sure what Bradel means about the numbers. <.< I mean, I have a hard enough time remembering what stories are about given their titles without bringing numbers into things. Maybe that's just me.

3873587
For the moment I'm with Bradel on this: consistent numbering has an actual benefit for the slower readers. It's easier to skim down the review thread and see "#18. Storyname" and know I need to jump past the review until I've reached that point in my reading than it is to memorize 30 story titles and cross-check for spoilers.

Also, there is no guarantee that titles will be unique, especially if authors are lazy and title based on prompt.

We already have reviewers consistently going in reverse order (me) and several reviewers going in randomized order. That can be encouraged more if we want reviews spread out more. I think this is a problem that can be fixed via social norms rather than with technology.

3872955
In the past few rounds, have the first half of the stories been voted on more than the second half of the stories?

3873587
It would be relatively trivial to implement. (Each art/fic has a "seed", a random float in the range (0, 1), assigned when it is submitted, which is used to order the gallery. Munging that seed with user IDs/names establishes a persistent order unique to that user.) I just don't know whether doing so is a good idea.

3873655
Values for (rank, vote proportion) for the last 5 events: https://gist.github.com/RogerDodger/b7a2d39c5e9193aa53c8

Plug the numbers into your statistical analysis method of choice. I checked the Pearson correlation, which clocked out at R=-0.624. The plot shows the effect best, I think.

The correlation is significant, but not very substantial. Stories at the top consistently get very slightly more votes.

3873841
It'd be more helpful to look at this data grouped by event instead of concatenated over multiple events with very different numbers of entries. I think we'd all expect voting proportions to be high for all stories in any write-off with a small number of total stories. The apples-to-apples comparison is going to be vote proportions for stories at different positional listings within a write-off event.

3873655
Also yeah, I hadn't considered the repeat titling issue, but that does seem like it comes up from time to time. It's nice to have a uniform way to distinguish between stories with the same title that everyone can follow.

Hey Roger, can you tell me the secret to word count on Writeoff? It seems to disagree with Word on what constitutes words. FimFic as well, obviously...

I'm trying to submit my story. Word says 748 words, Writeoff says "Error: Wordcount too high or too low"

I compared my story in Word to another author's story marked as 750 words, and they both show 748 words (in Word).

Er, help?

3941056
Start trimmin' words, bro! :V

3941109 But I don' wanna!

EDIT: But I did trim a few words down, of course.

3941056
What browser are you using, and do you have JavaScript enabled? You should get a client-side error that tells you the exact word count it has for your entry.

3941215 Thanks Roger! When I read this, I realized that I had NoScript enabled in Firefox for Writeoff.

I just finished building a new PC, and I've had to slowly go through setting it back up again like the old, dead one. I'm surprised that Writeoff even worked for me, but I finally got my story uploaded.

Wrong thread.

I asked in the other thread, but it might have been lost in the confusion: is it intended functionality for people to be able to get more than one mask on the scoreboard for the same competition, when we otherwise display only a single medal or ribbon per competition?

3969169
You can get any number of awards in an event. You receive a ribbon only if you receive no other award.

3969208
Ah. Okay, fair enough.

4086893
I'm not really a fan of websites with mobile-specific stylesheets and try to avoid UI work in general. You're free to give it a try and submit it as a pull request, but I'm unlikely to do it myself.

You can probably get by styling the page to your liking with Stylish or some similar plugin. White-on-black for example should only be a few lines of CSS. (Other coloured elements in the UI might not contrast so well, though, so... I don't know for sure.)

This might've already been suggested, but:
When there are a large number of stories in the final round, the title row on the voting page that lists the scores that each column of radio buttons corresponds to can be very far away from the final rows in the table. I've found myself counting my way across the columns to verify that I selected the correct score for the last stories in the voting order. Would be be possible to periodically repeat the title row, or something of that nature?

4122920
An easier possibility would be alternating columns of different darkness levels.

4123957
That would help some, but not as much. If there are enough entries, the top row can scroll off out of view entirely when scoring the last few stories.

+1 for 4122920, which has bothered me for a while; and another +1 for 4138977's suggestion to (if nothing else) at least mention MLP somewhere. I mean, since the entrants and judges are all coming in under the assumption that we're reading MLP fanfic, might as well make it easier for strangers to set their expectations.

4138983
But that ruins our prank on JK Rowling next month!

4138983
The former I intend to implement.

The latter will be addressed at a later stage.

4176751
Once the scoreboard is set up properly, yes.

It could be a little awkward to organise, though. The site's copy is all in English, so any participant that only knows French might have trouble figuring out what to do.

4189988
Some browsers (notably Chrome) will offer to translate pages that look like they're in another language. Automatic translation isn't great though so I wouldn't rely on this.

The best approach I think is what lichess.org does. You can get bilingual users to translate the messages for you. Setting this system up would take a while, but it is something I'd like to do at some point.

4190088
Oh, yeah. Detecting which language to serve is the easy part.

I'll get back to you on doing translations once I've got that set up. It might be a while though.

4086893 4104772

Allowing alteration of the site's color scheme is something I've been thinking of for a while, since my eyes also find it much easier to read white on black.

Currently I use Firefox with the Color This Site! plugin, set to use "Invert Brightness" on both Foreground and Background colors, so I don't have to spend time altering colors for Writeoff.me, and I get black background/white text where I need it.

Examples: Active Event / Fic Gallery / Story

It would be great to be able to select the color scheme on the site itself, though, so that any browser on any device follows the user settings. If this is a huge hassle, though, I'll just keep using what I have.

4194715 My pleasure. I hope it proved useful for you.

For what it's worth, the changes to the preliminary voting system are somewhat minor, but really nice for quality of life purposes. (Seeing which ballot corresponds to making which fic eligible, being able to go back and change the rankings, not having to type a name in at the end, etc)

I'm really digging it now. Very classy.

4265687
I'm planning on changing the prompts page and this is a major thing I plan to address. The winning prompt is usually one of the first ten submitted.

4272348
Thanks.

The bar graph things:

On the results pages for the previous contests are quite pretty, but I'm not sure how to read them. I'm guessing the red on the right is the "0" end of the spectrum while the green on the left is the "10" end, but I don't know why the bars are longer the higher a story ranks. It can't mean those stories got more votes, can it?

Just looking for some guideposts, I guess...

Mike

4286458
The coloured bars are the 10-0 votes coloured on a green-red spectrum. The width of a bar is proportional to its value divided by the number of bars (i.e., the amount it contributed towards the total score)[1].

The sum of the bars' widths is proportional to the story's score (i.e., the average of its votes).

[1]: Technically, the proportions are a little different to give 0-scores non-zero width, but the idea is the same.

4286640
Agreed, the colored bars are cool.

The width of a bar is proportional to its value divided by the number of bars (i.e., the amount it contributed towards the total score)

How does that work? If a story received 33 votes - three of each from 10 to 0 - would each of the colored areas be the same length? If not, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how to interpret the data.

4286721

If a story received 33 votes - three of each from 10 to 0 - would each of the colored areas be the same length?

No. Re-read what you quoted.

Number of bars is constant for each story. 10's are twice as big as 5's, 8's twice 4's, etc. (Approximately. As mentioned it's a bit different to allow 0 votes to have non-zero width.)

I've updated the page to try and make it a bit clearer. Hovering over a votebox will put a black border around it and show the value of the vote in a tooltip.

4287025

Thanks!

I'll play around with it when I have a chance. But one other thing: on the Author Guessing page, I changed a couple of my guesses yesterday, but when I look today, they've reverted to the guesses I originally had. It says "Automatic updates enabled" at the bottom, but since it doesn't seem to be updating, I figured I'd better mention it.

Mike Again

4287025
The hover definitely helped.

4287525

A work-around:

If I change an author guess to the blank spot at the top of the list of names, it'll stay as the blank spot when I navigate away and back to the page. Then I can change the blank spot to the new author, and the list remembers it. So all is well!

Mike A Third Time

4290283
Bug has been fixed. Thanks.