Reviewers Cafe 576 members · 410 stories

Welcome to Reviewers Cafe.

Finding good stories and helping improve authors.

Story Directory

Reviewer's Cafe is for all authors who seek to improve and grow through feedback, whilst also putting their stories up to see if they have what it takes to be accepted into our Featured list. If you want either of these things out of your story, then please, show us what you’ve got!

Reviewer’s Cafe is a member of the Creator’s Guild, a place for people to enjoy themselves. Our Discord is moderately active with a gaming community as well as an active staff. We have rules concerning the Discord, however, they're common sense rules and shouldn't be feared.

In order to have your story reviewed, you will need to submit in our submissions folder. This folder becomes available at the start of every month and will be available until 50 submissions have been reached (see above for the next submission cycle). Your story will be claimed by a reviewer and when your story has been reviewed you will be notified and the review will be published in our forum.

For submissions, we do have some guidelines. As mentioned above, we're looking for stories on the site to add to the Creator's Guild, a collection of groups providing services such as: Art, Editing, and story advice.

So feel free to submit your story and join us. Only a few rules apply.

Submission Guidelines

  • Stories with the sole purpose of gore and other morally questionable content such as acts against consent and vore are subject to removal based on admin discretion.
  • All submitted stories must have rating and commenting enabled.
  • Stories with the sole purpose of sexual entertainment may not be submitted.

If you have any questions regarding the Reviewers Cafe or the Creator’s Guild, please do not hesitate to contact OkemosBrony.

If you wish to challenge a review grade or if you wish to bring a problem to our attention, please contact our complaints officer, Milo Chalks.

Comments ( 53 )
  • Viewing 34 - 53 of 53

443683
As the founder of the group I can say that what you've said is much of the rumor, but it wasn't as elaborate.

Go with occam's razor on this one. People lost interest for a variety of reasons and a few bad apples in terms of reviewers spoiled the bunch. After a certain point, we were done and didn't want to go through the rigmarole of working it through in terms of service while balancing full time jobs.

Dead absolutely, scandalous no.

433675
It's not just that. I know, I'm replying to this just over two years later, but I used to be a reviewer here and I feel like I can explain why the reviews died out completely after the format changes in a bit more detail and why it's taken two years for this kind of explanation.

Before I launch into this I will say that I harbour no ill feelings towards anyone in this group and that my statements here will be reflections of my feelings at the times specified or impartial, brutal honesty.

First things first, let's talk about the reason why the change was made in the first place: the rate of reviews versus submissions. A lot of groups on this website will have thousands of fics appended to their collection folders since every writer wants their piece of critique or attention to see what they can do better, and the Cafe wasn't really any different.

Presently there are 361 stories to 570 members currently in the group, of which only about a dozen were allowed to be reviewers. It should also be noted that there are 204 stories currently in the submissions folder, which says it's supposed to be emptied at the first of every month if they've been left unclaimed, though I doubt that's changed in two years.

Reviewers were selected on a very rigorous trial basis, the details of which I don't remember perfectly, but I do remember having to tryout for the position by submitting a mock review for a fic and then hoping that it was good enough. The standards may not have been incredibly high as far as to what number of words qualified for a review, but what you said in the review mattered immensely, and by that I mean most reviewers had to come off as scathing as possible to make it seem like they were being the stereotypical harsh critic.

It also seemed like we were almost expected to give lower-than-expected ratings to any fic we came across, feigning it as "high standards" when in reality I think we were just assholes. From where I'm standing now, and looking back at the impression I had of the group at the time, having a low acceptance rate was a commonly celebrated statistic since we thought it meant that we were picking only the absolute cream of the crop yet all it really did was fuel our ego and give us attention for being the jerk we all not-so-secretly wanted to be.

Again, that much is observation but it was the feeling that I was left with prior to my departure.

Now, I took this reviewing thing very seriously. I have quite a few of my old ones saved on my Google Drive and few of them run short of three pages (standard Letter, 1.15 spaced).

With the pressure of having to write my reviews as crudely as possible for fear of ruining the group's reputation and the position I had worked for, I felt like I had to think way harder than I needed to in order to write reviews for these people. These often took me a few hours more than I believe necessary to get the wording and "character" correct for my reviews.

Even if the reviewing of 204 stories was evenly split among the [let's say for the sake of argument] twelve active reviewers, that averages out to 17 stories per reviewer, and that submission box wiped at the start of the following month, meaning that you had less than 30 days to get 17 reviews done. With how slow I was at getting my reviews out because of the pressure I had put on myself, it was an impossibly high task, so in an attempt to appease all sides--reviewers, moderators, submitters, and even audience members--the moderators opened the floodgates and let anyone write reviews.

Now here's the problem

The moderators never contacted a single one of the reviewers about the changes. Not me, not Jay, not Okemos (who is now listed as the founder of this group which I find comedic, since it was really ArctikFox who initially created it), nobody aside from Arctikfox and one or two moderators knew about these changes.

My guess is that they didn't want to cause mass panic among the reviewers. They didn't want us to reject the idea of them wanting to make reviewing more accessible and keep submissions flowing. After all, the reviewers up to this point were professionals with standards and they were commonly held to those standards.

My mind at the time was thinking something along the lines of "you made me write these multiple page reviews being as scathing and nitpicky and particular as possible just to throw it to the same people I've seen write these things??" among other criticisms that fell into issues I had with other reviewing groups on this site. The chiefest of criticisms being that other reviewers and review groups didn't know how to review without sugar coating (which is totally false by the way) and we were the only group who dared to tell writers the truth.

I deleted my account a number of months after these changes because the Reviewers Cafe was what I was spending most of my time on and its foundation was ripped right out from under it. Not just that though; the foundation was ripped out entirely but it was done in such a way that I wasn't even told that the change was coming, as if to say that the hundreds of hours that I had spent dedicated to this group didn't even matter. I thought I had understood these people that I worked alongside with here. Yet it was done in a coup d'état way, and that was another way of the group signalling to me that my opinions on the changes weren't just irrelevant, but they never wanted to hear them in the first place.

Judging by the abrupt halt made to posts here, I imagine that's how many of the other reviewers felt as well though I won't speak on their behalf.

TL;DR: The admins made a change to the group that they thought would improve the speed of the reviews without informing the other reviewers. The result backfired and they ended up alienating both the people who had been anointed as dedicated reviewers and those who may have tried their hand at it shortly thereafter. Whether the latter is a result of the high standards and overall snarky nature of the group prior to the change is unclear.

One thing is clear, however: this group is dead and one major event points to it.

Thanks for reading and have a good one,
-TK

Do you accept crossovers?

433674
Kinda unfortunate. I'm pretty sure it died with the format change away from having people dedicated to reviewing and instead letting anyone do reviews.

433148

432559
Definitely feels like it, though.

Hello? Anyone out there? This group is dead, isnt it?

430294

Submissions are currently CLOSED. Submissions for the next cycle will begin at 10 AM EST (UTC -5) on January 5th, 2019.

This "Submissions Status" is updated consistently, and can be found below the "Story Directory" box right here, on the main page.

Not long to wait! Good luck :twilightsmile:

Okay I can’t add anything for some reason even though I joined. Help? Hope this place is monitored

1st December. I'll put that in my diary...

Not sure if anyone will see this but I figure it would be safer for me to ask here (and hope someone notices).

I have a story that at one point made it to the Featured Page, however I can't say for sure if it was because of the story or just a fluck. I have tried to submit it to the submission folder but it claims it is full (apparently clop fics like to clog the folder), so I'm not sure if the review cycle already came to an end or not.

When is the most opportune time to try to submit my story to the submission folder?

Hey there! I recently heard about this group, so I thought I could give it a chance, why not?:twilightsmile:

425644
I found it years ago so im not 100% sure, but I do believe it's a Magic card named "The Library of Leng"

425643
Yee, but where's the banner from?

425642

Complete stripping of the group to make make it better. :twilightsmile:
Hopefully the new operation helps.

Banner sauce?

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