Somewhat recently (past two months, maybe? I 'unno.), I'd been taking a more active hand in story policing-- deleting fics that didn't qualify and notifying members who'd repeatedly broken the rules. Then I got a job and don't have time to do so anymore. So little time, in fact, that I'm suppressing story add notifications from the group. Sorry 'bout that.

I keep thinking we should rejigger the group anyways, maybe into a human-powered recommendation engine. But that's a completely separate thought.

3336968 or hold a poll/something asking for volunteers to take over for us. I myself am working a 8-6 job (last hour to get home) so I can't do it either.

3337138
"We need more mod-hours" is an absolute, independent from my thinking that we should rejigger the group.

I don't know if you remember, but basically since the group started I've felt--and said, if I remember correctly--that we need to clarify what the group's for and/or reorganize it so it's better at that. Yet I haven't actually done anything about it, which may just show how much I really care about the group.

3336968

Just thought I'd bring up that all my imageshack pictures have died recently, and I believe your banner was one of them. Trouble is figuring out which one it was.

I think that was it, and the link is here to a working copy if you want to put it back up.

--arcum42

3337254
That was our banner all right. And that would explain why I suddenly wasn't seeing it. I'll go put that back up. Thanks!

3337217 Yup I remember, and I still disagree that we need to rework the group.

But as you said, mod-hours is our top priority for now.

...

...So how do we go about doing it?...

3337810
:PPshrug:

3337409

No problem. I got most of the groups I've made banners for, because I have admin access on a lot of them, but I overlooked this one, and realised it when I saw the blank banner...

--arcum42

Oops, meant to comment on this sooner.

But yeah, at the very least, it might be a good idea to do away with the method of dividing the main stories into the incremental numbered folders, and just organize those by genre instead. The constant shuffling around is a hassle, and I honestly doubt many people pick a folder to click based on whether the stories in it have 200ish views instead of 300, or such. Just the simple fact of having under 500 views can be good enough.

3339271
You know people only get notifs about thread replys if they're >>replied, right?

That is, I got a notif for arcum's comment right above yours, but not for yours.

3340510

Yeah, I know, but I wasn't really thinking about it. I didn't quite consider my comment as being specifically directed at just you enough to give much thought to marking it as a reply, more just part of the general conversation. Would have if you'd been the only one here. Plus I suppose I figured you'd be checking into the thread for just that reason, because I got used to just looking occasionally for the next few days whenever I've made a new thread here. I mean, you saw it, after all, but I guess I could have added a reply to all three of you, although perhaps not Arcum.

Anyway, no opinion on replacing the main folders of stories under 500 views with regular genre categories? Just mix the 100s together with the 400s and such, then treat the graduates and adjunct folders the same as we have been. Maybe that would be more effort than it'd be worth, I don't know. The last time I spent a while trying to decide how to sort through a bunch of stories here, my browser crashed and everything I was in the process of organizing got undone, so then I just went bleh and figured I'd think about it later.

3340691
Bleah. Now I feel I look like a jerk.
(I did see it, but only because I hadn't happened to look at arcum's comment before you posted. Although checking every so often for a few days is a good idea.)

If I'm not going to be around, far as I'm concerned you can do whatever you want. If I were trying to improve the group, I'd say we need to be clearer on what the goal was, and we need massively more user involvement (even if it's of "low-key" mods) in determining whether a fic meets that goal. That would almost certainly end up with a folder re-arrangement, but into what I don't know.

3341865

Eh, not a big deal. Replying probably would have been a good idea, but like I said, I mostly just didn't really think of it. Group forum threads have always been a little bit awkward here.

I still wish I had a better idea how many people actually check the folders in this group. If everyone's just using it to add stories, and no one's actually reading them, then it doesn't matter what we do. Or if people just base it on the notification when a story is originally added, folder sorting still isn't that important. But if people actually browse the folders a decent amount, and the goal is succeeding, the system is kinda sloppy and should be cleaned up. It's just such a low-feedback group, I really have no idea. Like you said, more involvement would be good, but I don't really know where to start either. All I know is that I got tired a while ago of constantly sorting things and removing rule-breakers, without having any idea if it was even doing any good. I've always had doubts that the group is active enough to support any sort of approval system, but maybe it is.

3342275
Also, I don't feel we have the right tools for involvement. Even something as simple as if people upvote or downvote every story they read through here could help--shuffling bad/disliked stories down out of the pile and pushing better ones up. But we can't tell if they do that.

But I think having a community who all know they came together ("here") for the same goal would trump all other considerations.

Maybe, we could flush everything, bump all folders to "contributor", and you can't add stories until you've reviewed/recommended some--and had your recommendations seconded. We'd still need to re-arrange folders.

Maybe if we... I dunno. I just know I don't have any specific interest in this being a review group, but I do want it to be a tool for finding good stories I (or others) would enjoy, but wouldn't have found out about otherwise because they never got much-if-any attention before vanishing into the mists of the past.

Maybe we could track how a story's views and likes/dislikes were when it was added, and how they change. Mmm but that doesn't give us any tools for finding and discouraging noncontributors bad contributors, and only poor ones for rewarding good contributors.

Maybe (though probably only theoretically) we could replace what's currently the story folders with a algorithmic subset of the "popular stories" view of fimfiction as a whole, and directly encourage people "hey! Go vote!"

Maybe we could base our metrics on votecount rather than viewcount. This might also encourage pulling in truly antique stories.

I dunno.

3342373

Yeah, that's pretty much the same as I was thinking, that it'd be really nice if members could vote on submitted stories to determine if they should stay in the group. Everything seems like a bunch of maybes because all the options seem lacking in one way or another.

I'm trying to remember why we went with views instead of votes when we originally started this group. I know there was some reason, but it's eluding me right now.

3344136

Low views makes sense, because those are the stories that just aren't being read. High view counts and not much on the way of votes could just mean everyone's rather meh on the story in general.

Of course, the trouble is that low view counts means that if a few people don't like the story, it torpedos your percentage of liked to disliked. For example, here is the story of mine that I personally consider the most underappreciated at the moment. (which isn't in this group) It was released in January, and only has 180 views, with 26 likes and 4 dislikes.

The thing is, it's a tragedy. Bad things happen to the viewpoint character and it doesn't end well for them. I expected a few downvotes and I got them. It makes me wonder if that 90% bar is set a bit high, though.

--arcum42

3344136
Low total attention? I wonder if views and total-votes are proportional. I'm pretty sure I heard that favorites and upvotes are proportional.

3344726
Maybe different "thresholds" for different categories? (Ie, tragedys getting away with a higher downvote ration than not-tragedys.)

Maybe some sort of normalization formula, so that lower views get away with a wider ratio spread, but as your viewcount goes up, the closer to 90%-or-better you have to hit?

Of course, reviews would work, too. If we could only find a way to get them to work.

I can't help but suspect that there's a story out there that's massively downvote-bombed, but is exactly what we'd want here, if only we knew why we wanted anything in here.

(Is that itself a tragedy?)

3345349

Normalization would be good, but I can't help but think it might be rather tricky for people trying to figure out if they could add their stories or not. Thresholds might help, but, of course, there are stories downvoted for other reasons.

Another one of my stories is named Twilight Sparkles Meets Peaches. You remember when everyone was posting Peaches stories? This was a subversion, and a number of people liked it, but it got massively downvoted on the name alone. 286 views, 38 likes and 15 downvotes.

Perhaps thresholds with exceptions. Something like contributors and moderators can put in stories with a lower vote total if they've determined the story to be better then the votes would indicate.

(These are atypical, btw. Two or three of my stories are in this group, put there by Periphery, I was featured on a chapter update recently on another one, and a recent story got a fair amount of attention, though it didn't quite feature.)

--arcum42

3345447
No, I don't. From what I've heard I consider that a good thing.

I'm just throwing out algorithm ideas. To be useful, we'd probably need some fancy javascript autocalculator webapp thingy. (I could probably write such.)

This quasi-live threading has been interesting, though. What if we replaced the group with a live IRC channel, and used the group folders for archive of fic recs? We could monitor fics in real time, and get that whole social, redundant recommendations/reviews thing going on. "Current" fics could be in the IRC topic.

We'd just need like 36 mod-hours a day and never let the sun set on them.

I put it in terms of IRC rather than threads because long threads have a tendency to stagnate around fimfic, and because people writing really really huge comments or doing like it Seattle's Angles are not what I think I'm picturing here.

3344726

Yeah, that sounds a lot like how the conversations have gone on more than one occasion. Each criteria has a down side, and the more we try to adjust for them, the more confusing/cumbersome the rules would become. And then it all gets so complicated that I don't feel like thinking about it anymore, and just hope it sorts itself all out.

It is unfortunate that some types of stories get voted down simply for being a theme that some people don't like. I've been meaning to read your one-shots for a while, but I've barely been getting anything at all read lately. And then right before the season finale, I myself finally finished a short story I started like two years ago, and due to a reason I can't explain without spoiling it, it got just as many down votes as up, two each. I don't think I would have said it deserved to be in this group no matter how the votes had been, but it does seem to be another example of how some things are just going to rub some people wrong.

3345488

It might make me a bad moderator, but one thing I can say for certain is that I honestly doubt I'll ever be consistently putting large amounts of time into this group when I can never even manage to keep from piling up hundreds of unread chapters in my tracking list alone. So whatever we do needs to be fairly low-maintenance, as far as I'm concerned.