I think it's time to try out one of the changes that've been tossed around for a while. I was kinda waiting to see if Toafan was going to make a follow-up thread to his poll from a month ago, but I guess I'll just try out one of the changes and see how it goes.

One of the biggest limitations of this group is that there's not really a good objective way to label something as a good story. Not only is it unavoidable that personal opinions will vary for the same story, but sometimes down votes can be for given for stupid reasons. A story can fail the 90% up-vote rule and still be quite good. Similarly, 500 views can mean a good reader base for one story, but only a handful of comments on another.

So, I'm going to add two new Recommendations folders that each ignore one of those rules that the main folders are held to. One folder for stories that already have more than 500 views, and one folder for stories that can have less than 90% positive votes. It should go without saying, but please use proper judgement when submitting to these folders. They should still be good stories that are under-appreciated; this is just an effort to allow stories that fail the rules due to technicalities.

This is kind of an experiment, and depending on how it works out, these new folders might see some changes, or removal if they just plain play out badly. The first thing I'm going to do with them is shift all the stories with 80-something % positive votes, because I've always been reluctant to remove those.

I'm also open to suggestions if anyone thinks they have better names for those folders.

Oh gracious.

Yes, this is what I get for not being an active mod. Completely my fault, of course.

I think the best way I've seen to sort out 'not good stories' is the use of a serious mod team, like Seattle's Angels or EqD. I'm really not sure if that's a good idea here, nor how we'd implement it.

I think what we really need is to completely overhaul our folder scheme. I can't decide whether I (would) see this as a distraction or a good start.

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Well, let's just think of it as a test for now. I'd rather try smaller steps before complete overhauls, and if this works badly we can try something else. An active approval process would be the strongest way to ensure quality control, but I'm not sure it would work well from a practical standpoint. A ton more work for I don't know how much benefit.

One unanticipated issue already came up, though, in that the first story submitted to the Over 500 Views folder is a fic that already made it to the Graduates level a while back. I kinda thought it was implied that those folders were only intended for fics that aren't in the group already, but I think I'll just let it stay there for now, since it's the only story in that folder so far.

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mmm... The thread here might be intended to imply that these new folders are not for fics already within the group, but the naming of the new 500+ folder implies that it's replacing the 'graduates' folder, and your use of the 'less than 90% positive' folder for fics already in the group reinforces that impression.

To get what I really want (I am specifically avoiding using 'we', here) I think would require more of a community than necessarily a group. This is one reason I like the upvotes ratio idea. Then again, I am not specifically restricting to low-view stories.

Then again (again), I'm not entirely sure what I want. I think (thought? I'm really not sure) I want something that focuses on old and obscure, but really good, stuff that you'd otherwise never hear of -- True Colors, my go-to 'gold' example, would get easily half as many views again by being featured in the PFV, possibly even doubling. But then what of, say, Days of Wasp and Spider, which I only discovered through happy accident -- in the featured box, okay, but I'll tell you straight it was pure, dumb luck, and that's one of my favorite fics on the site. And what again of the likes of Eternal and Mood Wings, which I guarantee you have a substantial effect on folks who read them but how will anyone find them anymore unless people recommend them? And on the other hand, what of 'fluff' things like A Day in the Life of Opalescence, which I know I'm not interested in? And then consider A Zoologist Dream, which certainly doesn't need our help.

I think I'm just rambling at this point. But I guess even if we figure out what this group is 'supposed to' do/be doing, it'll only be a small part of what I 'really want'.

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Yeah, after I made those two folders, I started thinking that the names I gave them might not have been the best. I'm not sure what would be more self-explanatory, though.

But I don't know, you kinda sound like you want more of a general "Recommend interesting stories" group like Twilight's Library, which is basically independent of the "deserves more attention" question. Most of those stories you mentioned are the sort that already had their day, as far as I'm concerned, and for the purposes of this group, I'm more interested in promoting the stories that never got much attention at any point, not the ones that naturally faded over time. On a site with tens of thousand of fics, any story is going to become more obscure once it's been complete for a year or more.

Days of Wasp and Spider pops into the update feature box with every new chapter, and it's on Equestria Daily, so I've seen it around repeatedly, even though I've never read it. Eternal might not get nearly as much attention anymore as it used to, but you almost couldn't avoid being aware of it back when it was being written. Mood Wings was interesting, but way too head-canony for my tastes, to be honest, and I'd say I enjoyed it less than the Opalescence story. In any case, Mood Wings is pretty high on the list of top-rated stories for the site in general, and Tchernobog is fairly well known, so it wouldn't be all that hard to stumble across. I'm not sure what happened with A Zoologist Dream, because I remember that was one of the original fics you talked about when this group first started. It was in one of the regular folders here for a while, then somehow blasted off later and now is over 8k views.

I consider this group as being for stories that practically no one has heard of, not just stories that you probably missed if you haven't been around for a long time. I mean, there's probably people on this site who've somehow never heard of My Little Dashie.