Or make that a couple questions, actually.

First, I was just looking into the recent changes Knighty made to groups, and there's now a way to shuffle stories between folders without having to remove them from the group, then re-add them. That has honestly been pretty much the main reason I've been lax about bumping stories up as they gain views, because I always feel like I'm being obnoxious with all those notifications. But then a couple people have said before that they see the notifications as a feature rather than a bad thing, so I'm unsure.

So the question is, should the group keep moving stories around as we have been, with the dozens of repeat notifications that entails, or should we take advantage of this new function to shuffle them silently? Personally, I'm thinking I might like to do something of a combination of the two, shift stories silently when they're simply being bumped up a tier, but send out a notification once they hit the Graduation level.

The other question is, how much do we want to use the new sub-folders function? I just added a bunch of sub-folders to the Graduates folder so that we can finally get some organization by genre going on (although I probably forgot a couple), but I'm not sure if I should add fics to every category they're tagged with, or try to pick just one for each story. And should I add genre sub-folders for each of the other tiers as well, or would that clutter things up too much?

One more thing, let me remind everyone once again to not add brand new stories to the group (even though the last time I said it didn't seem to do any good). The 0-100 Views folders always has a bunch of fics with hundreds of more views than that, because they were added right when the story was published.

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shift stories silently when they're simply being bumped up a tier, but send out a notification once they hit the Graduation level.

This.

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One more thing, let me remind everyone once again to not add brand new stories to the group (even though the last time I said it didn't seem to do any good). The 0-100 Views folders always has a bunch of fics with hundreds of more views than that, because they were added right when the story was published.

Well firstly, we should probably put that on the front page with the rules, just to ensure that everyone knows about it. That way, there's no excuses.

With the recent (? How recent?) addition of the "Who added the fic" information to the feed notifications, we can actually enforce "don't add your own fics". So I intend to start doing that. With an exemption available, of course, if the fic is older than, say, 30 weeks; but we can negotiate that number.

As long as we're doing housecleaning like this, do we have an agreed-upon "percentage of dislikes" formula? I don't recall that we ever specified one. Heck, I don't even remember whether I used (dislikes / likes) or (dislikes / (likes + dislikes))

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Well, it has been one of the rules from the very beginning, but I suppose "Stories should be at least a couple days old." is a little bit vague. I was trying to be concise, I guess, so maybe we do need to word it more strongly. Although I think some people just don't read the rules in the first place.

Names being attached to submissions started a few weeks ago, not sure exactly when. But I think we should allow people one exception to the "Don't add your own stories" rule. It's mostly just a problem when people add every fic they've written that qualifies, so if they want to add their own stories, they need to pick their single best one. Does that seem fair?

And for the like/dislikes matter, I've just started shifting stories that fall below 90% to the new Recommendations folder. It makes it a loooot easier to decide. If stories in the main folders fall below, say 75% positive votes, though, probably best to remove them entirely. There was a story a couple days ago that was added right after being published, when it only had one vote, and when I checked back later, it was at 3 up votes, 7 down votes.

By the way, did you want to try doing some sort of weekly spotlight or anything? Seems like you mentioned something like that in the past, and I figured I'd just leave that up to you. You could run a periodic thread with suggestions/discussions, if you wanted. I'm not sure how it would work, exactly.

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Yaugh. I think I need to go back through... sheesh. Everything, probably, in order to recuperate what I was talking about.

Proposal: minimum two-week age to get into the group. Thoughts? (See also below.)

I put the age call with the "Don't add your own stories" rule because, in my mind (and remember that I have no data to back this up) most of the people who add their own stories are doing so roughly the same time they publish the stories. This group is not for that, that's more like Authors Helping Authors or Self-Promotion. I like your rule proposal, but it's much too subjective IMO -- way too un-enforceable.

A further thought on the "recommendations below 90%" folder: I don't know what the "current" purpose of the folder is, but what if the purpose where to be a place for people to put fics they thought belonged here, but didn't have a good enough vote ratio -- a nominations folder, if you will. If it climbs above 90%, then it gets moved into the main folders, and if it drops below... hm... say 75%? then out it goes.

On which note, what is the purpose of the "recommendations above 500 views" folder? Someone recently added a couple of big-name/big-popularity/high-quality stories there (I've got a screenshot, if you want, I was thinking to make a thread for the purpose of discussion), and I don't know if that fits our purpose. No doubt there are fics I'd love to see boosted there, but if it does fit our purposes then we're left with the difficult -- nigh-impossible, even -- problem of deciding what goes in there, and if it doesn't fit our purposes then we're better off directing contributions and would-be contributers to groups that are dedicated to the purpose, such as the Vault and Twenty Great Stories.

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I'd rather make it one week, since it really only takes a few days for views to level off. But if you want to compromise, we can say 10 days for a nice, round number.

You're right that people who add their own fics usually do so when they're brand new, but that's two different rules at the same time. If they adhere to the age rule that applies to all stories, it shouldn't be a problem. And with names attached and viewable right in the Modify Folder area, it's pretty easy to see when people add more than one of their own fics. Plus when people add their own stories, they often add several at the same time, which is very easy to catch. I actually see it as simpler than a "Your story has to be at least half a year old to add your own story" rule, because that involves arbitrary math that I think people would ignore and not understand the reasoning for it. It'd be easy to just say "Don't add more than one of your own stories. If you add more than that, we'll pick one for you and remove the rest." And then maybe a "If you do it again, we'll remove them all" if people ignore it.

The last forum discussion we had, you mentioned a bunch of stories that you felt had become obscure simply due to age, despite having well over 500 views, plus the whole view-limit-scaling-up-with-age thing, so I figured we should have a place for people to add stories that deserve more attention despite exceeding the group's regular limits. The fact that the last three added there were very well known fics is less than ideal, but I wasn't going to remove them. I kinda figured we'd just let people add whatever they wanted to those Recommendations folders. Although "Recommendations" still isn't the best name, but I can't think of anything better.

And for the other one, that's sort of how the Below 90% folder is working already, really. I actually moved a story out of there just yesterday, when I noticed it had picked up enough up votes to qualify for the main folders. I don't really want to enforce any minimums at all for that folder, though, because it's already meant to be for fics that fall short of the other folders due to controversial content, or such, rather than quality. And like I said about the other Recommendations folder, I figured people could add whatever they wanted to those, except it probably should have a strict "Do not add your own stories to this folder at all" rule, though.

The more rules we have, the more complex everything gets, and I really hoped to try to keep things fairly simple.

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Part of me really wants to take a step back here. D'you -- would you, maybe I should say -- mind if I make a thread specifically for the purpose?

What we're trying to do here is good stories that didn't get much attention "the first time through". Right?

Rather than slog through every story, the way we go about doing that is to ask -- invite, really -- people to suggest fics they think are good, and let other people vote on the fics directly. Now, as a side effect, a lot of stuff is going to slip through the cracks, simply for not getting more views.

What about this (and really, I'm describing the system mainly so I can go back and dissect what I think our purpose is):

We make a "nominations"-type folder. Practically speaking, anything is allowed in here, because anyone is allowed to put stuff in here. But the rules say that 1) you can't add your own stories, period (someone else needs to like it enough to think it deserves more attention), 2) that it shouldn't have more than -- yesh, this is where "what's our purpose" come in -- say 600 views, and 3) that it needs to have at least twice as many upvotes as downvotes. Okay so far?

Then, fics more than one month / four weeks old, with more than ten (10) upvotes and at least a 85% upvote ratio ( (downvotes / (upvotes + downvotes)) = ratio ), can be added to folders based on view count. Since folders can be sorted by Date Added (compare "newest") and Rating (compare "top")... I don't remember where I was going with that sentence. Anyways, these fics are ones that a majority of people liked.

We don't put a viewcount limit on these folders -- we can have view-count folders going up as high as we care to. Instead, we have a view-count versus age formula to ratchet up the age faster and faster as you go up the view-count chart. We fix this formula to explicitly ban the likes of My Little Dashie and Past Sins, which already have almost stupidly high view-counts and are pretty old -- but we have to do so by the numbers, rather than by naming any given story.

On top of that, we have yet another folder for fics that "the community" feels are really, really good, but don't and never did fit in the main view-count hierarchycolumn. This combines the "graduates" folder with something vaguely like Twenty Great Stories. "Members in good standing" -- that is, fics that originally joined through the view-count folders but shot up through the ranks -- dangit, this is why I shouldn't leave in the middle of a thought! Anyways. So fics that came up through the view-count system but gathered likes + views "too fast" go in here, no questions asked. Uhm... maybe we want to put a likes minimum on there, too? Furthermore, we have a way to add in fics that never met the original requirements, but do meet the age formula. mmm, I should mention that I'm not absolutely sure about that, I'm not quite as focused as I'd like to be. I think that's what I was going to do.

Anyways! (Again.) The "nominations" folder, anyone in the group can add to, but the other ("higher up"?) folders only "contributors" and "admins" can add to. We may also have a "trash" folder or two ("user" and "contributor"), and folders for "hey, this fic is now eligible to move up" -- probably just contributors folder(s) for that, and depends on how we lay out the permissions on the others.

Wee. Now I just need to review that, and see if it's really what I mean. If I haven't gotten back to you within 24 hours, PM me.

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Okay. I'm running really close to the wire here, because I was reading the Cryptonomicon instead of working on this. So sorry for that, especially if I missed my self-imposed deadline.

As I recall, our Founding Purpose was to serve as a sort of "alternate feature box". Our founding members were True Colors and Not Quite BFFs, which at the time had been around for a while and had very low views.

Our goal, at the time, was to bring more views to good but obscure fics -- stuff with good quality that, for whatever reason, didn't gather much attention the first time around and from the looks of things don't have another chance, whether due to being [complete] or abandoned. Presumably, at the same time we want to show readers good stuff they may well have otherwise missed.

Of course, we can't really go through the entire site looking for these things -- that would take something like at least 24,000 man-hours a day, just to keep up -- so we encourage users to make suggestions.

Since then, we may or may not have picked up the 'additional' (not at all 'additional', really, more like completely separate and possibly even contradictory) purpose of boosting ancient fics of any popularity. (Or not 'any popularity', exactly... more like independent of their popularity. That's not quite right either, I suppose -- no matter how popular they are/were?)

Thoughts? Does this seem about right?

I wonder if I should get Casual Quill to have a look at this.

It may be true that adding rules adds complexity, but imprecise rules carry more complexity than precise rules. So I think clarifying existing rules -- that is, making them more precise -- will actually make things simpler. Similarly, the fewer "exemptions" with tricky decisions there are, the simpler (see below re: adding your own fics). This is also why I'd like to decide on an official likes-versus-dislikes formula -- it's settled, fewer tricky edge cases, simpler all around.

I personally don't feel a week or even ten days caries the "weight" of the time delay. Also, a fic can certainly have views trickle in over an extended time -- just today I got around to reading a fic I saw recommended, and first published, roughly a month ago. On the other handhoof, things like that have already missed their chance at the feature box anyways...

The important thing, however, is to put a number to it. I'll settle for any of those numbers, as long as we make it explicit. Should we make it explicit? Maybe we should decide on a minimum age, but not mention the exact minimum age.

On further thought, (I think) we should just ban adding your own fics fully and outright. The idea is that someone else thought your fic deserved more attention, right? (Besides, "if you add more than one we'll pick one for you" sounds like a lot of work.)

Proposed group policy: "We treat likes as 'this story deserves more views', and dislikes as 'this story doesn't deserve as many views as it has'."

One last item, then I'll shut up for the night: I think we should avoid the word "recommendations", since I feel it implies some kind of group endorsement. Based on the current folders, we don't. "Nominations" could work for the below-ninety-percent folder, but we will have to come up with another name for the "recs above 500 views" folder (and/or fold it in with the graduates folder).

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I would say the Recommendations folders (or whatever we change the name to) were intended mostly to provide a place for outliers. Such as, some stories get down-voted simply because of reader bias against some subject matter, and others gradually tick upwards to like 700 views over a year and a half, but still only have 5 comments. Bringing some attention to "forgotten" fics that had a decent amount of views in their day is very much secondary.

I wouldn't be entirely opposed to just saying that people can't add their own fics at all. "If you think your own story deserves to be in the group, find someone who agrees with you." The 1-per-person exception was for when stories have 0 comments at all, and the author is basically the only person who even knows about the story in the first place--so unknown that there's no one to recommend it for them.

As for the minimum age requirement, it seems like diminishing returns to me. Ten days vs. two weeks would probably be a pretty small difference, so it can be two weeks if you want. It's just that if someone really likes a story and wants to recommend it, they're likely to have just forgotten about it by the time two weeks go by. Where's the balance between "this story is old enough to qualify as buried" and "this story is so old, no one is reading it anymore to recommend it"? Plus the longer an incomplete story goes without getting any attention, the more likely an author is to decide it's not worth writing if no one's reading it anyway. Maybe two weeks is a good balance, I don't really know.

The likes-vs-dislikes formula seems pretty clear right now, though: If a story has at least 90% positive votes, put it in whichever folder matches its viewcount; if it has less than 90% positive votes, but you still think it deserves more attention, put it in the Recommendations folder. That was another reason I wanted that folder, because when stories dropped to 85% up-votes or such, I was reluctant to remove them, but I also hesitated to bump them up like normal, so then I'd let everything lapse when too many stories fell in that gray zone. Having that broader secondary folder just makes sorting things so much easier.

But eh, I don't know. Honestly, I really didn't want to have to put so much time and thought into this group. I was hoping for it to be as community-run as possible, mostly letting members add things, with minimal policing by us. If we turn it to a system where members submit everything to one common folder, so we then have to factor in age and everything to calculate out where to put them from there, deciding what to do with every story that comes in, that just seems like it would end up twice as time-consuming, and far less collaborative, for an end result that wouldn't be all that different. Unless I'm misinterpreting your previous post... it wasn't exactly as clear as it might have been.