Hall of Fame

I think the Hall of Fame is self fulfilling. As it is always on the home page of each section any new visitor gets immediate exposure thus maintaining the status quo, as they go directly to those stories.

Surely it would be possible to create a feature whereby the most visited story of the week got a 'star'spot for say a 5 day period, whichmight give it a chance to get into the hall of fame.

That's what the "recently popular" section of the category hubs is about. It's divided into 24 hours, 7 days, and 30 day tabs, and displays a fair number of stories for each division ( provided there are actually enough stories released for the category in the time period to fill it out )

The "views" metric doesn't figure into the Hall of Fame at all. It's simply the top of the toplist, which is based upon score and vote totals, so the "recently popular" section is the stepping stone to that.

artykay63 said:

I think the Hall of Fame is self fulfilling. As it is always on the home page of each section any new visitor gets immediate exposure thus maintaining the status quo, as they go directly to those stories.

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Not sure I follow. Being in the HoF certainly does get more viewers & hence more votes, but it doesn't help boost your average score. Those extra readers can just as easily vote you down as up.

If anything, readers who find a story via the HoF may be a little more likely to vote it down. Somebody who finds my stories via my profile page or the "similar stories" links is probably there because they like the sort of thing I write. Somebody who finds them through the HoF could be looking for something quite different.

I tried asking laurel recently what the criteria for the hall of fame was, but alas she ignored my message. So I'm still none the wiser. I only asked because I felt I had a few stories that scored well enough and had enough likes and visits to be put in the Hall of Fame for the sections they were submitted, but I have never got one in there. So the process seems veiled in mystery, or appears to be selective based on Laurels preferences. Not sure to be honest and would welcome someone setting me straight on it.

My cynical mind can think off various reasons why the system seems to work the way it does.

horrorotica said:

I tried asking laurel recently what the criteria for the hall of fame was, but alas she ignored my message. So I'm still none the wiser. I only asked because I felt I had a few stories that scored well enough and had enough likes and visits to be put in the Hall of Fame for the sections they were submitted, but I have never got one in there. So the process seems veiled in mystery, or appears to be selective based on Laurels preferences. Not sure to be honest and would welcome someone setting me straight on it.

My cynical mind can think off various reasons why the system seems to work the way it does.

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Top scores in the category with a minimum of 100 votes. I think it might eb a lower vote total in low read categories, but not sure.

The top list is a curse as well. A lot of trolling goes on in a couple of them, especially incest and many times the minute a story hits a top spot it gets bombed and buried unless it has enough votes to with stand it.

I have a series SWB that had a bunch of chapters in the mid 4.8's but with only 90 or so votes. I get no bombs on them until each hits the hundred and shows up on the list then they quickly receive two or three bombs.

Some of the top lists are pretty broken as well. Incest has not changed in a long time and stories two years old still show on the 12 month list.

I have heard that Lesbian is screwed up too. On the other hand Group and Mature seem to work just fine.

horrorotica said:

I tried asking laurel recently what the criteria for the hall of fame was, but alas she ignored my message. So I'm still none the wiser. I only asked because I felt I had a few stories that scored well enough and had enough likes and visits to be put in the Hall of Fame for the sections they were submitted, but I have never got one in there. So the process seems veiled in mystery, or appears to be selective based on Laurels preferences. Not sure to be honest and would welcome someone setting me straight on it.

My cynical mind can think off various reasons why the system seems to work the way it does.

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Trust me - I have zero preference. We receive 150-200 stories a day, of which we post 75-100. We receive 1.5-2 million unique visitors a day, tens of millions of pageviews. The days when this site was small enough for me to know all the writers are long behind us - and even then, I didn't care who was on the Lists. Obviously this won't stop the conspiracy theories from flying, but I wanted to say this because it is the truth. I really, really, really don't care about who is on the Top Lists, so long as they are there because of honest (as can be on the Internet) reader voting.

The reason I haven't replied to you yet is because explaining the algorithm is difficult to do, and I was waiting till I had time to do so. But since I'm here, I can try to explain as best I can: our programmer has the Top Lists set up so that the number of votes required to be on the toplists is enough to fill all 250 slots. So, if there are 250 stories with 500 votes and over in a category, then that's the threshold. But in a smaller category, we may have to move the bar down to 50 votes or less (though never less than 10 votes). So the threshold varies from category to category, and from time period to time period (Last 30 Days will have a different threshold than All Time, for example).

Last I heard, the Top Lists weren't working as expected. I believe we're working on that. But when they are working, this is how they should work.

Hope this makes sense! I'm not a programmer, so my explanation is not very technical - though hopefully you can all get the general gist.

lovecraft68 said:

Some of the top lists are pretty broken as well. Incest has not changed in a long time and stories two years old still show on the 12 month list.

I have heard that Lesbian is screwed up too. On the other hand Group and Mature seem to work just fine.

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The first page of the Lesbian top list (top 50) is frozen, but the top-25 that appears at the bottom of the story hub is updating promptly. From what Laurel said a few weeks back, a lot more readers come through the story hub than the currently-frozen top list.

I have been reading stories on this site since the early days. Somewhere along the way I started searching for stories from the top lists until I started reading the same stories over again. The other thing that I realized was that being on the "top list" was like being elected to student council. It didn't necessarily mean that they were well written, it just meant that they were popular, for whatever reason.

I switched to reading from the new stories list.

I like searching the tags on my phone. (I don't use the "Literotica iPhone Site". I don't remember why.) I also read contest entries before searching in other places.

Of course, that was before I asked for reading recommendations this summer, here in the AH. My reading list is crazy long, but it is tailored to my own preferences, and I have a pretty good idea of how well-written a story will be, based on reading conversations here.

I think of the top lists and hall of fame as being more for the authors than the readers, but that's just my own insignificant point of view. (I have to confess feeling a bit of pleasure at finding one of my stories on an all time top list, even if it is in a category that requires like 6 votes. )

I'm a reader, and these are my dos centavos.

[deleted]

Laurel said:

Trust me - I have zero preference. We receive 150-200 stories a day, of which we post 75-100. We receive 1.5-2 million unique visitors a day, tens of millions of pageviews. The days when this site was small enough for me to know all the writers are long behind us - and even then, I didn't care who was on the Lists. Obviously this won't stop the conspiracy theories from flying, but I wanted to say this because it is the truth. I really, really, really don't care about who is on the Top Lists, so long as they are there because of honest (as can be on the Internet) reader voting.

The reason I haven't replied to you yet is because explaining the algorithm is difficult to do, and I was waiting till I had time to do so. But since I'm here, I can try to explain as best I can: our programmer has the Top Lists set up so that the number of votes required to be on the toplists is enough to fill all 250 slots. So, if there are 250 stories with 500 votes and over in a category, then that's the threshold. But in a smaller category, we may have to move the bar down to 50 votes or less (though never less than 10 votes). So the threshold varies from category to category, and from time period to time period (Last 30 Days will have a different threshold than All Time, for example).

Last I heard, the Top Lists weren't working as expected. I believe we're working on that. But when they are working, this is how they should work.

Hope this makes sense! I'm not a programmer, so my explanation is not very technical - though hopefully you can all get the general gist.

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Thanks for the explanation I do appreciate it

A_Little_Show said:

patient lee,

I just read "What the Hell Are You Looking At?"

Your inspiration intrigued me, but I think it was a missed opportunity. I longed to be inside the nude woman's head. The ironic thrill of the Exhibitionist & Voyeur category for me is the internal unexposed world of the exhibitionist and the exposed appreciation of the observer. The exhibitionist feels the thrill of being admired. The observer feels the thrill of the taboo and the honor of being permitted to view.

Your "Jeffrey's Murderer" story is more to my taste.

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Wasn't expecting to see a comment like this here!

What the Hell was one of those things I had sitting in my thought locker for a long time, probably long before I ever wrote anything that wasn't graded. I tried about five different approaches before that one took me by the hand and said come with me.

I would like to read your take. Kinda like a FAWC only my personal, friendly challenge to you. In fact, maybe I'll just throw that out there to anyone who wants to play. Maybe I'll stick this in a new thread and see who bites.

But you better, A_Little_Show. I'm looking forward to it!

(I'm pretty fond of Jeffrey's Murderer too.)

Lee

[deleted]

A_Little_Show said:

Your "Jeffrey's Murderer" story is more to my taste.

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That was one of my competition favorites too - unique and kinda creepy yet still funny. As an avid Apple-fan I did cringe at the choice of weapon of course...

A_Little_Show said:

I wrote a story inspired by Literotica author, patientlee's, "What the Hell Are You Looking At?" which in turn is inspired by the 1863 painting Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe by Edouard Manet. It is a painting of two clothed "dandies" and a nude woman having a picnic lunch. In addition there is a woman wearing a chemise, bathing in the water behind the picnic. (It may help if you Google the painting before reading the story.)

The story just posted within the last ten minutes. It is http://www.literotica.com/s/suzanne-in-salon-society

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Great story! It's a completely different perspective.

So who's next? Three more people in the painting. What were they thinking?

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StrangeLife said:

That was one of my competition favorites too - unique and kinda creepy yet still funny. As an avid Apple-fan I did cringe at the choice of weapon of course...

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An HP wouldn't have prompted the lawsuit. Had to make it valuable.

My first computer was a purple iMac. 13 gig hard drive. I could edit 5 minutes of video at a time before I had to dump all of the files to start the next 5.

Good times...

(I'll never be able to afford a Mac again.)

patientlee said:

An HP wouldn't have prompted the lawsuit. Had to make it valuable.

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Good point... and you certainly sent your title character off in style...

[deleted]

A_Little_Show said:

What motivates a playwright when the crowd boos or simply doesn't show up? What motivates an unpaid author you to keep writing when when the writing is rated B- or C?

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I write for fun - not for the sake of the crowd. I don't really care whether or not anybody likes my stories, as long as I enjoyed writing them. Nobody pays me so I have no moral obligation to deliver any specific level of quality or quantity.

So why do I post? Because the feedback helps me better my skills...

A_Little_Show said:

Sigh. "Suzanne in Salon Society" is down to 3.83 at the time of this writing. I had such high hopes. I suppose it just isn't appealing to the masses.

What motivates a playwright when the crowd boos or simply doesn't show up? What motivates an unpaid author you to keep writing when when the writing is rated B- or C?

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Blame the painting. It was all out of proportion anyway. Manet was heavily criticized for it, but yet here we are writing about it in 2013. Keep the faith. (It also helps to have low expectations. That's what I do.)

Patientlee

StrangeLife said:

I write for fun - not for the sake of the crowd. I don't really care whether or not anybody likes my stories, as long as I enjoyed writing them. Nobody pays me so I have no moral obligation to deliver any specific level of quality or quantity.

So why do I post? Because the feedback helps me better my skills...

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And it's way more fun if somebody reads your shit.

[deleted]

A_Little_Show said:

Yes. I appreciate having an audience. It is better when someone reads my shit. Still, there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of stories at Literotica. I don't know how to reach an audience who likes what I like. How do we find each other in the crowd?

I post here because I want my writing to be read. I specifically wrote the story because I love a challenge I just don't know how to crack the code here. I don't know how to write for mass appeal.

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That is an excellent question. My latest thought is story tags. My FAWC story has gotten many more reads than I expected. I tagged it well.

I don't know the answer, but I know that patience keeps me from quitting.

A_Little_Show said:

Yes. I appreciate having an audience. It is better when someone reads my shit. Still, there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of stories at Literotica. I don't know how to reach an audience who likes what I like. How do we find each other in the crowd?

I post here because I want my writing to be read. I specifically wrote the story because I love a challenge I just don't know how to crack the code here. I don't know how to write for mass appeal.

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You ask a few questions here, but I'm not sure which one you really want answered. Do you want to reach the widest audience possible? Do you want your writing to be accepted by readers? Or do you want to write the best story you can write? The answers are not identical.

If reaching a wide audience is your goal, then write in the incest or loving wives categories. That is the quickest and easiest route to getting clicks on your work.

If you want to develop a following, then the best advice I can give you is to pick a category you like and concentrate your efforts on producing stories that appeal to the readers of that category. Many of us jump around different categories, but I believe that slows the process of developing a following. Stick with one thing, for a while, and develop your skills.

If you want to write the best story you can write, then forget about numbers and concentrate solely on the product. Test it by going to the Story Feedback or Story Discussion Circle Forums and ask for a thorough review. You won't always get it, but sometimes you will and it can be very helpful in identifying weaknesses that you did not know existed.

As soon as I saw the listing for "Suzanne in Salon Society", I guessed that the views are going to be low and the score is probably based on too few votes to tell you much of anything. A period piece referencing an impressionist painting posted in Group Sex is going to be too esoteric for the vast majority of that category's readers. That doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with the story or your writing, but it's a hard sell in a field where strokers are the norm.

[deleted]