Darkniciad
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jun 5, 2005
- Posts
- 7,946
Recent events have got me thinking about this. Chaptered stories are no longer allowed in the themed contests, and the Survivor contest is planning to eliminate them from eligibility next year as well. It's a little off that a single chapter of a long story can win a monthly award, as well.
The toplists are often filled with multiple chapters of the same story, quite likely obscuring some very good self-contained works. There are stories out there with multiple chapters that aren't complete, and may never be -- big time frustration for readers who read all the way through to be left hanging.
As someone who writes a lot of chaptered stories ( though I have more than a few self-contained 6-7 Lit pagers as well ) I've been thinking of ways to level the playing field a bit and smooth out some of the issues with them.
Code to identify chaptered stories already exists. It's used to create the series listing next to chaptered stories. I dabble a bit in PHP, so I tried to think from behind the scenes about the difficulty, server load, and page load angles of all of this, in order to simplify it into something workable that utilizes already existing code and functions programmed into Lit.
I know all the standard arguments about suggestions regarding the website, but humor me and discuss.
Some of this will only make sense to people who've worked with a dynamic 'Net language, but the greater scope of what it is supposed to do should be something that everyone can give a thumbs up or down to.
Let's start with the submission page. Add a radio button with three options, all of which would operate off of one database cell for the story. ( Also serves multiple purposes, which I'll get to in a bit )
Chaptered story? ONo OYes OFinal Chapter
This would allow you to set the status of your story at the point of submission, and should default to "No". A trap could detect "Ch. 01" or something similar in the title and automatically select the "Yes" option while generating the preview.
The code to create the series listing could handle filling in the Yes/No portion for existing stories.
That doesn't capture completed stories to fill in the "Final Chapter" option on older stories, though. Let us move on to the author page.
Add a radio button with three options to the author page as well. This will allow authors to set the "Final Chapter" option on existing, complete stories.
That takes care of active authors and links normal chaptered stories together. I have thoughts about how to deal with complete stories from inactive authors, but I'll just leave that be for now.
Now let's move on to what we can do with this. First, a few small icons could help readers tremendously.
For example, A circle with a star inside notes complete chaptered stories. A half-filled circle denotes incomplete stories that have had a chapter added in the last year. A circle with a red dot in the center would represent incomplete stories with no updates in the last year.
This will probably require adding a new housekeeping routine to the site.
On the "New" list, only the icon for "final chapter" is displayed. On the author's submissions page, only final chapters have the icon. All chapters are still listed as they are now in these two locations.
In the category listings, only the title of the story is displayed -- not the individual chapters. The icon will denote whether the story is in progress, abandoned, or complete. The link here will point to chapter 1 of the story. This addresses complaints I've heard before about wading through a whole page of one chaptered story to find something to read using the category listings.
This could be a problem in some cases. For example, my story Danica has both a "prelude" and "epilogue" chapter. The new code to display series catches both of them and lists them in the proper sequence, so it's quite possible that the code is advanced enough to pick up on things like that. It probably won't be perfect, but tweaks for the things that slip through the cracks could come later.
Here comes the part that would probably require the most coding, but could also provide a lot of balance, and benefit to readers using the toplists as a means to find stories to read.
The score-based toplists will only display the title of the series, not the individual chapters. The link will once again lead to the first chapter of the story, and display the appropriate icon for the chaptered story.
The position of the story in the toplists is based upon an average of the scores and vote totals for the individual chapters. Let's take a four chapter story as an example:
Ch. 01 - 4.50 65v, Ch. 02 - 4.55 60v, Ch. 03 - 4.65 50v, Ch. 04 - 4.75 40v
The average score of the story is 4.61, and the average of the vote totals is 54. These averages are used to rank the story in the toplist. This helps eliminate some of the skew in the toplists that chaptered stories can cause.
The views toplist would use much the same points, except the average of the views for the chapters would determine rank of the story in the list.
Because these lists only update every so often, I think the time and processing power required should be manageable.
Now, let us move on to monthly contests. Only complete stories are eligible to win awards. My thought is that the month in which a final chapter comes out is the month of eligibility for a monthly award. This could be done without everything else, but utilizing the radio buttons way up there in this post will streamline and automate the process. Once again, the average vote/score is used to rank the story for the month.
Ditto for the year-end awards.
Thoughts, anyone?
The toplists are often filled with multiple chapters of the same story, quite likely obscuring some very good self-contained works. There are stories out there with multiple chapters that aren't complete, and may never be -- big time frustration for readers who read all the way through to be left hanging.
As someone who writes a lot of chaptered stories ( though I have more than a few self-contained 6-7 Lit pagers as well ) I've been thinking of ways to level the playing field a bit and smooth out some of the issues with them.
Code to identify chaptered stories already exists. It's used to create the series listing next to chaptered stories. I dabble a bit in PHP, so I tried to think from behind the scenes about the difficulty, server load, and page load angles of all of this, in order to simplify it into something workable that utilizes already existing code and functions programmed into Lit.
I know all the standard arguments about suggestions regarding the website, but humor me and discuss.
Some of this will only make sense to people who've worked with a dynamic 'Net language, but the greater scope of what it is supposed to do should be something that everyone can give a thumbs up or down to.Let's start with the submission page. Add a radio button with three options, all of which would operate off of one database cell for the story. ( Also serves multiple purposes, which I'll get to in a bit )
Chaptered story? ONo OYes OFinal Chapter
This would allow you to set the status of your story at the point of submission, and should default to "No". A trap could detect "Ch. 01" or something similar in the title and automatically select the "Yes" option while generating the preview.
The code to create the series listing could handle filling in the Yes/No portion for existing stories.
That doesn't capture completed stories to fill in the "Final Chapter" option on older stories, though. Let us move on to the author page.
Add a radio button with three options to the author page as well. This will allow authors to set the "Final Chapter" option on existing, complete stories.
That takes care of active authors and links normal chaptered stories together. I have thoughts about how to deal with complete stories from inactive authors, but I'll just leave that be for now.
Now let's move on to what we can do with this. First, a few small icons could help readers tremendously.
For example, A circle with a star inside notes complete chaptered stories. A half-filled circle denotes incomplete stories that have had a chapter added in the last year. A circle with a red dot in the center would represent incomplete stories with no updates in the last year.
This will probably require adding a new housekeeping routine to the site.
On the "New" list, only the icon for "final chapter" is displayed. On the author's submissions page, only final chapters have the icon. All chapters are still listed as they are now in these two locations.
In the category listings, only the title of the story is displayed -- not the individual chapters. The icon will denote whether the story is in progress, abandoned, or complete. The link here will point to chapter 1 of the story. This addresses complaints I've heard before about wading through a whole page of one chaptered story to find something to read using the category listings.
This could be a problem in some cases. For example, my story Danica has both a "prelude" and "epilogue" chapter. The new code to display series catches both of them and lists them in the proper sequence, so it's quite possible that the code is advanced enough to pick up on things like that. It probably won't be perfect, but tweaks for the things that slip through the cracks could come later.
Here comes the part that would probably require the most coding, but could also provide a lot of balance, and benefit to readers using the toplists as a means to find stories to read.
The score-based toplists will only display the title of the series, not the individual chapters. The link will once again lead to the first chapter of the story, and display the appropriate icon for the chaptered story.
The position of the story in the toplists is based upon an average of the scores and vote totals for the individual chapters. Let's take a four chapter story as an example:
Ch. 01 - 4.50 65v, Ch. 02 - 4.55 60v, Ch. 03 - 4.65 50v, Ch. 04 - 4.75 40v
The average score of the story is 4.61, and the average of the vote totals is 54. These averages are used to rank the story in the toplist. This helps eliminate some of the skew in the toplists that chaptered stories can cause.
The views toplist would use much the same points, except the average of the views for the chapters would determine rank of the story in the list.
Because these lists only update every so often, I think the time and processing power required should be manageable.
Now, let us move on to monthly contests. Only complete stories are eligible to win awards. My thought is that the month in which a final chapter comes out is the month of eligibility for a monthly award. This could be done without everything else, but utilizing the radio buttons way up there in this post will streamline and automate the process. Once again, the average vote/score is used to rank the story for the month.
Ditto for the year-end awards.
Thoughts, anyone?
+ 
we can hope for a quick, positive response from the ROYALS.
