The Official (Most likely) 2024 Literotica April Fool's Day Contest Support Thread!!!

[Duleigh]

Nine Days until we close the gates
Sixteen days until Laurel get her vote​

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Mine's not happening this year. There's a good story there and I want to do it justice.

 

[Duleigh]

Mine's not happening this year. There's a good story there and I want to do it justice.

I put in two that I am proud of and really happy with. The feed back from readers is incredible and the voting shot from 4.8 to 4.3

 

[FreyaGersemi]

25 comments is actually amazingly impressive for SF/F

Lots of disappointed readers expecting the usual shenanigans of "Story Freya" and then taking pity on me. I guess I should just stick with boobs and butts and all that.

 

[FreyaGersemi]

Your little trio of one-thousand word wordlets sounds absolutely adorable

Except that the subject matter is about as bleak and dour as you can imagine. But at least it alludes to a happy ending...

Once I proofread and upload them, I'm going to get back to the crowd pleasers. Boobies and blowjobs.

 

[Duleigh]

SF/F readers don't demand huge amounts of sex, in my experience. They prefer story and worldbuilding. If the sex flows naturally from the tale, so much the better.

I love writing SF/F and I love the SF/F readers, there's just not enough of them, but you're right, they prefer prose over pron.
I wrote an Octalogy in Terry Pratchett's Discworld that I passionately loved and my readers did too. The comments brought tears to my eyes comparing my pitiful scribbles to the novels of The Master, Sir Terry. But the views on my SF/F stories are a bare fraction of my Romance and Erotic Couplings

 

[StillStunned]

But the views on my SF/F stories are a bare fraction of my Romance and Erotic Couplings

Yup. My seven SF/F stories together have fewer than half the views of my least-viewed I/T story, and a quarter of the next-least-viewed.

 

[Duleigh]

Yup. My seven SF/F stories together have fewer than half the views of my least-viewed I/T story, and a quarter of the next-least-viewed.

Right now I'm working on the third of a trilogy of stories for Geek Pride, that's where I let my SF/F plot bunnies have free reign. This year it's the Captain Scarlett series
Captain Scarlett Saves Mars!
Captain Scarlett vs The Scrapper!
Captain Scarlett, Martian Ambassador

I need to fix that last title, it's 2 characters too long
Captain Scarlett, Martian Envoy fits

 

[StillStunned]

This year it's the Captain Scarlett series

What's the genre? Planetary romance, planetary adventure, space opera?

 

[Devinter]

Lots of disappointed readers expecting the usual shenanigans of "Story Freya" and then taking pity on me.

That is one interpretation of it, and I am not saying it isn't a valid one, but I want to let you know that I read the comments and I do not see them as such. I think people were genuinely left with a lot of things to think about, in a thought-provoking sense, which is a great thing. Personally, I thought it was one of your best stories, and I've read most of the things you've published.

 

[Duleigh]

What's the genre? Planetary romance, planetary adventure, space opera?

Space Opera
It's styled after those great old SF radio drama's from the 1950s. The first two are loosely based on Isaac Asimov stories (The Martian Way and The Billiard Ball) Outer space is filled with wagon wheel space stations and "Babylon Style" stations, there's two political blocs that hate each other and space pirates that hide in the asteroid belt. Martian Envoy is going to deal with the 90th anniversary of WWIV (It was started by a political faction that set off a 45 megaton nuke in Lake Erie) explains more of how Captain Scarlett became the only Western Alliance survivor of the Battle of Venus Prime. He's the only man to have ever stolen a moon.

 

[StillStunned]

I'll add them to my reading list!

 

[shakna]

Wow! That's a huge drop. But did you have fun writing it? Maybe you can take solace in that.

My girlfriend certainly enjoyed reading it. And I enjoyed what came after

 

[KeithD]

My entry went from 4.71 to 4.56 in the blink of an eye a couple of days ago. With over 100 votes. Either a sweep knocked out a lot of fives or someone has multiple accounts and voted my story down. That's a big drop to happen in a day. And two weeks into the contest, too. Oh, well...

Contest votes have been wildly jockeyed here ever since there have been site contests. The sweeps were initiated to counter that. You won't know how your story really did in a contest until the last sweep done by the site just before the winners are designated. That's just the way it is here. The up side is that I think the sweeping brings your ultimate (until the next votes come in) rating up higher on a contest work than a regular-file one.

 

[Duleigh]

Contest votes have been wildly jockeyed here ever since there have been site contests. The sweeps were initiated to counter that. You won't know how your story really did in a contest until the last sweep done by the site just before the winners are designated. That's just the way it is here. The up side is that I think the sweeping brings your ultimate (until the next votes come in) rating up higher on a contest work than a regular-file one.

The sweeps covers all of your stories too. If you've had a troll rooting around in your stories a sweep will clear that up also.

 

[Rustyoznail]

The sweeps covers all of your stories too. If you've had a troll rooting around in your stories a sweep will clear that up also.

I'm not so sure other stories get touched. I know I had one story up around 190 in the all time favourite list, and it got beaten up by some pretty blatant bombs which have never been swept.

I could report them, but what would be the point? A couple of well placed ones would sink it again, and it's not like it'll be the best ever.

 

[Bamagan]

I'm not so sure other stories get touched. I know I had one story up around 190 in the all time favourite list, and it got beaten up by some pretty blatant bombs which have never been swept.

I could report them, but what would be the point? A couple of well placed ones would sink it again, and it's not like it'll be the best ever.

The sweeps seem to be done in tranches, aside from current contest entries. I had a story in last year's summer contest, shortly after I started posting here. It did okay, but was probably miscategorized. I turned off voting on all my stories for a while, and it sat quietly forgotten, or so I thought. Months later I downloaded my story data from the site and noticed that it had been swept again, despite being closed to new voting, and from the jump in score it was a handful of low votes that got removed (it never attracted a large number of votes in the first place). I was a bit surprised that it would continue sweeping under such conditions, especially considering the ones removed had to be from the time of the contest since I disabled scoring very soon after the results were announced. I suppose that suggests the vanished votes were from people whose subsequent behavior was deemed troll-like or abusive, or perhaps votes associated with deleted accounts are taken away along with the other data associated with it.

 

[FreyaGersemi]

I downloaded my story data from the site

What's this, now?? You can do that??

EDIT: Ohhhh! The little grey arrow thingie... Interesting....

ANOTHER EDIT: Oh. It's just the data that's already right there on my page. I thought maybe it was more detailed and you could track trends and individual votes and all that fun stuff.

 

[Duleigh]

What's this, now?? You can do that??

EDIT: Ohhhh! The little grey arrow thingie... Interesting....

ANOTHER EDIT: Oh. It's just the data that's already right there on my page. I thought maybe it was more detailed and you could track trends and individual votes and all that fun stuff.

You can download a CSV of all the data of all your stories. I keep each CSV in a work book and that provides a database of viewing, voting, commenting, and favoriting. Very handy to have, especially when discussing something with Laurel. Just go to My Stories and click that down arrow.

 

[Bamagan]

What's this, now?? You can do that??

EDIT: Ohhhh! The little grey arrow thingie... Interesting....

ANOTHER EDIT: Oh. It's just the data that's already right there on my page. I thought maybe it was more detailed and you could track trends and individual votes and all that fun stuff.

If you download it regularly, you can track trends, but yeah, there's not a whole lot of additional insight to be gained, sadly. But excel or other spreadsheets can be used to convert the numbers to charts and graphs, and I like visualizing the data.

 

[KeithD]

The sweeps covers all of your stories too. If you've had a troll rooting around in your stories a sweep will clear that up also.

I haven't really observed that as happening recently.

 

[Duleigh]

I haven't really observed that as happening recently.

I have my CSV from February, you can see the votes change on quite a few stories (I have a very active "Fan Club" I've taken to highlighting onebomb hits also)

 

[ElectricBlue]

I'm not so sure other stories get touched. I know I had one story up around 190 in the all time favourite list, and it got beaten up by some pretty blatant bombs which have never been swept.

I could report them, but what would be the point? A couple of well placed ones would sink it again, and it's not like it'll be the best ever.

From what I've observed, sweeps go through the whole data base, with no cut-off for age. I've on occasion seen my oldest stories (ten years this May) lose a vote or two and the score move up a couple of points. Over time, every one of my story scores is creeping higher. Sweeps aren't limited to Contests, and you don't have to have a story in a Contest to benefit.

Sometimes people think they've been thumped, but when you do the maths, there can be several permutations that will give you the same result, with no one-bombs at all. I don't think everyone has figured out how to do the maths.

 

[intim8]

I don't think everyone has figured out how to do the maths.

If you keep a granular enough time series you can get really close, if not exact. But it is a huge PITA. I kinda did it for a couple of days on my first submission.

I could write a script that would download my stats on a regular basis and feed them into a database. Theoretically, it would mean you know what every individual vote was. But I doubt Laurel would appreciate that script running every 5 minuites all day and night just to satisfy my curiosity. And it might violate terms.

I may do that in the future to track them once a week or something like that, for other purposes.

Edit: Other purposes meaning to understand trends, analyze the effect of titles, tags, categories, etc, see the effect of new submissions on older ones. Nothing nefarious.

 

[ElectricBlue]

If you keep a granular enough time series you can get really close, if not exact. But it is a huge PITA. I kinda did it for a couple of days on my first submission.

My observation is that some (many?) don't even have the basic conceptual clue what to do with the numbers, no matter how good their data grab.

A month ago someone thought they'd received a bunch of ones, and gave the before and after score parameters. I could offer up at least three different vote combinations that arrived at the end score, none of them including ones. The maths is really simple, but if you can't conceptualise it, it's still a mystery.