Just sent this note to the webmasters...

Let's see if they respond.


Dear Webmasters:

There are two matters at CHYOO that I think should be brought to your attention.

One is the fact that there is no link from the CHYOO website to the message board. This seems a simple matter to fix, and it would be nice to have some more activity on the board. The newer authors don't seem to know it's there.

The other is a problem with the ratings system. I and some of my fellow authors suspect that people are "sabotaging" stories by rating them with a plethora of low marks in order to manipulate the list of top stories. It seems that sometimes when a story appears in the top five, it is instantly hit with low ratings on every single thread to move it down the list. Since the ratings are made anonymously, there is no way of knowing who's doing this. Essentially, this is rendering the ratings system worthless, and it might as well be abandoned.

A more objective way to rate top stories would be to create a list of which stories have received the most visits over the past month. This would more accurately reflect which ones are the most popular, I think. Obviously it could be manipulated by an author who repeatedly visits his own stories, but at least it wouldn't be possible to sabotage another's story by taking away points.

Good Points

Both of those ideas are good.

I would expand on the ratings idea and have a variety of ratings like on the old Chyoo, most views, most threads, deepest thread, and numerical rating.

I think this would give people a variety of ways to look at stories to see which are the most popular and best written.

I think there should be a favourite stories section on everyone's profiles too. That way you can see other stories that might be similar to stories that you enjoy reading.

I'd limit the "Top Stories" to ones that had high ratings based on some threshold number of votes.

Or make that "all-time top stories" and bring back "This Month's Top Stories" or "Current Hot Stories" based on the last 30 days' votes.

There seem to be a number of annoying behaviors on the site which could be fixed with a tweak to an SQL query or conditional statement. Things like...

"Fresh Stories" which are on the list because they've had a recent submission that hasn't yet been accepted.

I'm glad Chyoo is still around, I'm happy it's free, and I hope the webmasters have a chance to make a little progress.

-Z