Different rating for same story

[CiaoSteve]

Wondering if anyone can throw some light on why I see different ratings for my Halloween Contest Entry on my Works List and within the Story itself?

Works List


Within the Story


Also wondering how the scoring works for the contest as 3rd place was 4.8, 2nd place was 4.82 and 1st place was 4.88. Is it purely the average rating which is used to determine the winner, or is it a combination of rating multiplied by number of votes, or is it some other formula?

 

[CiaoSteve]

Strangely enough, I see a 3rd different rating when I look at the story top lists



I guess this one is not updated on as regular a basis, as the 27 votes pre-dates the last sweep for the Halloween Contest.

 

[RejectReality]

All pages on Lit update at different times. Your personal works page that only you can see is the most up to date. ( Views update in 15 minute increments and comments are delayed by the comment queue, but everything else is essentially real time. )

You can even see different scores on the same page, as different sections of each category's hub update on different schedules. Hubs update several times a day. I haven't paid any real attention to the speed that the new story pages update, but suffice to say, it's nothing resembling real time. Toplists only update once per day.

What that boils down to is that it is impossible to have more than a general idea of what anybody else's score is unless it's an older story that's more or less stabilized. You have basically zero clue what any other person's score is during a volatile time like the end of a contest where 11th hour vote spikes clash with final sweeps to make scores and vote totals swing wildly.

Final judging is by score, and the only place vote totals matter is the 25 vote qualification bar. Score is the sole determining factor for qualified stories.

 

[CiaoSteve]

Thank you RejectReality . . . I guess my main concern is why the rating within the story still shows a much lower count than the story itself (and has done for quite some time). Does it suggest something is wrong with this particular story. I guess it doesn't really matter in the run of things, but just seems strange.

 

[RejectReality]

The score listing on the story is probably the least important of them all. By the time someone sees that, they've already decided from information elsewhere that they want to open it. So even if it has some serious lag from the real time numbers, it shouldn't be any sort of issue with regards to reader interaction. They're already there, so the story ( + possibly the tags ) are what's going to matter.