Part of the issue with E/V is low vote total. I just took a peek at the 12 month top list and have to go down to #27 to find a story with over a hundred votes. Some have less than 20. At that point a single low score is going to drop them.I'm pretty sad... I had 7 stories in the top Exhibitionist and Voyeur list, I held the number one spot for two years, and I've woken up today to see all my stories tanked to a 4.79 at the absolute highest
Sadly, reporting it rarely does anything. I have used that option quite a few times and unless the bombing is really obvious, such as getting like 15-20 1* and going from 4.85 to 4.0 it gets ignored. Such are my experiences with it at least.
I once knew a girl who hoarded all the blocks in the playroom. The moment I reached for one, she’d snatch it, screeching, "Mine! Mine! Mine!" So, naturally, I had no choice but to introduce her forehead to geometry. She wore that square mark like a badge for weeks...
Tanked to a 4.79? I am beginning to sympathize with whoever created the bot bomb. You realize hardly any authors have stories over 4.5 let alone that high.I'm pretty sad... I had 7 stories in the top Exhibitionist and Voyeur list, I held the number one spot for two years, and I've woken up today to see all my stories tanked to a 4.79 at the absolute highest
Yep, a whole lot of whining.These folks remind me of that author who harassed a reviewer for leaving a four star review. Not every Shakespeare play deserves a five star review! Are your skins so thin that anything less than five stars is a personal affront? Some of us baseball fans understand statistics. If you are batting .1000 and you strike out once, it is virtually impossible to get back to .1000 even if you never strike out for the rest of the season. Is there a one bot lurking? Possibly. On the other hand NONE of us is churning out perfect fiction. Traffic to the site has increased meaning more eyeballs and more votes. As a point of fact, scores tend to decrease with time for everybody.
Well, indeed.
Some of my stories have been read hundreds of thousands of times without a red H or a contest win in sight! People know what they are looking for when they come to this site. Everyone uses the search feature for their particular kink. Yes it is nice to be in the top twenty but I still get likes and comments on stories here over a decade old. Yes our stories are our babies but you have to let your kids out of the cradle. If the other kids don’t like your kid. That is part of life. I have high red H stories with zero comments. Clearly they like those stories but I have no idea why. Now, if I post a toss away story in loving wives and the readers tell me that they hate my protagonist and by extension me and all my ancestors back to Adam. In the real world I publish award winning nonfiction. A U.S.A. Today review sure beats a red H here. I’m invested in the stories I place here but it is not where my ego lies. Entropy is the refactor setting of the universe. Scores degrade with time. Simple fact.
Actually, I think BOTH of us are assuming others are like us. I didn't know what I was looking for when I came to this site (I didn't even know I was coming to this site, I just followed a link from Bluesky). I don't use the search function. I find stories by checking the category page and looking at the favourites list of authors I follow.
The pair of you are missing the point. Nobody is complaining about receiving a lower score than they'd initially hoped for. What they're disappointed about is the fact that they had a higher score, but it got unfairly tanked. The actual score itself is redundant; the issue is the systematic reduction of that score through unjust 1-bombing.
Evidence of one bombing is anecdotal at best. Scores decline over time that is a fact. Without firm evidence which you do not possess it can only be construed as whining. Show me solid proof of a one bomb bot or conclusive evidence of a concerted score sabotage scheme and I’ll change my tune. None of the evidence presented so far is even close to convincing or that it is a site wide problem.
Curiously, my facts show that scores go up over time.
Lots of people have: Melissa in this thread. The whole of the malicious voting thread.
Mine too, and that's over ten years, 130 or so chapters or stories, a million and a half words. The overall creep is upwards in scores as the view count climbs over time. Mind you, I don't write in the most popular/volatile categories, even though I've written in, at last count, eighteen different categories.
I've written a handful of I/T stories. Discounting the one where I used 2P POV and highlighted the inherent wrongness of incest, my I/T scores would go up when the new story was published, but most of my other scores would drop. But after a prolonged period of no I/T, all my scores just generally go up slowly, even the I/T ones with thousands of votes ("Too Cold Not to Fuck" has nearly 3k votes, and has climbed from around 4.5 to 4.56 over the past six months or so).
