I agree wholeheartedly with this. And that's what I mean. I'm basically trying to provoke a way to encourage people to stick around and be a part of the discussion, whether what they've come away from it with has already been written or not, without thinking that just dropping a rating and browsing on is contributing to the thread. In the WbA at least, it isn't.

 

I think there are some good points... I just don't like anonymous voting on DLP, because ideally it's about quality or vetted voters. WbA without ratings doesn't sound so crazy...

 

The big issue I have when it comes to ratings in the Library is that, while a troll or two taking advantage of anonymous voting to 1/5 a fic for no reason would be statistically insignificant with enough votes, not every fic gets enough votes to drown out a couple troll-votes. Especially in the Non-HP Review Board (though it happens in HP Review too), there are plenty of fics that wind up getting binned while their vote count is in the single digits. When a fic only gets 5 votes, a single troll can be the difference between the library and the bin.

Other Fandoms might be a more prone to trollvoting than the Potter Review Board, since it's a pretty safe bet that just about every non-HP fandom has a dedicated hater or two on this site. If that one guy who absolutely loathes Naruto and 1/5s every Naruto fic he sees is one the three people who votes on a fic, that's gonna throw things off.

While I do agree that requiring a post in order to give a rating would probably only result in fewer votes rather than a larger number of substantive reviews, it would be nice if something could be done to minimize the impact of trollvoting.

 

Just out of interest, is the WbA edit time fix going to be done any time soon?

 

During the last three weeks there was only one (MLP) story in Other Fandoms with very suspicious votes - though as pdo summarises here the story has its flaws which are just ignored by its fans. Later on the problem solved itself by other votes pushing it back into the library.

There are a few stories with differing reviews and votes - but that doesn't mean they are trolled.

A solution could be to enable moderators to check who actually was voting on a story. And if there is a pattern of someone trolling a fandom or an author, he/she might get banned from voting.

 

That could work. Since I don't really know how people vote and can't read minds to find out why they vote a certain way, I don't really know how much of a problem trollvoting is.

It's more a matter of a lot of fics in OF just not getting that many votes in the first place, so when/if trollvoting does happen it can have a significant effect on a story's rating. Finding some way to encourage people to read fics, review them, and give informed votes would be nice; I wouldn't be as worried about trollvoting in OF if we didn't have so many fics only getting three or four votes.

 

Maybe the forum should show two ratings: one as it is now and second that'd only show votes of people who posted in that thread.

 

If you are afraid of a few "troll votes" influencig the end result, perhaps a simmple solution of not counting two lowest and two higest votes wold suffice (it should be implementable, I've never tinkered with forum php, but it should be settable somewhere)?
Then, there should be a raised requirement for minimum number of votes, but it would efectively save from two false votes.
Or course, this approach wouldn't help against the third.

The other options could be (probably harder to incorporate) a table of votes
5 -2 users
4 -4 users
1 -2 users
This, if there is no critisim in the thread (no one admits having voted ones), whould point towards fake votes.

Another half option is restricting the votes of 1 and 5. For example a rating of five or one could only be given with a post. Even if its a post of

The variant above (KrzaQ) also works in a way.


Just my two cents while browsing.

Nauro.
P.s. I blame all today's spelling mistakes on the phone having no spellcheck. And my lazyness.

 

Why not make the votes public if that's possible? I either like a story or not and rate accordingly, I don't particularly care what others think. We're encouraged to elaborate our opinion anyways before we rate.

And it's fine if someone doesn't like a story and only gives it one star, but this way we'd clearly recognize persistent troll-voters and not only report them but publicly chew them out on top of that. Downside is that this could potentially create a lot of spam.

 

Question: Is this "troll voting" really even an issue? I mean, to read this thread, it sounds like a problem of epidemic proportions. We can't seem to get enough moderators to get this horrendous problem under control!

The real problem I see is that we don't get enough voting in the first place. It shouldn't take more than a few days to get 30 or 40 votes, not several weeks just to get the minimum 10 required.

 

As much as I would really like something like this to happen, two things stand in its way:

1. Not sure if it would be particularly easy to code or mod into the forums.
2. I predict EPIC shitstorms on some fics, particularly controversial ones sitting in WbA. Frankly, I can see it sparking a bit of bad blood here that just isn't needed at this time.

 

While I agree that getting more more people to read/rate/review should be a major goal, smacking a couple trolls is going to be a lot easier to manage than getting 30 to 40 people to read, review, and rate every single fic posted up for review.

Yeah, I imagine it would not take long at all for some sort of drama to get started if everyone knew how everyone else rated a fic. Just seeing the vote distributions, without knowing who voted how, would be enough for me; it would separate out the fics that have middling ratings because they're of middling quality from the fics that have mid-range rating because a couple folks slapped a 1/5 on it with no explanation or justification.

Incidentally, I liked the proposal of tossing ratings out for WbA; WbA is for feedback and constructive criticism, and a rating isn't a big help there.

 

To kansas-city-shuffle your analogy, it would at least get the blood pumping again. Lack of activity at all was - as Rin veered dangerously close to realising - the initial problem.

The fandom is becoming stagnant as interest wanes. Some actual discussion about fics, heated or not, sounds like a move in the right direction. Or, indeed, in any direction.

Strangely enough, reading through the thread, it seriously looks like the idea that lurkers - and members - who drop-vote are somehow 'participating' is what is killing the fic side of the board. More activity leads to more fic. I don't think 'no-one will bother' is a valid excuse for doing nothing when that's basically what we're seeing at the moment.

Or if this trend really is fine with everyone, let's just kill the discussion side of it completely. Have stories posted and admitted/rejected/ignored by summary and rating alone. The community that people are staying for is no longer built out of the Library discussions.

 

I don't see the problem with how things work now. If it's not broke...

 

I'd have to agree that actual posting and discussion of fics is going to give us a lot more to work off of than we get from ratings. Personally, when it comes to deciding whether or not to read a fic I find two or three posts saying "fic is good because..." or "fic is bad because..." to be far more useful than how many stars it has.

 

I personally thing we should try to work on getting more people back on forums because to me, it looks as if there is barely anyone on anymore.

I think a writers competition should be started. Maybe have people here on DLP start new stories and post them in a competition thread and depending on votes, create a listing of whose story is best, maybe have a first place to tenth, it might inspire more people to write if they are trying to beat other writers.

 

Are you shitting me?

 

There're plenty of opportunities for writing around: TGYH, monthly contests, etc. The thing though is that people just aren't writing. More writing competitions isn't gonna help, sweetheart.

 

That has more to do with the slow decline of the fandom than anything else. It's part of the natural cycle of fandoms.

You're new around here, aren't you?

There is a monthly fic comp. Past entries are here: https://forums.darklordpotter.net/forumdisplay.php?f=115

It doesn't use a public voting system [it's more of a jury style vote] for reasons discussed in its initial announcement thread.

edit: ninja'd

 

Have to agree there; the Harry Potter Fandom is shrinking now that the movies are done with. If we want DLP to start growing again, the best bet would probably be to put more effort into branching out into other fandoms to pull in new members.