That is an excellent idea. People might actually pause a minute to read over reviews for blatantly horrible spelling/grammar, or to see if it made rational sense five minutes later.

 

Yeah thought I had, been up for like 3 days straight now, so sorry I brought it back up, honestly couldn't remember.

By reviewer basis, karma points given by other reviewers. Maybe -2 for an unfair review, +1 for a fair review that's not largely biased, +3 for a great unbiased review, then sort the reviews for each story by high to low karma reviewers. I never review ff.nuts simply b/c I'm sure someone else has already said simialr things. It may not sound huge, but after seeing how much opinions influence story reviews here alone, I think it'd be fair to say it'd be a great idea.

Then add in sanity checks like you can only give a karma point once every 10 hours or something, only registered users, etc. I'll find the link and give you the explanation how lionhead does it on their boards, it's a good system.

 

Or even some sort of general rating system. Like when you review a fic you could give it a grade on like 1 out of 10 or something, then the total score is averaged out to get the story's final rating. Then a filter option in the search engine to only show fics that rate 8+ or something.

Also here is the FAQ about how rep/karma is handled over at the LH boards. It wouldn't be able to be ported into PC exactly, but just showing how it's used in other places.

 

About grading...

Would grades be just for individual chapters or for the story as whole? And what if you vote twice? Does your new grade replaces the old one or is it added normally?

Maybe you should use descriptive grades like on FicWad? Or grades for different categories (originality, writting style etc.)?

I'm just not sure that standard 1-10 grade would work. I for one wouldn't have a clue what grade to give to half the stories I've read.

 

Story as a whole. Force votes to register so they can only vote once per username/email address.

Most of the fics I've read would score a 5-7, a select few a 7-8. Don't think I've ever read a 9-10 yet, there's always something that irks me.

 

I'm actually grading fics on my HD when I read them. But I'm only giving 6 to 10, so it's more to seperate stories I'd read from the others

BTW If you're interested, fics that I had graded 10:

10 Evil Be Thou My Good (ONESHOT)
10 Journeyman Potter (WIP)
10 A Second Chance at Life (WIP)
10 Ascension Of The Scorpion Sorcerer (WIP)
10 Reign of Power (WIP)
10 Shadow Play (WIP) - this is not as good as it used to be, should be 9 now...

And these are from back when I was reading H/G:

10 This Means War! (WIP)
10 Harry Potter and the Power of Time (WIP)
10 SIB - The Awakening Power

Right now, I would have given 10's to maybe 3 of them... just proves that grading system doesn't work.

 

Sure it does, just means that your scoring system is a bit high to begin with 6-10 isn't a large range =)

Reign of Power I'd forgotten I'd give it a 8 or 9, the rest probably 4-7's

Two of them I can't stand for some reason, they just rub me wrong.

 

‘Reign of Power’ or ‘Second Chance’ would be my highest rated in that lot. Awakening is a bit long winded, and I’ve only read it once, yet have no interest in reading again, something that I’d take into account when rating a story. I don’t like Journeyman at all…seams a bit strained to me after the first one, its just trying very hard to adapt to the concepts in HBP.

I’ve never read more then the first chapter or two of Scorpion Sorcerer, for some reason, but I’ll have another look at it. I really don’t remember why I didn’t like it at first. Everything else I like, but not enough to give them an excellent rating.

As for the rating on the new site; well, this is a Dark site, is it not? so I say you take a count from 1 to 7, since seven is the most magical number and all. HBP does have its shining spots, after all. We can’t just ignore its existence.

 

Yay! So, when do you plan on having the site up and running? Sometime after New Year's I'm guessing.

 

Yeah, me too. You go, Raven.

 

I was just angsting while trying to find any worthwhile story on FFN and in process came up with few more peevies / suggestions for Patronus.

1) Mandatory gender in author info + search fics by the author's gender

I find stories written by males generally more enjoyable than those written by females. That's probably coz I'm a guy myself - I suppose the opposite thing goes for females. It would be nice to be able to filter out the stories written by opposite sex.

This is especially important for romances - I find even the best romances written by females barely readable, since they are always written from female's POV (or they're SLASH). I don't wanna read about how nice muscles Harry/Draco have and how encapturing his eyes are, damn it!

2) Genres

I find standard genres (action, angst, romance...) sorely lacking when trying to find a story of specific genre (dark, independant for me).

I suggest you instead use tags that describe the story the way many people do in summary. For example: Dark!Harry, Independant!Harry, Fluff, Angst, Hurt, Cutting, Slash, MPREG, Magical duels, Swords, Guns, Magical theory, Science, Crossover, AU, Time travel, Evil!Harry, (insert person) Bashing, Sex (+ all the NC17 categories, if you allow smut - bonding, head...), Smart!Harry, Slytherin!Harry, Heirs, Politics..... etc etc.... You can allow each author to attach say... 10 or 15 tags to a story; Or make it unlimited, but overtagging the story should be punishable then (I guess some people would attach all of them to attract attention - that should be subjectable to banning / expulsion etc.)...

Oh, and you can use the similar thing for pairings, but that should probably be separated from the genres above...

Anyway, I think that this system would make searchng for a story much easier, than looking for action/adventure and then browsing through all the fucking H/G romances for half an hour...

3) Search for stories that are NOT of the genre...

Whether you accept that second suggestion or not, you should definitely allow search engine to find all the stories that are NOT from some genre... If only I could have filtered out all the romances from FFN's search, that would have saved me a lot of time...

 

ip's suggestions are good, but what about the few good female authors out there? I know I'd probably end up skipping over them because, and I agree with you, men are generally better writers then women. And uh...yeah!

 

No, man are definitely NOT better writters than women. Quite the contrary.

It's just that girl writers tend to feminize the main male character (Harry in this case) - make him overly romantic pansy who wants to save himself for marrage and who's constantly angsting about things no normal guy would spend a second thinking about, or a tough guy with golden heart, who can kill 20 DE's with one spell but needs his freakin' soulmate's constant nursing and moral support, or a fagget who pines after Severus/Draco or etc...

If the main character was female, I bet all the male writers would be making the same mistakes - turn Harriete into a slut lesbian, who don't give a shit about her hair, don't spend a second analyzing where her romantic relationships are going, and never discusses her feelings about guys and other life-related stuff with her girlfriends... you know what I mean.

 

Fine, fine fine fine. But you know what would be better? Having two main characters, one guy and one girl instead of one main character with two sidekicks. That way, the writers can choose whichever main character they want.

I'd end up making most of those mistakes. Except the slut lesbian. Because that's me exactly, or pretty close. Oh, and I got one more point. Since the main character is Harry Potter and his gender won't be changing anytime soon, men will be the better writers of HP fanfics. Because I think Raven said somewhere earlier that PC was going to be only HP and crossovers. I think that's all.

 

That's stupidly sexist, and needless. Filter out romance if you don't want to read gushy stuff, all that would do is invoke whines of sexism. I do agree women authors tend to slash, but theres a slash filter to take care of that. Most of the other fics that are feminized, the ones I can think of anyway, are done by husband wife teams, or a male author with a female muse/beta. No way of filtering those out under your suggestion.

Decent idea, a bit overboard however, and so many fics cross into one another, and most fics radically change I'd imagine as an author thinks of more stuff. How would they know to label it guns at the start, if they decide to have Harry rocking a sniper rifle at the end chapter? Being able to sort them by the categories we have here, also ship, and being able to filter out slash should be more then enough.

 

Unfortunatelly (for girls at least), most of the stories have males as main characters.

I still think it's almost impossible for someone to realistically write from the other gender's point of view. Yes, it seems it's kinda easier for females to put themselves in male's shoes (I for once couldn't even imagine writing from female POV). But as soon as female writter writing from male POV tries to write romance, you (if you're male) can see how she lingers on boy's athletic bodies and their dreamy eyes and glosses over the girl's outlook...

Even JKR screwed herself up with making her main character a boy (probably coz it would sell easier). It was all nice and dandy while they were kids but now... just look at the romance in HBP and it's all clear.