Time to start actually using those stars.

 

Wow. Most of that list contains fics I have already read. Time to go through and star them. This is really interesting to look at! Thank you.

 

Raven, you give us the nicest things.

 

Is it normal it shows stuff I have rated (which I've read)?

 

Are you aiming to have the data upload automatically or will you have to do it manually every time?

Otherwise the feature is pretty interesting, I'll have to actually read the fic recommended before I can give you more feedback, but it looks like it's working pretty well!

 

Nice one, Raven.

An interesting expansion would be the ability to feed it your FF.Net favourites, though I'm not quite sure how that would work, as a fic being favourited or not is binary, whereas ratings aren't.

 

This seems like a good idea, though may give somewhat messy results from time to time; a shared taste for one type of story between two users may result in them having completely different fics appearing in the results because most people like such a varied range of things. I won't pretend to understand the first thing about how search algorithms work, but that kind of unreliable correlation seems like it'd lump in vastly different styles of story next to one another in the suggested results.

Perhaps it could be useful to add some kind of genre or theme filtering system, so you'd be able to check a box and hide, say, all results flagged as humour or romance, or only show results of a specific genre. Something similar with a series of tags relating to the fics' themes could be helpful as well, so that specific searches for, say, fics that do or do not contain an alternate house sorting or early introduction to magic.

Seems like this might be a fair bit of work, especially adding all the possible tags to everything, and probably more effort than it would be worth. But filtering by genre seems like a realistic and useful addition, cleaning up search results a little.

Of course, despite the efficiency of specific searches, having unexpected gems thrown up that you may not otherwise look twice at is one of the best things about this magic personality test.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I'd quite like to see a sort of 'randomizer' feature, where at a click of a button, a dozen randomly selected fics from the library would pop up. I'm sure there are many things hidden in the recesses of the forums that somehow slipped by without gaining as much attention as they should have.

If none of my suggestions are feasible or easy to pop into existence, I'd also suggest that you manually force my paltry contribution to the fandom onto every single recommendation so I get lots of attention and feel pretty as pie. This would be a valid improvement to this great tool, and definitely not a self-serving bullshit idea. :3

 

This sounds awesome Raven - I'd love to take a look at your algorithm. Not because I'd be able to help, most likely, but I'm interested in seeing exactly how it works.

I'm pretty sure that lots of people, myself included, would be up for helping tag stories by genre or any other criteria. Even if we don't manage to get the whole library tagged it'd be a good thing to have on newer entry stories anyway.

Let me know if there's anything else I could do to help out.

 

Oh... that'd be sad. I've studied those before. D:

 

Try rating those crappy stories on the list then. If it works as I feel like it should, giving those crappy stories a bad rating may change your list a bit.


How often will this list get updated? It would be cool if it was more dynamic, and changes as we rate the stories on the list. I have no idea how difficult making this is, but will you be planning on making this more automatic, or updating it manually as you are doing now?