Favorites (so far)

[Caras pet]

To hopefully help others finding some good stories, here's a list of my favorites so far (ordered by discovery, descending).

Title	Author	Size [kb]	Forum
Curious Neighbour	Teann Daorsa	131	forum-thread
The Goth, the Sex Shop, and the Surprise	Zeedrot	124	forum-thread
Leatherbound Hearts	Darkwolf	458	forum-thread
Pet Correction	ForeverAltered	723	forum-thread
Part-Time Equine	ForeverAltered	1117	forum-thread
Questionable Room Service	Zeedrot	100	forum-thread
Well, Shit	Zeedrot	81	forum-thread
Sam and Em	ForeverAltered	1323	forum-thread
Heather's Wild Vacation	Lastdirewolf	63	forum-thread
The Saga of Alys	Darkwolf	229	forum-thread
A Conventional Affair	Darkwolf	1434	forum-thread
Alice and Amanda	Alina Aamu	198	forum-thread
Paradice Lost	A Pensive Pen	282	forum-thread
If Found	A Pensive Pen	57	forum-thread
Trouble in Fairyland	Cropsncuffs	119	forum-thread
Rubber Madame	Jane D'oh	210	forum-thread
The Sorcerer's Apprentice	Darkwolf	928	forum-thread
The Gingerbread House	Darkwolf	1641	forum-thread
Gag Sentence	Dan	80	forum-thread
The Client	Anne Woolsey	89	forum-thread

(@forum-admins: some cell padding for the tables would be nice, I had to trick the software to get a readable output)

Depending on the feedback, I am willing to update this list as is evolves.

[teanndaorsa]

Added 0.1em of padding to table cells, can up that to 0.2 if it's not enough. A few of my own favourites on there, for sure. I'd love to see more people sharing theirs, it's always good to see which are popular, and I'm sure the favoured authors appreciate the vote. :-)

[le Bouc]

What about a 'year-end-review' of top 10 voted favs, top read/downloaded, top commented on, top contributors, etc. I think that would spark more user engagement and maybe increase readership.


Qu'en pensez-vous?
Le Bouc

[Caras pet]

Thanks for adding some padding, @teanndaorsa, next time I'll try without "hard spaces" :-)
I would love to see your list, it's really hard to find the good ones and my "plan" for that is not that much better than "brute force"...

If there is a forum API that lets you query the replies for every "story-thread", would you say that a "top ten" list (or something similar) would lead the readers to the "most interesting" stories?

I also thought about a voting system, but

• as the forum software isn't custom made for the plaza (correct me if I am wrong), that might be difficult to add
• that might lead to fewer replies (as clicking a "thumbs up" icon is so much easier than typing a few words of appreciation)

[Caras pet]

A list of my favorite authors (alphabetical order)

Author	Stories	Size	Min	Max	AVG
Darkwolf	5	4692	229	1641	938
ForeverAltered	5	3321	67	1323	664
Frosted Moonwright	11	361	14	71	32
LilCthulhu	8	253	8	51	31
Tankpoet	4	90	7	46	22
Teann Daorsa	9	391	21	131	43
thepinkbishop	5	2487	30	1296	497
Zeedrot	15	715	15	124	47

(@teanndaorsa I didn't use hard spaces this time, so you have something to test the padding with; for my taste, the could be more "spacy" for improved readability - what do you think?)

[teanndaorsa]

Increased padding further, see what you think.

I don't think that the number of replies, or even the number of views on the feedback threads, is any real indication of which stories are the most interesting or even the most popular, just the ones which prompted the most discussion. As with any voting or scoring system, so much is lost in the aggregation. Everyone has such different tastes, and they vote not on any objective measure of quality but on "I liked this". If you share the same tastes as a really big group of people who are voting, that's great, high vote count tells you that people like you liked that story. If your tastes don't align with lots of other people, then vote counts just tell you "other people I don't usually agree with liked this story."

I like public favourites lists, because they let people seek out other people who share the same tastes, and leverage their knowledge, and then it doesn't really matter what's popular or what the big groups of people think.

[Caras pet]

Thanks for increasing the padding once more. For my taste its readable now, and I might have to investigate "BBCode & text-align" next

...but I don't think the forum design is about me (if it where, we would have dark-mode and adjustable font-size )
So, what do you (and the other readers) think?


As for voting / scoring systems: of course you are right in those being highly subjective, but you will also agree that the "likeness" (is that even a word?) of stories can't be measured objectively at all.
You can measure things like number of typos, grammar, sentence-building, repetitiveness, vocabulary and such, but those are only "tools" (if important ones, at least for me - the inner monk is strong in this one).
But a good story is so much more, and that's where it gets highly personal/subjective...

See, there are nearly 8000 stories at the plaza (with: multi-parts count as 1, reposts/cross-posts count as 0), published under more than 2300 author-names, so the "how to select/sort" question naturally leads to all kinds of "measure" thoughts.