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Bacon cheeseburgers fix everything!

Remember, you’re here because your parents got frisky. Sweet dreams!

I think a downvote button just opens for abuse. At the end of the day you can’t use the downvote metric for anythings useful since you don’t know why somebody downvoted the story/chapter. The upvote/like is more useful for the author...but it can be abused by authors/readers who want to promote a story. How about having a “like” button for the chapters where the result is only visible for the author? If you remove publicly visible aspect of the like/upvote you remove a lot of reasons for people arranging a bot that clicks on the like button.

I’m one who was attacked by a rating bomb, the downvote would come in immediately after a chapter post, too short to actually read it. Lemme tell you, it was very discouraging to keep posting. (And this was in ORIGINAL fiction, where there wasn’t any “one-true-pairing” shipping nonsense – could’ve been a story-tag thing, but never really know why they attacked.) Sure, a like button is open to some abuse, but any author who bots it will lose the reason it’d exist, to know how many people truly like their story – less of a downside than a dislike button. Now back to this Hermione incest scene….

Honestly, if we could implement it, a “like” button would be great. Granted, the lack of likes might be just as discouraging as the lack of dragon prints, but it would have far less potential for abuse than our old ratings system. I can’t tell you how many members had stories rated down for what I consider the stupidest of reasons: a disliked pairing, a character being too out of character, and on one memorable occasion, for writing too many stories. Yes, really, and the saddest part is that the author was an excellent writer who truly didn’t deserve to be ratings-bombed.

One thing that make dragon prints a measure a bit tricky is that a large number of chapters in the story raises the effort to read it all. This mean that each time you post a new chapter you can expect a number of people checking the beginning out but not becoming fans so they drop out. The increased perceived effort to read the chapters will mean these random visitors lessens over time. In essence you can a growing number of regulars that read everything, but having a dragon print that is falling as fewer random visitors visit the story. If you keep a steady beat of dragon hints as chapters grow in number I would say it signals you are doing great. From another perspective, exchanging reviews with other authors is a great way to making it more likely new people will check you story. If I have to choose between reading two stories and one of them has a review I will most only choosing the 0 review one when doing community-service-style-reading. Stories with reviews are generally a better read. The thing lacking at AFF today is we don’t get dragon prints for the individual chapters. If we had those we could tell how many that read to the end. The tricky thing is that adding such feature afterward would imply that later chapters of all existing chapters has no dragon prints even while they could have been visited by loads of people.