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I don’t know how useful keeping track of dragon prints are- I used to get loads of hits on pastebins I hardly showed anyone, and I realised the numbers were just getting inflated by bots combing the site.

Oh, yeah, those rating bombs were not great. Only happened to one of my stories – went from like 4 stars/30 votes where it had been for months to over 100 votes overnight and 1 star. I tended not to pay a lot of attention to ratings, but it still kinda sucked. A like button would be pretty good -might need to be tied to accounts tho’ like on Twitter, to reduce fake boosting (probably not all the way but some of the way!) I feel like it’s unlikely

At what point must I stop calling my story “short”, a million words?

Not saying it’s the greatest idea ever, simply what I do because there’s no other metric here, aside from reviews. (And don’t think asking the reader a comprehension worksheet would work either.) Now, FF.net has good enough statistics for me to ascertain that bots are coming through. I mean, I doubt humans are reading my 700k potter fanfic in a day. It was meaningful the couple of times I watched a slow progression through the chapters, that did let me know that somebody was willing to hit “next chapter”. On FF.net, though, they have other metrics, like alerts & favorite counts, to help know that readers are liking it.

Flicking through Unleash the Beast comparing the above has had me thinking a second part would be cool, Hermione back to Hogwarts not long before her 17th Birthday, ends up spending the night in Hagrid’s hut and seducing the cowardly Fang, who for the purposes of the pwp would have some magic in his bloodline is still frisky at senior dog stage… eh. Got this idea of some dogs of magic infused that breed litters of puppies with witches, a secret group called the Union of the Knot, with only one or rarely two puppies out of each little also able to carry on a magical rather than non magical bloodline. There should have been a witch with Fang back in ‘89 or so, but the candidate turned out not to be able to get through his basica cowardice, perhaps scaring him due to personality conflict. Hermione’s the second effort, having been unknowingly observed with Saxon in part 1, they arrange for her to find herself alone with Fang for the night, and then the next morning one of them is making breakfast when she wakes up caked in dried sperm and strongly smelling of dog sex, and explains she’s now likely pregnant, that the pregnancy enhances her own fertility – maybe a suggestion that Fang’s grandmother was Molly, another member of the Union... Yes, this is some fucked up shit, but the first story was popular and turning it around a bit so Hermione is the seducer rather than the other way round, and adding in the pregnancy angle (some kinda magic to hide it while she’s carrying I guess) would be something new. I dunno, I feel like I probably won’t get it written but it’s nice to plan stuff and feel ideas form…

Bit of gunk on the monitor becomes a (derogatory) nickname to a character, funny how life goes.

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….

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.

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.

It’s the age old question, whether people are enjoying the story. True, I’m writing for personal enjoyment, but there’s an extra level of effort required for polishing & posting (or publishing) a story; thus, some positive feedback is appreciated (& constructive criticism). TV producers have the Nielsen Ratings, publishers have sales numbers, and we have dragon prints (other archives have hit-counter equivalents). Discerning whether a dragon print is a hit-through, a random check, or a devoted reader is tough to do; similarly, book publishers don’t know from the sales figures, how many physical books are actually read vs those that are shelved away for “later” vs those that are burned or used to level furniture. Now, AO3 also has kudos (likes), bookmark counts, & subscriptions – this tells a bit more to the general enjoyment. FFN does have that per-chapter hit numbers, and they do show that there’s a lot who’ll click because it’s on the “updated” list but don’t click through to the freshly posted chapter. (However, FFN’s numbers are now getting drowned out by bots...another topic for another time.) In the end, for AFF, the best metric is recording the dragon prints, and relish when that occasional review comes through.

That is me. I tried my hand at it x)