Leaderboard

TBH, I’d be overjoyed if I netted two reviews per 1,000 hits. Only one of my stories exceeds that ratio, because I had a serial reviewer post for the first half dozen chapters or so. Rest of the stories… the one with 16k hits has only three reviews.

Shoutbox was cool in that regard, few ever visit the Chatbox.

I had gotten smacked by the trolls. I’d post a chapter, lose a “+”. Post another chapter, lose a “+”, repeat. That became...very discouraging to an inexperienced writer. And I’m posting originals here!

Author: BronxWench Title: Masking Intentions Summary: Newly masked and permitted to walk among the Court of the Seaborn Crown, Kdis is given his first assignment. He must guard one sprog, a youth who stands on the cusp of a terrible manhood. Kdis did not expect to desire his charge, despite the games the sprog enjoys and the potential cost to Kdis. Forfeiting his own life might be the sanest course for Kdis, but sanity is as rare as mercy in the halls of the Palace of the Sea. Feedback: Yes, please!! Fandom: Original Fiction Warnings: Abuse Anal BMod Bond Fingering Minor2 MM Oral Rape SandM Tort Toys Violence Solo story or chaptered story: Chaptered URL: http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600109395 Review Reply thread: http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/index.php/topic/25864-bronxwenchs-review-replies-original-fiction/ (This was originally published on 3/24/16, and has undergone some editing to clean up some of the more egregious shite. I don't know if I've made it better, but I certainly hope so!)

We were talking at one point about something to replace the ratings system, perhaps a “like” or “kudos” feature that would be harder to abuse, at least in terms of downvoting a story that didn’t have the reader’s OTP, or had content (duly tagged) that the reader still found offensive even though they were alerted by the tags to its presence. (Yes, it got that petty.) As I recall, and it was a while ago, it was not something that was easy for the coder to implement, and our focus on code updates was to make the site more mobile-friendly. Encouraging reviews has always been difficult. We had to implement a policy of not allowing authors to withhold chapters until a certain number of reviews was received, because readers emailed us in droves to complain bitterly. Review demands are still prohibited, because honestly, none of us have the patience to deal with the surge of irate emails they engender. On the other hand, readers tend to expect fast updates without any consideration for real-life demands that might slow an author down, and I can’t imagine we’d want to reward a flurry of “Get off your ass and write the next chapter, dammit!” reviews. But that would involve a quality assurance review of reviews, and I don’t have the staff for that, probably because we’re all volunteers and getting paid in virtual whiskey and brain bleach isn’t appealing to a lot of folks. Now, if someone wanted to revive the AFF Reviewers Association, and had the artistic talent to create badges and banners to hand out to reviewers, that would be something I’d get behind. Anyone reviewing a story could leave a link to their review, and whoever is running the initiative could hand out badges and such monthly (weekly might be a bit time consuming). Who knows? It might be a way to get folks more active again. Another way for authors to perhaps encourage reviews is to post story updates to the Promote a Story! thread, with helpful links to the story or chapter so readers could jump to it quickly. Readers could follow that story promotion thread, and get email notification when the author posts about an update. Sometimes we lose track of a story, and this could be a way to keep it fresh in readers’ minds. I’m enjoying all this brainstorming!

We HAD ratings, but trolls kept spamming the down-vote button w/o reading the stories, which was demoralizing to some authors; and fanboys spamming the up-vote based on their one-true-ship desires. This made ratings useless for actually judging if the story was any good.