Desiderius Price

40576

40574

40572

40570

40568

40566

As an author, I won’t do a bot for that, because it’d destroy the point of the metrics, to know if people reading & enjoying my stories. As to the other stories… sure, it’s an arms race, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least put up speed limit signs & speed bumps. Human reviewing reviews means staff, which we’re not exactly busting at the seams with, or conscriptingthe complicit authors. This is a nice thing, and I do post a link in my stories to the relevant forum thread. However, inline in the story, like a comment section (similar to AO3) might be better engagement – but we’d need that mythical coder for new features. I’d suggest starting with the honor system on this, we don’t need to add more enforcement duties to the archive moderators. And you can certainly make a badge today, put it into your profile today.

40564

40562

40560

40558

40556

40554

An intriguing spin (IMO), is to have it be a teenage mother, who vanishes shortly after his birth. Use suspended animation or time-travel or similar to be the truth for that disappearance. Boy gets into high school, meets this girl and clicks… truth is later revealed that it’s his mother, same/similar biological age. Note, I do NOT have time for another writing project, so feel free to use this idea (or not).

40552

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!

40548

40546

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.

40542

UTF-8 rocks, saying that as a coder. You can’t tell the difference when it’s English, pretty minimal overhead in the related European languages, and able to handle all the languages. Main drawback is if you’re dealing mostly in the asian languages, it’ll be a bit larger in file/data size than UTF-16.

40534