Reputation System Update - We need your help!

[Claire]

Reputation System Update

Thanks to @Vela Nanashi the Reputation System has received a major update. You will see now to the left of a story's title on the topic list a number that wasn't there before. This is the story's reputation. To be precise, this is the reputation score of the first post in a story topic. So if you rate the first post of a story, you rate the story as a whole. If you give the story a rating of 1 or 2 points, you can always return later, upgrade your rating to 2 or 3 points and change the rating comment you gave the author of the story the first time you rated the story. I would like to encourage you to make use of these rating upgrades if later updates to a story improved your overall impression of the story.

You can now also sort stories in the topic list by rating. Just scroll to the bottom of the topic list, click on the button to the right of "New Topic" and choose "Reputation" as your sorting criterion. You will then see the highest rated stories at the top or the bottom, depending on the order you chose.


We need your help!

I want this forum to be an active community that does not only passively consume the stories posted here, but really engages with them, that will leave the authors of stories not frustrated due to a lack of feedback. With that, I would like your help. Help me foster that Feedback Culture I outlined in the Freshman's Guide. This forum is designed to incentivize further activity on its own once it has reached a certain base level of activity. But to get to that required base level of activity, we need authors and readers actively commenting on stories and responding to feedback. The reputation system is a part of that. Please rate stories you like positively, especially their opening post. And if you as an author receive good feedback that the reader put some effort into, rate that positively, too!

Currently, @Vela Nanashi, @LaLia, @Shocker and me are trying really hard to get that initial momentum going to put the forum on the right track. But for this forum to succeed, the stories board can not stay a circle jerk among us four. If you don't want this forum to be a temporary blip but become a new home for you to engage with others who share your kink, I can only encourage you to participate. I can't promise you that the fate of the Ravishment Academy will be different from all those sites that recently went down even if you do become active. But I can promise you that this site will fail like RapeCage, The Black Van and the Ravishment University (and probably others I am not aware of) if we don't establish that new feedback culture. The simple reason being that neither me, nor anybody else who might take over running this forum from me at some point, will have any reason to keep this place going if the real life comes knocking with different priorities and the forum has fallen into the same rot where authors post a story and receive on average maybe two replies that say no more than "I like it".

And if you read this post as an unregistered user right now, don't be shy and join us! If you liked a story you found here, you can have an enormous impact on getting more of those written and posted if you let the author know what you liked about it.

[Vela Nanashi]

Please let me/us know if there is any further things we could use for the reputation system to work better for you guys. Also what would make it more likely for you to read and comment on others stories? We both believe it is important that we get into a habit of doing that. So that we keep writers and us admins too, motivated to keep making this place better and such

[LaLia]

The current system still needs to be established, however, or rather, the initial post would have to be "rated" more. I think it's working quite well at the moment with "Im Netz des Fremden," which isn't doing so well yet, but the individual posts do have some good ratings. Is there a way to not just count the first bid, but to include all points?

[Vela Nanashi]

Counting all would be possible, but that would include ratings on comments that the author did not make so the current choice was to limit it to only first post for the topic and have that represent the story as a whole.

[Claire]

@LaLia I think we are simply too few people actually using the reputation system to assess how well it works. The influence of just one person on the rating is enormous. For example, the rating of all German stories suffers from the fact that Vela can't read them. That means, that 1 of the 4 people who actually regularly read, comment and rate stories is gone and she happens to be the person who is also most generous with 3 point ratings. To truly judge that, we would need more active readers rating stories to a degree that the individual vote becomes statistically irrelevant.

Regarding your suggestion to include all the chapters of a story: That is problematic for three reasons.

1) We have no easy way to distinguish between story posts and discussion posts in a topic. We could theoretically include only the author's posts in a cumulative rating, but even that would include posts without story content. We might be able to do this, but it is difficult to do this right.

2) More important is this point: The forum infrastructure is already biased in favor of long stories over short stories by pushing them back to the top of the board with every update they receive. Making the story rating the cumulative rating of all chapter posts, would make it impossible for short stories to compete against multi part stories. The rating of a story would start to much more reflect the length of a story than its "quality" or I should say "popularity". So unless we want to express a clear bias that long stories are to be preferred over short stories,I would not recommend that.

3) This point follows from the second one. You introduce an incentive to post your story in many small chunks rather than in more lengthy updates. That would be the most obvious attempt to game the system and I believe that this would work. You could see instances of this on RavishU where a user who updated his story in 300 to 500 word chunks had gained much more merits than most other users, simply because he received multiple merits for his ultra short updates where others had posted a single 3000 word update and got only one merit for that in its entirety.

So overall, this is not a good idea. We are already biased towards long stories because of how forums like this work. Adjusting ratings to work like this would dial up that bias to 11. If it weren't for points 2 and 3, we could try to solve problem 1. But this would only create problems. But maybe it makes sense to remind people of the meaning of the first post's rating at the end of a new chapter. You know, do the Youtube thing, ask people to like, comment and subscribe in case they liked what they read. Because that is the only problem I see with this: People forgetting about the first post after they finished reading chapter 5 and gave it a glowing review.

[LaLia]

Exactly what you mention at the end is what I see as a problem right now. It could have the opposite effect, with stories with only one part getting more points than stories with multiple parts, and I don't like that at the moment. But maybe we should wait and see. Personally, I found it better without seeing the numbers directly; that can have too much of an influence.

[Claire]

Exactly what you mention at the end is what I see as a problem right now. It could have the opposite effect, with stories with only one part getting more points than stories with multiple parts, and I don't like that at the moment. But maybe we should wait and see. Personally, I found it better without seeing the numbers directly; that can have too much of an influence.

Don't worry about that too much. I would consider it extremely unlikely that short stories could ever outcompete in terms of reputation longer multi part stories given how much that the forum infrastructure stacks the deck against them already. And the greater visibility of the reputation score will only be a reminder for people to pay more attention to the first post. My recommendation here is: Don't bother with the reputation score of a story until we have at least something like 10 to 20 people somewhat regularly voting on stories. Statistically speaking, the current ratings mean little to nothing, they are just noise. For example, look at Venus' Touch. I know for a fact that at least Shocker, Vela and Jess like that story, but its rating is currently 0. Give it some time to let people participate and some ratings to come in. If an issue like people not paying enough attention to the first post of a multi part story actually comes up, we will see and address it then.

[Shocker]

to be quite frank the reputation doesn't bother me one way or the other, I still prefer readers and their comments. Even if it's just the quick I liked this. If none of my stories ever make it into the popular section I won't loose a single minute of sleep over it.

[Vela Nanashi]

I prefer comments over reputation too, it is worth a lot more to me, and it is a lot more important that people actually comment on stories, as that is one of the main things we want to make happen on this forum. I also don't mind a single word comment, or longer than that. I do prefer more details though, but yeah any comment is amazing.

The reputation system does allow doing a hidden from most people comment, only the one you give rep and comment to and you and mods and admins can see that you gave reputation and read your reputation comment. So if you are scared of commenting out in the open and want to be lurker, you can give a +1 or more rep and give the author a comment on their post, or you can send a pm to them I guess

However I have some fun things planned for reputation, that will perhaps make people want reputation a bit more, it will just take me time to code those things.

[Kendall]

Unless the 'reputation' does anything, I don't see it helping me become a better writer. I like reading comments both positive and negative. That's just my 2 bits.