Finished voting on the Letter Challenge

That sure makes me feel special!

Especially if one of your stories totalled ten points! Not that it would, and not that you'd know!

I added up the points I'd given when I'd read all the stories and found that my average mark was 5.7, so a bit above mid-way.

I add my voice to those saying that if you vote, you should read all the stories and vote on them. Otherwise, stories which you might like but you don't try because of the title, the length or whatever don't get a fair chance.

I tend to introduce more of a spread between my top on low scores - not because the stories I give lower scores are 'bad,' but because I want the ones I think are truly the best stories end up with the best chance of being recocgnized in the results.

Mati, I really applaud your sentiment. But if everyone did the same as you, how - I ask you - would our contest be resolved?

Valerie, I just forgot that I promised a few weeks ago that I will be more serious in my posts.
I actually don't vote on every entry, but I have read nearly all by now - at least the first few sentences. If a story don't appeal to me I see no sense in reading it completely and if I don't read it, I can't give a vote. I think this is fairer than giving only 1 or 2 points. If I would be an author I would prefer 10 votes of 10 points rather than 100 votes of one point. If you receive only one point you don't know, if the voter didn't like your story or didn't like the orientation. In both cases you would have the same sum, but the mean value based on the number of actual votes would be still 10 in the first case and 1 in the second case. So if any author would like to know how his/her target group judged, it's much better not to vote for stories on which a reader has no opinion. And it could be, that a story of an author, which is not in the winning ranks - maybe because his story is just not mainstream, or on the wrong position or with the wrong title or too long, still has a high mean value, because the people who actually read the story liked it. For me that would be less disappointing than to have a lot of 1-point-votes for "effort".

But actually you are voting! You are awarding a zero to the stories you don't like. I'm not judging if that's fair or not, but that's what you are doing.


My take is that if you can't commit to read all the stories (and I totally understand that some can't) then pick out as many as you can in totally random order, read them, and grade them (comments are nice too). If everybody did that, then the averages will prevail, and all stories will get about the same number of readers, and therefore a fair shot.

By the way, I finished grading all the letters today.

Vaughn

Exactly. With the current voting system in place, the TOTAL number of votes cast for any story is what determines how it finishes. So stories with more reads and voters will score higher than those with less. Who knows why some stories are read more often than others, especially when the authors are anonymous. A catchy title? The length? Where on the list it's loaded?

A fairer method would be to take the total points awarded a story and divide it by number of voters who cast a score for that story, thus giving a score between 1 and 10. A story with a 9.7 average, for example, is ranked higher than a story with a 9.2, regardless of how many readers ended up voting on that story. It's more meaningful than simply reporting a story had say, 500 votes total. No way of knowing that meant 50 people gave it a 10, or 100 people gave it a 5. Same total score but obviously there's a difference in quality between a 5.0 and a 10.0 story.

I'm afraid that's not true and in my opinion at least the logic behind that suggestion is flawed. For example, to illustrate this with an extreme case, Story A is extremely well received and scores 900 points, averaging s score of 9.1. Story B is extremely poorly received and only the author bothers to vote on it awarding himself or herself 10 points ending up with an average vote of 10.0 and emerges the winner. Furthermore, it would also likely lead to other entrants awarding stories they considered their competition very low votes to bring down the average.

There are other problems with the "average vote" method and you go could several steps further and blank out all the tiles, always display the list of entries in random order, only accept votes from those who voted for each entrant and so on and so forth. The point is, the challenges, as we keep saying every time we have one, are intended merely to be a bit of fun and a means of encouraging people to write something they probably wouldn't have written otherwise so agonizing and deliberating over the method of voting seems counter-productive to me.

I think the fairest method would be to have some experts in a jury who are really able to judge the stories properly. A public choice must not be fair, it's just fun and is not only encouraging the authors to write, but also some readers like me to look at stories, which they otherwise would never read. I agree with Februs, that all the authors shouldn't take the results too serious. Thus said, the last challenges showed for me, that the winner-stories have been always really good and I think the results wouldn't be very different with another voting system. The mean values may be only interesting for statistical research, f.e. if you want to find out which type of story attracts most readers or certain readers.

Actually as a writer, it seems to me sometimes I forget a few things. On the last challenge, I did not win or come close to winning BUT...I picked up 39 comments I never would have got....I picked up hundreds of reads I never would have got...I had a lot of fun submitting the stories...and lastly i never expected to win so any points i got beyond the ones I voted for myself showed that some others on site thought my story was worth something.

As Februs states, these things are for fun, and all though I encourage everyone to vote for all the stories, it is really not that important. I always write to new authors, "read lots, write lots and comment more but most important IS TO HAVE FUN."

So people, vote if you want, don't vote, whatever you choose is best for you is all part of having fun on this site. We will never all agree on the method of how to vote, on who should win or not win, whether there are better ways to do this or that. So i know what and how I handled the voting on this contest and it is entirely my choice, but most important is that I had fun doing it my way