Story Challenge - story order

OK, well I've made a change to the story contest software such that the stories will now be presented in a different random order every time the page is visited or a vote is submitted. However, for those people who might find the constantly changing order to be an annoyance they can change it by clicking on the word "as loaded". This will restore the original order the stories were loaded in so hopefully we've got the best of both worlds. If anyone finds things not behaving as anticipated or discovers any problems with voting do please let us know at the earliest opportunity.

So, a second question now. Sebastian suggests that 10 votes isn't really enough and it's something that can very easily be changed but what does anyone else think in terms of votes made available for future contests and challenges?

Please No! It is already hard enough to keep 50 stories straight in my head without shuffling them up every time I access them. EDIT: I just read Febs new solution that gives us an option, and that sound OK to me

Since Febs is a genious, perhaps there is a way for each member to have a different (but static) sort? That would solve the unequal reads problem without the side effect of causing a new source of confusion for readers.

If I have not already caused anough trouble, it would also be nice if we could have a few characters on the line with each story so that readers can make a note to themselves to help them remember or keep track of the stories they have read. For example I might put something as simple as a + next to the stories I want to go back and re-read.

Well, with 50 stories, it's going to be VERY difficult to allocate votes fairly. It would be possible to find more than ten stories you like, but just don't have enough votes to cover them.

Perhaps the number of votes available to each person should depend on the the number of entries?

I can see for myself as a potential reader of the contest entries that something like this would be useful. I am currently investigating whether some form of personal story rating could be added .. it has major implications for the way the contest software was written though so I can't promise it will be possible but will certainly look into it.

I always like a bottom up: so that is the way I am working. Some of the icons seemed to be missing earlier today but all is now fine. More votes would be helpful but it might need a lot (eg. a multiple of five -to record excellent thru' to awful). Super exercise, many thanks

I really can't see the point of competition in these circumstances.
For me the challenge is to write a story that I enjoy writing to a theme that I hadn't thought of myself. I only do it for the challenge and my own satisfaction, and hopefully it gives others enjoyment.
I also think that personal preferences enter massively into it; for my part I don't read and if possible don't even open stories that I know will involve children, although I don't mind passing references to incidents that occurred in the past when such events were socially acceptable and legal.
Although I would continue writing to themes and also chain stories, which used to be great fun on Alex's Flaming Cheeks, the idea of winning a competition means little to me.
Incidentally I won one of the categories in a recent SSC competition, and although I obviously enjoyed winning, I didn't enter for those reasons.
I certainly would never publicly rank the writing of anybody who has made the effort of writing as poor.
I think we should all remember that we are judging very subjectively, and in this genre we all find different themes more interesting than others, and may even find some a complete turn-off.
I also don't think that I'm qualified to judge these entries on their literary merit, which would be objective.
Even a judgement on how imaginative the effort was would be highly subjective.
Some of the stories I most enjoyed writing aren't my most popular, and I am pretty sure that I know which buttons to hit if I wanted to court popularity.
I would prefer comments to votes, it is after all a bit of fun and a personal and hopefully enjoyable challenge to dream up a response to the subject set.
These are I must emphasise are my own personal views.

You must be using Internet Explorer then .. when there are many small graphics on a page which are all the same it may fail to display them correctly. Suggest using a better web browser such as Firefox or Chrome which don't have this problem (nor many of the other problems associated with IE).