About the story challenge

That was my calculation exactly - and most of it seemed to come either in the first week, or the past couple days. I happened to use fewer votes (so I could more distance between what I considered to be the top few stories), but readers/voters may have used more.

A quick SQL query of the votes database table reveals that at present 146 people have voted. Not every person who voted bothered to vote on all the entries and some only voted for one or two.

That's always going to be the case, to some degree. I would be disappointed, though, if too many people voted on some stories without even having read most of the others. I'll be the first to admit that, self-promoter that I am, I rated my own story highly, not simply because it's my own story, but because I happen to like my own writing. But I read every single story in the contest and conscientiously tried to rate every other story relative to how well I thought it was written.

This is a suggestion very late in the process, but is it possible to calculate a story's score as an average of the times it was actually read? For example, if only 125 of 146 voters actually read a story, and those 125 voters gave it 500 total votes, could the score be 500/125, or 4. In other words, a story's score is the average score given to it my the people who actually read it. That way, an author would lose in the ranking simply because fewer people read his/her story? I would understand, of course, if this sort of scoring system is too difficult to implement at the last minute.

That won't be possible and the logic is also flawed in many respects .. for example a story that was only read once but given 10 votes would win and this would also favour authors who vote for themselves but no-one else. In general if there was to be any weighting (and I've definitely no plans to do it) the opposite approach would surely be better in that stories which have had more reads will have an average score which is more accurate purely on the basis of a much increased sample size.

On the impossibility of it, I certainly defer to you. It was merely a suggestion. I'm not so sure the logic is flawed. I think it would fix one possible problem with the voting (where some readers/voters simply did not get through all the entries). I agree that it absolutely wouldn't address a situation where (with or without reading other stories) a reader/voter gives one or more stories a '10' while not voting for others. The bottom line, though, is that impossible is impossible. I'll just trust that everyone (other than me, of course) will try to rate the stories fairly. Thanks, Februs, for looking at my suggestion.

I guess that's not surprising but still the format is the best you are likely to come up with. People probably start to read some stories then get distracted and don't finish but at least with the star system they can do a vote as they read and don't have to make comparisons as before.

It's all those danged comments you write - which, in my humble opinion, gives you the excuse to take as long as you need.

You know after thinking it over I had a thought about what njrick said. In a way a story's batting average is more revealing than sheer number of votes. Of course like batting averages you have to have a threshold sample before it is valid which is what Februs said. This will be an interesting stat when all the voting is done. Just divide number of vote points by number of reads. I presume that we will know this when the results are in. I think all of us would be interested in knowing how readers scored us on average. Number of reads definitely has an effect on the final result which once again poses that age old question--why do readers pick one story to the exclusion of another?

Well, the only response that makes sense is that they're attracted to or intrigued by the title, given that they don't know whom the author is--at least not until they've read it, or part of it at any rate, at which point in some cases they might identify a particular writing style.

I did cast at least four votes for every story since it took effort to write each one even if some of them weren't particularly appealing to me. Quite a few of them were very cleverly done with nice plot 'twists' that I enjoyed--which AFAIC is a good way to work a 500-word story since both description and characterization are necessarily going to be somewhat limited.

This is a much better voting method IMHO, I feel more gratified at being able to give every story some votes rather than having only ten to divide up between maybe five entries--which meant not being able to give a few stories I enjoyed even a single point.

Obviously, it would be ideal if every participating voter could read every story... --C.K.