LSF short story challenge

Well, many of us may not yet have finished reading all the stories and voting on them, which might account for some entries seeming "neglected" at this point.

Two Challenge stories have the exact same *Frosted* title (rather predictably given the theme), two of them have title characters with the same feminine name, only five have titles which clearly indicate that they involve spanking.

"Now to start actually reading them and casting my votes..." --C.K.

My own personal opinion . How about increasing the time for reading the contest stories by one additional week.

Right. So maybe they're not actually spanking stories. Better skip those five.

So on a spanking forum, it's expected that stories should have names that clearly indicate they contain spanking? Or there are numerous readers who skip the stories that have titles that don't contain spanking?? Why?

I have noticed in the past that the number of people who've read different stories varies very considerably, which obviously disadvantages some stories (if you take the voting and marks seriously). Between my own stories on the same challenge I've noticed a considerable variation and it's not always easy to explain, though I suspect a short story with an overtly sexy (for spanking types) title will get more readers thana rather long one with a less obvious title.

It would be nice to think that giving an extra week would result in a lot more readers completing their reading, but I have my doubts. I think some readers just decide they'll read and vote on some stories but not all.

One thing has puzzled me, and I think it happened in a recent previous challenge. I was looking at the number of votes cast and it was bumping along fairly slowly and then suddenly shot up a few days ago. The voting seems to be recorded immediately and certainly when someone enters a score it's recorded and the system doesn't wait till they've made all their votes. Are there masses of readers who didn't get started on the thing till recently, then rushed into it? Or are there meticulous people who are noting down provisional scores without entering them till they feel confident to do so, though a vote entered can be changed? The second explanation seems unlikely.

Currently, the most viewed challenge entry has 184 views and the least viewed has only 77.


There's usually a request for the voting period to be extended on challenges but by the final week of the voting period the Activity page shows that virtually no-one is reading or voting any more.

That much of a gap is ridiculous. The story with only 77 views may very well be the better one, but is almost sure to receive less votes simply because it has over a hundred fewer readers. I feel that if I read and vote on one entry, it is only fair to read and vote on all of them.

What we have to remember is that the Challenges are for fun. We shouldn't get too caught up in the results.

I did read and vote on all of the entries over a period of several days. I am glad that I did since there were some real gems among the 47 stories, and I might have easily missed those if I had focused on just the entries' titles. I tended to read the shorter stories first and the longer ones later, but based upon the hard work the authors put into their entries, I didn't want to skip any of them.

It is a shame that there is such a discrepancy between the number of views the stories are receiving. I'm not sure how the final ranking of the entries is handled, but if it's based upon the total number of votes each story receives, the ones with the lowest readership will obviously be disadvantaged compared to those that receive the most views. If the ranking is done by dividing the number of votes a story receives by the number of times it has been viewed, it seems like the advantage of having lots of views would tend to go away.

I agree with FIBlue. If you can't manage to read all the stories, at least to skim or sample them. I don't think you should vote. If you do, then the story you think is pretty weak will still get more votes than the one you'd have liked if you'd managed to glance at it.

I like the idea of rating stories by their average vote. But I agree: for all sorts of reasons, the results shouldn't be taken too seriously.

Bingo!

Also, I feel that writing a good title for our stories is a legitimate part of the challenge. A good story with a great title should score better than the same story with an uninspired title. That said, I think we can all agree that the world's most clever title won't (and shouldn't ) make a winner out of a poor story.

Besides the attraction (or not) of the title, I can think of at least two other reasons for a discrepancy between views. 1) A story's position in the list, because people just naturally start at the top, and 2) some people might avoid longer stories. Personally, I work to keep mine under 5 thousand words.

Most importantly (and not to be redundant):

And just in case anyone missed it:

For me, the best way to improve the challenge is simply to vote for my story, as early and often as possible, and to give all the other stories scores of zero, or less. I realize all the other authors will be heartbroken, but as I said, FOR ME, this is the only solution. My story is very worthy of your praise; it is exceptionally well written, has a great title, and has a spanking in almost* every sentence. The name of it is . . . Hey, Ms. Thrashbottom, what are you doing here, and why do you have that paddle in your hand, HEYYYYY, NO, WAIT!

* Your definition and my definition of "almost" may differ. Past performance is no guarantee of future earnings. Your mileage may vary. The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.