Forum: Author Hangout

Story Mining?

Uther Pendragon 🚫

With 227 stories on-site currently, I'm used to having more than half having no downloads in any current week.
Even were I a much more popular author, Some of those stories would come up empty in any given week.
This week, though, every one of those stories has at least one download, and 199 -- a suspicious number in and of itself -- have had at least 2.
Back when my chief posting ground was ASSTR, we were often visited by people who downloaded all of our stories to use elsewhere, nd this looks much like that.
If you have many stores on the s9te, will you checl and see whether you have equally suspicious records in "story stats"?

Replies: PotomacBob Switch Blayde Akarge Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

PotomacBob 🚫

@Uther Pendragon

Does reading a story on-screen count as a "download"? If you look at the story on-screen - but don't read it - does that count as a download?

Replies: Uther_Pendragon madnige

Uther_Pendragon 🚫

@PotomacBob

Does reading a story on-screen count as a "download"? If you look at the story on-screen - but don't read it - does that count as a download?

I think so. I don't see hoe that applies to my concern.

Replies: PotomacBob

PotomacBob 🚫

@Uther_Pendragon

I think so. I don't see hoe that applies to my concern.

It could account for some of the "downloads" that appear to be your concern - unless I'm misreading it.

Replies: Uther_Pendragon

Uther_Pendragon 🚫

@PotomacBob

It could account for some of the "downloads" that appear to be your concern - unless I'm misreading it.

If a large number of people were downloading, or even reading on-line, one or a few stories apiece, then the distribution would look entirely different.
I'm sorry; that is obvious to anybody with the slightest knowledge f mathematics beyond the grade-school level. I should have been more explicit.
Are you assuming that one person looked at all my stories on-screen this lat week? That would have to be a speed-reader with one hell of a lot of time.

Let me belabor the obvious. if 10 People downloaded 27 stories apiece at random, each of them would leave 200 stories untouched. doing it 27 times would leave(200/227)^27 -- something like 44 stories without a download. Since there are only a few ways -- starting from the largest, the smallest, the most recent, the highest coring, there would be far more stories without any downloads. So, the pattern shows two peope taking all my stories, one of them working incompletely.

Replies: Remus2

Remus2 🚫

@Uther_Pendragon

I would agree it sounds fishy. Not really sure what anyone could do about though.

madnige 🚫
Updated:

@PotomacBob

Does reading a story on-screen count as a "download"?

Yes - from one chapter to the whole thing. In fact, if you're visiting more than one chapter, it could count for two (or more) downloads, if the download accounting period(s) expires between the visits - and note that the author accounting periods are likely fixed times, whereas the reader accounting periods have a variable start time based on the reader login time.

If you look at the story on-screen - but don't read it - does that count as a download?

Yes - even if you just look at the chapter index and don't visit any chapters, that counts as a download to the reader (not sure if it's counted for the author). The only story-linked page I know of that doesn't count as a download is the 'More Info' link found in the RSS feeds and in premier member's listings.

ETA: It's more correctly called story scraping rather than mining, unless whoever is getting 'behind the scenes' to extract stuff directly from the databases (in which case it wouldn't show as a download)

Switch Blayde 🚫

@Uther Pendragon

I have 37 stories. All 37 have downloads for the week.

The range is: most is 2,148 and the fewest is 5. I don't see anything unusual in the counts.

Akarge 🚫
Updated:

@Uther Pendragon

I have 25 stories. Two are multi chapter and i think each chapter gets counted separately. My story score average in the sixes, so decent, but not great.

My week counts range from 26 to 928 (new last week) total for all stories 4420. I suspect my recent new stories inspired a few new readers to check me out.

My guess is that people that have already read your stuff either like them and have already read them all, or don't like them and don't read any new ones.

Just guessing.

Replies: Mushroom

Mushroom 🚫

@Akarge

I have 25 stories. Two are multi chapter ant i think each chapter gets counted separately. My story score average in the sixes, so decent, but not great.

I for one never really count the "scores" as meaning much. But I do look at downloads. But more as a guide than anything else.

And by sorting by score or downloads, then it can become strange. Lower rated stories getting more downloads than higher rated stories. I look at my top 10 downloaded, and it is very different from my 10 highest rated. Some of my highest rated are barely in the "Top 20" in downloads.

And this likely starts to happen because of tags. Some tags tend to just gain more downloads than others. 8 out of 10 of my top downloads all have "Female Teen" as a tag. Also 8 out of 10 have "Oriental Female". 8 of 10 also have some form of "Lesbian" tag.

Now these are not the same 8, of course. But each of the top 10 has at least 1 or more of those. But then again, I have the strange case of one I posted over 17 years ago, that has not even accumulated enough votes to display a score (despite having over 1,500 downloads).

So in short, I have long ago given up making any kind of sense to most of the numbers in here.

Replies: Pixy

Pixy 🚫

@Mushroom

But then again, I have the strange case of one I posted over 17 years ago, that has not even accumulated enough votes to display a score (despite having over 1,500 downloads).

Not that strange, I have 2, one posted in 2003-04-21, 1636 downloads and 7 votes (6.20 score). The other posted two months after...

Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

@Uther Pendragon

ou have many stores on the s9te, will you checl and see whether you have equally suspicious records in "story stats"?

There are constantly people trying to download everything on the site. Some are more industrious than others.

The site has a system to detect these, but if they go slow enough, it might be impossible to distinguish their behaviour from normal site access.

I guess yesterday they went through your stories.

One time I had somebody create five paid accounts (probably stolen credit card) in order to download faster.

That's par for the course on most websites, been going on for as long as the site has existed. Other sites like asstr or lit. show those as normal accesses and it inflates the number of reads from those sites and generally, it's good for the site because it makes authors happy that their numbers are up.

Replies: Uther Pendragon

Uther Pendragon 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

That's par for the course on most websites, been going on for as long as the site has existed. Other sites like asstr or lit. show those as normal accesses and it inflates the number of reads from those sites and generally, it's good for the site because it makes authors happy that their numbers are up.

I got used to that on ASSTR. I had one file on the site which an actual reader could onlyaccess by clicking on a button on my stories which said, "write Uther." That file had at lest one download a week, although I didn't anything like that many comments.
I'm not used to that on SOL.

Reply to topic

Forum: Author Hangout

Story Mining?

WARNING! ADULT CONTENT...