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Story Size Variability

awnlee jawking 🚫

It seems management is continuing to tune SOL's story size algorithm.

Yesterday I submitted a revised version of a chapter containing an extra paragraph. The listed story size dropped from 554 to 526. Today my concluding chapter, listed as 18, was submitted. The story size rose to 573.

So if your story sizes are behaving strangely, that's why.

AJ

Replies:   Switch Blayde
Switch Blayde 🚫

@awnlee jawking

SOL's story size algorithm

How can there be a size algorithm? The size of the file in bytes is what it is.

awnlee jawking 🚫

@Switch Blayde

How can there be a size algorithm? The size of the file in bytes is what it is.

I don't know how it works but, as one example, IIRC Lazeez mentioned he was taking action to ensure double-byte characters in eg Chinese didn't count more than single byte characters in English. Since length is an asset, counting towards premier membership, that sort of change sounds fair to me.

AJ

Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)
Updated:

@Switch Blayde

How can there be a size algorithm? The size of the file in bytes is what it is.

Not really.

The file is in UTF-8 and contains html codes. So a story/chapter with lots of short phrases dialogue will bloat quite a bit.

For example:

"What?" should be counted as 7 characters, but if you take just the size reported by the file system, it would be:

< p>'''What?'''< /p> (or 13 characters, so almost double).

I created an a function that strips html tags and then counts non-ascii characters properly as 1 character each instead of 3 for each utf-8 high character.

After I read this thread, I looked and in the admin side there were three instances of story size update that weren't using the new algorithm.

Bug fixed. From now on the size should be consistent after updates. Although, if a story has been updated with the old code due to the bugs, then it might still be inconsistent if it gets updated now. But the inconsistency will be a single occurrence.

Replies:   Vincent Berg
Vincent Berg 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

I created an a function that strips html tags and then counts non-ascii characters properly as 1 character each instead of 3 for each utf-8 high character.

That makes a lot of sense, and while it won't help Awnlee get any closer to Premiere membership (I'd always thought he already had his), it does give a more accurate story size count.

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