I've in short order made two changes to my account:
Firstly I paid for a premium account
Secondly I've set y theme to dark
the result of these combined changes means I cannot see if a story is premium not.
not sure what's going on but I find the dark theme much easier to read but the lack of differentiation
Having a premier account means you shouldn't care about which story is premier.
If you need a list of premier stories, go to 'My Library' and click 'Exclusive' in the left hand column.
go to 'My Library' and click 'Exclusive'
I never knew that existed so I tried it. I think I found an error.
When I got the list, I clicked on the "Score" heading to sort by score (highest first). The first 23 stories had dashes in the "Vote" and "Score" columns. The 24th had votes and a score, but then the 25th story had the dashes again. And then the 28th story had blanks in the two fields.
What's the difference between a story with a dash and one with a blank in those columns? And why would stories with scores show up in the middle of them? And why would a story with no score be listed at the top when sorting highest score first?
And then it gets more confusing.
When I click on "Score" again to reverse the sort (lowest first), the first 66 stories have blanks in those fields. The next 2 have dashes. Then 2 with low scores and then more stories with dashes.
So:
1. What's the difference between a dash and a blank?
2. Sorting by either high-to-low or low-to-high both begin with the stories with dashes or blanks. How can that be? A blank (or dash) should either be high or low. In my opinion, if it's no score it should be the lowest.
3. Why are there stories with scores in the middle of stories with dashes/blanks?
There's a minimum number of votes that have to be made before the score is displayed, but the calculation is started with the first vote.
Can't remember which gets the dash and which gets the blank, but one designates voting is on and the magic number for display has not yet been reached while the other shows there are not votes or the author has turned voting off. Click on the 'score' to toggled between rising and ascending and see which has a high score first to work it out.
Of course, then there's the question as to what votes a story may have acquired prior to the writer turning voting off...
There's a minimum number of votes that have to be made before the score is displayed, but the calculation is started with the first vote.
So the first 23 highest scored stories didn't have enough votes to display the score? They should not be listed first when sorting highest to lowest.
Imagine an author posting a story, giving himself a 10, and then turning voting off. He'd be at the top of the list. Or even if he didn't turn voting off, but no one else scored it.
So the first 23 highest scored stories didn't have enough votes to display the score? They should not be listed first when sorting highest to lowest.
When you choose to have the stories sorted by descending order of the score the stories with the highest scores are listed first as even scores not displayed are known to the system compiling the list.
Imagine an author posting a story, giving himself a 10, and then turning voting off. He'd be at the top of the list. Or even if he didn't turn voting off, but no one else scored it.
It's my understanding of how the system works that when you turn off scoring all of the votes and scores to date are eliminated. However, if they are or aren't eliminated the value in the score column is changed to zero. Thus turning the score off gives you an automatic value of zero.
It's my understanding of how the system works that when you turn off scoring all of the votes and scores to date are eliminated.
I believe that isn't the case. Being too stupid to operate the uploading wizard properly, I accidentally switched on scoring right at the start of a serial although I intended for it to be switched off. By the time I managed to switch scoring off, a number of readers had already submitted votes. When the serial reached the appropriate point I switched scoring back on and the initial votes were reinstated.
AJ
Imagine an author posting a story, giving himself a 10, and then turning voting off. He'd be at the top of the list
If voting is turned off, then the story won't show up at all when you sort by score.
The difference between hidden score and forbidden voting is that stories with voting turned off by the author don't have anything in votes and score columns, while stories with hidden score because of lack of enough votes has dashes.
But keep in mind that the 'Exclusives' list is not about authors who try to manipulate the system, so whether they turned off voting or not doesn't matter.
But keep in mind that the 'Exclusives' list is not about authors who try to manipulate the system, so whether they turned off voting or not doesn't matter.
I was looking at it as a reader, not an author.
It was the first time I looked at "Exclusives" and sorted by score (highest to lowest). The first 23 stories didn't have a score. That confused me.
If voting is turned off, then the story won't show up at all when you sort by score.
The difference between hidden score and forbidden voting is that stories with voting turned off by the author don't have anything in votes and score columns, while stories with hidden score because of lack of enough votes has dashes.
That's an approach that doesn't fit well with the actual results when sorting from highest to lowest score. I never used the Exclusives list but I gave it a try and sorted from highest score down. The first dozens of results all have a dash, meaning not enough votes. Not what I expected when I specifically want to to see the highest scores first.
1: When sorting high-low I want to see the highest scores, real scores, not a dash which means nothing to me. (That goes for any list when sorted on score.)
2: Most are (very) old stories that are not likely to get enough votes to ever show up meaning they will remain at the top of the list where they don't 'deserve' to be.
3: Having not enough votes doesn't qualify for a score to show so it should not qualify (yet) for a score ranking.
The results do make me wonder HOW those old stories apparently got a few high scores but not enough of them to be displayed. That is, assuming that the few scores there are cause the high ranking. If that is not the case it's a bug in the sorting.
So I did another test. Went to Advanced Search and selected sorting on score, descending. Nothing else, and clicked search. A perfect list starting with the highest score, without any dashes, at least not on the first 40(!) pages :D
That is the result I would expect for the results of the Exclusives list and what some of us has confused about the results.
That is the result I would expect for the results of the Exclusives list and what some of us has confused about the results.
That was what I meant.
If voting is turned off, the story is excluded from many of the features in SOL. I believe the Category Search is one of them. Probably the Advanced Search as well. It won't ever show up. But that doesn't seem to apply to the Exclusives.
That is the result I would expect for the results of the Exclusives list and what some of us has confused about the results.
I updated the exclusive stories list to show only stories with enough votes to show score if the selected sorting is by score.
I updated the exclusive stories list to show only stories with enough votes to show score if the selected sorting is by score.
Thank you!
You forget, scores are only displayed after there are enough votes... but they can certainly be calculated prior to being displayed.
So, a story with 3 votes would have a (tentative) score based on the median score (the high and low being eliminated) and so on.
As for the difference between a blank and a dash.... one has enough votes, but not once the high/low ones are eliminated, and the other has fewer? It seems plausible.