Top Chapters: Determination of Top Chapters based on recent popularity

No one's adverse to this much. A little more dynamicity in what we promote on the front page would be dynamite. The question is how do we apply this to Top Chapters, and the minor tangent was the question of "What's the point of top chapters?"

For the rest of your post, I'm inclined to side with TheDespaxas. A per category designation isn't a bad thought, but only so long as every category is represented at the same time.

The purpose of any website's front page is get a broad view of a website and its changes. The stasis of the Top Lists and Notable Writers is the biggest hindrance to this, not their presence. And narrowing the scope of the front page is exactly what we don't need.

 

I think that would still have the problem of being static.

I am trying to think of a way to do it that can be automated so that it can just be set and forget it.

Maybe have top ten lists for each category, that could be hidden from view, and then take two from 5 of them each week and show those in the list and each day you switch out the current two for another two from their respective top tens.

That way you have a list that changes every day of the week and you highlight a lot of chapters in one go.

I don't know how the site is put together behind the scenes so maybe that is complex to do but I would imagine forming the lists would be easy enough and then having it refresh once every twenty four hours would be pretty easy as well. Use a flag to let you know if a chapter has been shown this week. Once you come to the end of a week you simply switch out the five you have just used for five more and repeat. On the list level maybe using a counter that will be used to find the lists that have been shown the fewest times.

Of course I still think having a monthly list is a good idea.

 

People do not like to scroll. We are stupid and don't care to do so.
This is an unwritten rule of web design. Any changes toward should go up top either above the search engine or below the search engine. If it is below the right hand side seems the obvious choice. The option when logged in of seeing ones chapter and stories could be the top stories with a drop down menu. We already have a drop down menus so it would seem the obvious choice to go.

 

having a drop-down menu would require another action and doesn't highlight the chapters/stories anymore. It would be like having another search option.


Just a vague idea to determine Top Chapters.
I could imagine using "likes", "views" and "chapter depth position" (could be used to compensate that chapters deeper in the story more likely get fewer likes/views, or get them in a greater period of time.)
The calculated value could be reduced by a percentage each "week" before adding the new likes and views and calculating the new value.

 

A random story once a day or week becomes the story of the week. That way it ends the biasness and goes wild. Makes it harder for anyone to get a second chance.

 

This sounds like a really cool idea
I believe that at the moment we have around 27 different categories.
If the list were to rotate weekly, every category would be featured around two weeks each year.
If it were to rotate daily, then each category would be seen once a month.

 

So "Random Story of the Week"? This would mean that even "crappy", single line stories could become Story of the Week. If this happens, I think it wouldn't be much interesting for users to check the list.

I think a slow deflation of recent values with addition of new values (like implied above) could result in a more balanced determination of Top Content (though I'm currently not sure if this is realizable)

 

2 Weeks a year seems fair, would make it at least seem mostly fresh and draw attenstion to under used story types.

 

I agree with recent thoughts on this topic.

I don't mind if the same quality stories are featured more often, and there should be a way to keep low-effort (shit) stories from being featured. But there should be some manner of rotation. Going by categories is a good start. That is one way of keeping more variety in the featured stories - garnering more interest in the top stories/chapter categories among site veterans (and I use that term to mean anyone that's visited CHYOA more than eight or so times in a year, at which point the current top story ranking becomes next to useless), and is more fair in the sense that currently it's hard to dismount a featured story (due to the intrinsic nature of featured stories getting more hits) unless a new story has 'mass appeal', in which case it then is allowed the benefit of also being always featured.