Just a thing I noticed. Lots of very short first chapters ending with: Please add to the story. While we sometimes can't even guess what the story is about from what is already there. So please, either write multiple chapters before publishing or make her first one enough that people can guess what the story is about, especially if you want other people to contribute. That was just a short rant of mine.
There's also the stories with tons of placeholder pages, especially celebrity names from what I've seen. Disappointing that someone can get a dozen likes from doing that while my actual writing for hours gets one or two.
I Counted that on (https://chyoa.com/story/Permanently-Naked-Ladies.9786) Out of 450 chapters more than 300 are first chapters with just a choice of characters and the rest of the chapters are gathered on about a dozen threads.
I agree with you TheDespaxas a few chapters to get into the mood would do then some junky one chapter and done. It takes away from the true authors of the site while awarding a simple one chapter story that lacks anything to grab hold of.
A lot of chapters are submitted by that one guy, "Matthew Twihard", a guy that doesn't actually write but just spams suggestions. Even worse, like I've put in the CHYOA suggestions before, he artificially raises his "Likes" by liking all of his chapters, which can be seen in his activity feed. This guy literally just unloads in these ENF stories and doesn't stop. The first time I had to cleanse his 50 or so chapters of random celebrities (I literally had to go through each one and manually delete it), there were even a few that were underage, like 14 or 16 years old. I told him to cut that out, but I'm just an editor for the story, not the actual owner. I gave up writing for those ENF stories, it's just disheartening to see the quality stoop so low. I've got one more loose end for one of the stories that I need to tie up before letting that ship sail. The owner of the story is okay with all the chapter spam because it increases exposure and gives more time on the front page. feelsbadman
I was wondering about that. I get a little annoyed when I see the ENF stories, cause that one person seems to have a monopoly on them. I know he doesn't really, but his are the stories that pop up the most, and I noticed the same trend. Lots of little intro chapters and that's about it. It's disappointing cause it's a kink I really like, but I know 90 percent of those chapters are probably never going to be written. I mean, why even bother writing stories like that? Just for the numbers?
I don't know, I hate that kind of story management though, hundreds of these loose ends with no substance. I'm sure there has to be a real reason for it past the numbers and publicity of spamming chapters. Maybe it motivates some authors when they randomly see that special celebrity name or something; it sparks an idea, causing them to write some smut. As of right now though, it's a whole lot of empty choices. I can't speak for the other ENF writers, but all it did was make me not want to participate in it.
As a reader i'd rather have a story with a dozen threads that have actual content, and appreciate it more than 100+ chapters that have no real content at all.
I dislike ENF, but, ignoring that for the moment, I agree with dingdongs and the others: less style, more substance!
Wow, I have never actually clicked on that story before. Makes me feel a little better about my own number of threads I have on my stories. The tricky thing is that if you put some kind of cap on the number of chapters a story can have would kind of be against the spirit of things. Maybe some kind of "Total Chapter to Total words" ratio so that you could try to clamp down on people just having tons of basically empty chapters.
WHen à story as absolutely no plot if you want to write about a particular celebrity you just add it and actually write something. Having an empty chapter with it doesn't help. One or two earlier threads were fun so I had it as a favorite in case it was updated, but I removed it later to avoid the spam of notifications. There is something to consider, when does it stop being publicity and becomes spam? How many times will a reader see the story had been updated and click on it only to see it is just another empty chapter before they give up on the story? Past a certain point it becomes counterproductive.
Out of curiosity when someone wants to post a story they normally have to wait for approval. How many people actually inspect stories for approval?
The thing is that you can send a story for approval with one chapter, if your story is a hub with various unconnected story lines the first chapter won't contain much of interest. The story could be good and we could have had a few threads each with a different celebrity living ENF shenanigans. But then people (starting by the owner) chose not to write a story but to list dozens and then hundreds of name hoping that someone would write the story for them.
Which I guess is why they can't really do anything about it without it looking draconian. Right now, stories that started out the way you described in your first example can start with no problem and not have to worry about being confused with more spammy stories like the ENF ones. I just started one myself that I hope people will contribute to. I guess all we can do is just live with it. While the ENF stuff is annoying, it's not really hurting anyone, except for taking up spaces on the front page. I think something can and should be done about that.
I'm pretty sure the only requirement for a story being approved is that it's not Blatantly Against The Rules.
Should there be a system where a story goes into pending that it is inspected , so the issue of spam stories doesn't get through? Just a thought.
Even that's not always how it's been done. I know one site moderator confessed back in the days of CHYOO to simply rubber stamping stories, which explains why blatant rule violations had been approved. And I don't mean the little things that can be fixed with simple edits (like an underage but fully physically developed character), I mean full blown "How was it even approved?" violations. One simple example that sticks out: a story subtitled "Wolf Pack Bestiality" and within the first thread featured a non-anthropomorphic wolf raping a human female. So honestly, depending on the day and the moderators on call, I think the only requirement for approval is that you hit "publish." How does one really distinguish a spam story from a good story? Some of these one chapter stories were created by writers who intend to do something with these stories, but either inspiration is lacking at present, they're more inspired by another story, or they have off-site obligations getting in the way. That said, there are some who are simply achievement hunting, padding their numbers, or other such nonsense. How then do we distinguish? Folks like $ajin (who I'm willing to bet none of you know) confessed to its methods and blamed it on being oblivious to the old means around the CHYOO thread cap, and a little inductive reasoning makes Matthew Twihard another non-writer, but what about the rest? The only means of distinguishing between these two types of writers exists in the writers' heads, and we don't yet have the technology to find that evidence. We're stuck waiting for them to provide enough evidence for us to inductively prove it. And even then, such additions are only problems because no one is adding, not because they're unnecessary. The hope of someone else adding something to nothing is always wrong, but what can really be done? Even if we delete it, in all probability we'd have an actual writer add a similar thread right back and then expand upon it, making the deletion a waste of effort.
