As far as I know when I browse a catagory or search a generic term and sort by rating i get the stories with the most likes. This usually ends up being a popular story with multiple authors and a whole bunch of chapters. It has lots of good chapters, some boring ones and some really bad ones. But what if i want to find a story that may not have many chapters, but eachone is gold. These stories would end up at the top if I sorted could sort by "total likes"/"total chapters". I don't want to get rid of the current way sort by ratings works. Just add another sort option. And there has to be a better name than "likes per chapter" any ideas?
I would call it "Average Likes per chapter." though this isn't calculated at the moment. Single chapter stories with a promising idea could get pushed by that as they sometimes get a lot more Likes than deeper chapters, though I think that wouldn't be a problem since it would be more likely that someone finds that idea to continue.
It also would push the rewarding of QUALITY over Quantity something that's far overdue and would at last strike a blow against those abominable 'build a bot' stories...
I have no idea as to how websites preform searchs so apologies in advance for getting this wrong. The server would get the results for the search. Then generate the value of average likes (total likes/total chapters). And finaly, sort the results. Alternatively there could be a new (probably hidden) stat of average likes that would have to be updated everytime someone adds or likes a chapter. But then it would be pretty much the same as sorting by chapter depth or rating.
I actually don't get the question about implementing... Obviously, there would be another sorting option for the search page. The value "average likes per chapter" should be precalculated to let the database do the sorting. You don't load a thousand data sets to sort and discard 990 of them. Exactly. I think the story data set has already fields for "number of chapters" and "number of likes". So another one "average likes per chapter" would be necessary. This new stat should be updated regularly, maybe every hour or day. (Maybe it would also be possible to calculate the new number each time a chapter get added or a chapter get liked.) If you sort the stories by rating, the story which is currently on 5 has an average of 14.6 Likes per chapter while number 3 has an average of 10.2 Likes per chapter. So it is definitely not the same.
