Or unfinished or any other ways of saying that story is incomplete and has been left hanging for YEARS, so people don't waste their time on that abandoned mess. Maybe automatically or manually add any stories that haven't been updated in a year to this category. Or maybe make private stories that have been left unfinished go public so we can finish it.
You might consider this thread, if you've been hoping to adopt author status of an older story: https://forum.chyoa.com/threads/the-new-adopt-a-story-program.172/page-48 As for unfinished stories, I would say finished stories are really a distinct rarity since many stories tend to be collections or otherwise have a lot of space for branches, encouraging a theoretically endless amount of content.
Who should be in charge of setting this tag? Isn't unfinished a little vague as distinction on a site where actually 99.99% of stories are in progress? And even if a story has been neglected for years, couldn't it be perfectly enjoyable for the part that has been published? By private you mean moderated? I think you can always ask to adopt he one you want and finish it by yourself. Don't get me wrong, I understand the frustration of finding a nice story and notice only later that it stops abruptly and hasn't been updated in months or years, but that's just it. I think the story database has grown huge in course of years and I guess at least half of them are unfinished in the way you meant it. This is just the nature of Chyoa.
An abandoned tag for stories that haven't seen any updates or new chapters in a year or more would be quite appropriate.
Do you often stumble upon stories from years ago that aren't unfinished? It would also be rather rude to target private stories. The author has explicitly wished for their story to be left alone. Nobody else has a right to their work. An alternative is what editthis did. It was called The Pit, and years-old stories that had ten or fewer chapters were sent there to be claimed by anyone. That's a bit less... authoritarian, and achieves roughly the same goal.
When searching for stories, you can sort by "Last Activity" so you would get the active stories first.
It is unnecessary. Inactive stories go down naturally. What we do need - search filter for the last activity because sortingby activity isn't enough.
I stopped Quoting there simply because I dislike the pairing of the last 2 words. I for one would perhaps like to see some way of pointing out a story (I am admittedly unsure how to select it, or how often to change the selection) that hasn't been updated in a while, so a new member (or a veteran; anyone, really) might be inspired to look at it & change that fact.
