Two statistics I would really like to see/sort by when searching for stories: Percentage of non-dead-end chapters. Percentage of chapters with more than one choice. These two, combined with chapter depth, would give you a better grasp of the breadth of choice in any given story, or a general idea of the state of completion established threads might be in.
Problem I see is how exactly do you define a "Dead End"? Some threads just have a natural end point or a writer may take them as far as they want to and not come back to them. How do you mark them out from each other. I get the thinking behind it, there are some stories that are 99% one chapter threads. Maybe a better thing to know would be the average thread length.
I think Liz has the right idea. I'm all in favor of a place to display more story stats, mostly just for fun rather than practical or sorting reasons, but the stats should make sense without too much jargon or potential for 'abuse', or weirdness, if the stat is seen as desirable. Number of threads, average words per thread, these things make sense and might have a piece of that practical or sorting value you guys are getting at.
More stats for stories are fine, but where do you put them? Who can view them writers? readers? Which stats to show and which not to reveal? Stats or common sense which is the greater?
1) A separate page, linked to by the story sidebar most likely. 2) Everybody. 3) All stats available would be available. 4) Not sure I understand. Common sense, I guess? The stats would be mostly for fun... Like stats in GTA or whatever videogame. Maybe, sometimes, for practical reasons, as talked about here. But overall... At some point people will just have to open a story and read it. Can't preview everything with numbers or whatever.
I dislike these ideas: the perception of most readers is that more choices is better, but that's not strictly accurate. Look at the top story on the site right now: 90% linear, just a few branches, each by a different author and themselves linear after that. If the number of branches were displayed a lot of readers would have ignored that story, but they weren't: so it stood out for it's ever increasing depth, which to my mind is more important. No matter how many branches you have per chapter: if 90% of them are placeholders or super short "Character Choices" chapters that you only developed three or four of, the story isn't worth reading. Better to keep things to depth, rather than breadth: because breadth is to prone to abuse. (However, I admit; this would be somewhat ameliorated by also including average thread depths, as this would encourage authors of those "custom order robot" stories, [and others with a lot of 'options' leading nowhere,] to flesh out more of the branches. A lot would also depend on how the "average" was decided. Total the depth of all non-continued chapters and divide by the number of such chapters? Chose the depth among such chapters which occurred most often? Find the difference between the highest and lowest such chapter number and divide in half? The one of these I think is best, [In terms of accuracy,] also puts the most strain on our server...)
Depth and breadth are equally important imho. Deep stories are available by the millions on Literotica. Choice is what makes these stories different and although it may be a statistic prone to abuse it is also the most unique trait of stories on this site.
Although this kind of thing would be handy for the ENF stories that are nothing but a huge number of first chapter with maybe one thread that is three deep.
