So I was talking with another user and we both agreed that we don't like how the site gets so many 1 chapter stories that are never worked on. It floods the site and probably dissuades some new users. So I was thinking that you could implement a minimum chapter count and/or word count to get a story approved.
Check below your post in the new posts queue and there's a thread entitled 'minimum word count' discussing this exact question that I think summarizes fairly well how a minimum chapter count would just make things more difficult. According to the moderator in that thread, stories are already not approved if they're not above a certain word count which perhaps could be a little higher but I personally don't think it needs to be. More freedom to attract authors is better in my mind than restrictions that just make it difficult for new people to join the site. You can just skip the over newer stories if it bothers you instead focus on older ones that are updated more regularly. I do agree that it should be easier to find stories that have a lot of recent activity over older more abandoned ones aside from story of the week and I think tackling your problem from this direction would be better. Perhaps there could be some kind of special section where a group of stories that got a lot of updates recently can be placed.
You may wish to consider the Recently Updated section on the home page. Right now, there are only two one-chapter stubs on it, and obviously they won't ever show up on it again until they get more chapters. The same effect can be achieved by sorting by Last Activity in Search.
