Encouraging Reviews

[EstabanBacca]

The reviewing format on this site, coupled with the forum threads, offers writers more feedback than that of any site I've visited. It is comparatively user friendly.

I personally do not care for a 1-10 rating system. Those little stars are often misleading and readers would be better off without them. Author's shouldn't miss them as they are totally unenlightening.Get rid of the fucking things! The written reviews and the author's ability to respond are all that is necessary. Use those stars for rating restaurants ( where again even with five stars you may often find yourself served flat fare at a fat price.)

As to obtaining more reader response...my own thought is that an author's best chance of provoking the reader lies with the story he or she writes.

[boccaccio2000g]

The reviewing format on this site, coupled with the forum threads, offers writers more feedback than that of any site I've visited. It is comparatively user friendly. I personally do not care for a 1-10 rating system. Those little stars are often misleading and readers would be better off without them.

With all respect, I strongly disagree. Maybe it's my unsophisticated baseball card mentality, but I think the stars provide a useful, easily understood shorthand. One or two "votes" can be misleading, but if a story has half a dozen or more recent reviews, I almost never find myself grading a story more than two points above or below the average score. I think the consensus of reviewers here, on the whole, is usually quite accurate -- and is better now ( the last year or two) than it has ever been. Oddly, some of the stories whose reviews I tend to disagree with most are stories that have been around for quite a while (including one or two of the all-time 'faves'). I think that the grading standards have risen appreciably (and that's a good thing) since Jinn added the 'captions' * that accompany the 1-10 scores on the reviewing page a year and a half of two years ago.

* Marcus' suggestion, as I recall.

Boccaccio