I noticed recently that certain stories on here have disabled anonymous ratings...  is this a new thing? I’m assuming its a beta thing that’s been kept quiet. Interesting.

Hmm I've never seen this. Are you sure it wasn't just a fiction you haven't read? (Ratings are always blocked unless you read at least one chapter.)

Some stories have it and are quite upfront about mentioning it. To rate you have to write a review. Though maybe upvoting an existing review might work as well in terms of registering your opinion...

Preventing anonymous reviews seems like a pretty stupid idea. 

I wonder how this - if at all - is taken into account for the Trending algorithm. Before I hit trending last night my story hadn't gotten anything lower than a 4 in 30+ ratings and this morning I woke up to several sub-2 lol. :P

Most likely troll ratings do happen a lot when you hit trending. However, I think you should get more positive ratings then troll ones in the long run if your novel is good enough.

Shadowmail Wrote: Most likely troll ratings do happen a lot when you hit trending. However, I think you should get more positive ratings then troll ones in the long run if your novel is good enough.

I think you're mostly right, but this kind of thing ensures that the 'best rated' section is likely to see little change. And I have a feeling a lot of troll ratings are from authors who think sabotaging the work of others may give their book a better shot of moving up, which is a fair idea since no one is really sure how the algorithm works. Just thought it was interesting lol.

AGUX Wrote:

Shadowmail Wrote: Most likely troll ratings do happen a lot when you hit trending. However, I think you should get more positive ratings then troll ones in the long run if your novel is good enough.

I think you're mostly right, but this kind of thing ensures that the 'best rated' section is likely to see little change. And I have a feeling a lot of troll ratings are from authors who think sabotaging the work of others may give their book a better shot of moving up, which is a fair idea since no one is really sure how the algorithm works. Just thought it was interesting lol.

I think you're mostly right about trolls and bots. But the admins seem to have a done a good job in tweaking the algorithm to allow some newer fictions to get on the 'best rated' section. 


If you look at it, several stories there are not that old. 3 of the Top 5 are about 3 months old or less. Didn't bother checking the precise ages of the rest of the list, but there seem to be plenty of stories there that are not that old. I'd guess more than half of the first page are less than a year old. Some less than a month. Given that this site has a number of stories from over 5 years, it's actually arguably a little too skewed towards newer fictions.

readerbreather Wrote: I noticed recently that certain stories on here have disabled anonymous ratings...  is this a new thing? I’m assuming its a beta thing that’s been kept quiet. Interesting.

It's a few months old. There's been a great deal of talk about it on the discord.

It is in closed beta, yes.

Ramingo Wrote: Preventing anonymous reviews seems like a pretty stupid idea. 

Anonymous reviews are already impossible.

SJ Wrote: It's a few months old. There's been a great deal of talk about it on the discord.

Unfortunately I wasn’t on this site in the olden days where discord was available to all