Home > Site Issues > Overall rating geatly differs from chapter ratings?

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alle2013
Overall rating geatly differs from chapter ratings?
The story 'Phoenix Eclipse' by Spyridon has 25 chapters. 15 are rated five, and most of the rest rated 4. How can this possibly be rated -1 on an overall basis?

This is the worst example I've seen, but I have noticed it in other stories, as well.

How does one rate an entire story rather than just a single chaper?
Posted at 2011-01-07 10:38:33
Circaea My understanding is that once a story has a second chapter, you can't rate the overall story anymore -- the rating from the one-chapter stage gets "locked in". I'm sure this isn't intentional, but it's very frustrating as an author, since the site is built with a ratings-based filter right in the sidebar.

The ideal behavior would be pretty complicated, so I can't say I blame the site admins too much for this.

For a single-chapter story, the current system is okay.

What about averaging the chapter ratings? For a slowly-updating story with long chapters, a straightforward average of all chapter ratings would be okay, because it would reach equilibrium before the author took a new action. That doesn't work for an actively-updated story with short chapters, though. For that latter kind, the -5 to 5 rating system is a problem, because it doesn't reflect total number of rating actions, which might be very high.

My ideal system would probably compromise, and let users filter or search based on multiple pieces of information. So, for my own story right now (http://ficwad.com/story/149388), I have 26 chapters, and 109 total points, for an average of ~4.2.
If the main story list showed something like "4 (109 points in 26 chapters)", readers would be able to tell one '4' from another.



Personally, I care far more about the feedback and encouragement I get from having each chapter be individually rate-able than I do about how broken the overall story rating might be. And I am in absolute awe that my story has been rated that many times.
Posted at 2011-02-20 09:21:04

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