Since the author of Janet's Ordeal is currently advertising for a new co-author, and is using the fact that his story is the most reviewed on the site (by a margin of 50 more than Bruce Boxer's Occupational Hazards, which is in second place) as an inducement, I thought it was about time to update this thread.

Out of 112 reviewers, 88 reviewed only this story and 24 reviewed at least one other at this site. Average scores: one-time reviewers - 8.7; multiple reviewers - 6.9. All of the scores lower than 5 were given by 'experienced' reviewers.

I tried to compare this to Bruce's story, but it, as well as the third and fourth most reviewed were so old that no information was available on how many reviews those reviewers had written. Many of the reviewers names for those stories were in blue, rather than the site-standard red, and you couldn't click on them at all, so I suspect they were purged when Jinn trimmed a few thousand people off the membership list recently. This left me with number five, Taking Carol by Lorddare. Taking Carol had 52 votes, of which 10 were by one-time reviewers and 42 by multiple reviewers.

From this quickie comparison, I think you can see the point lex was trying to make with his initial post in this thread, but some new information has come to light since he made his claim of "stuffing the ballot box". It seems that the author of Janet's Ordeal started a Yahoo! group fan club for his story, and in order to be a member of the fan club, you had to post a review.

Elegant. Ingenious. And an in-your-face response to all those authors who post here lamenting how few reviews they get, or how bad their review-to-click-through rate is. Apparently, it's also a good way to boost your average score. And it took a Dane to figure this out (I can hear Alex Bragi crowing from here).

My hat's off. I'm amazed that no one ever thought of this before. Congratulations.