Originally posted by Jinn
To answer Marcus's question: there are about 300 out of 570 total reviewers wrote only one review. If you ask me why, I can only guess and I think your reasons all could be valid. People are lazy.

Only 570 reviewers out of the 7600 who went to the trouble to register? That seems very odd, doesn't it? I would have thought that most people registered so that they could write reviews.

But maybe they just wanted to follow the Brenda brou-ha-ha. :-)

Of the 300 who wrote only one review, I'll bet a fair number only wrote a review to their own stories (under a second (third?) identity. I've seen some 9's and 10's for some stories that... oh, well -- there's no accounting for tastes, I guess.


I was acctually considering the idea proposed by boccaccio. The question is how to setup the system. And again, how to do the quality control. You can't just say 'good story' to become a top reviewer.
Do you have a way of measuring the number of words or lines in a review? The award could go to most reviews of, say, 3 lines (or 30 words?) or more. With a certain minimum number of reviews required, at your discretion (10?). And it might be a good idea to stipulate that no one could win the award more than once every six months or so. This wouldn't absolutely guarantee the quality
of the reviews, but if someone is going to write a few lines, they might as well write something useful.

You might have to reserve the right to disqualify someone who reviewed a lot of stories, but gave no hint of having read them, though.

It's not impossible that, in the long run, this might actually add paying members, Jinn -- I don't know what you have Behind the Green Door, but very likely some of the winners might continue as paying members. Or at least give the membership zone some good word of mouth here and elsewhere.

In case of ties, of course, I think the most equitable solution would be to give extra credit for having written stories set in 19th century China, don't you? :-)

Boccaccio