In a system where only 4 and above is “good,” negative reviews inherently have a 4 to 1 weight advantage. So, if a story gets ratings of 5,5,5,4,1. The person who gave it a 1 has lowered the score from 4.75 down to 4.0! Whereas the median score (the one in the middle) is 5.0. Update: After thinking about it for a week and now being review bombed myself, here’s what I’d do: You really only want to give outlying ratings as much power to change a story’s score as everyone else’s, just because someone really hated a story doesn’t mean that they should be able to shift it’s rating more than someone who liked it. The median is probably your truest rating, as that’s what most people gave it. In honesty, that’s the score the story deserves… but people want a little more fidelity. So you take the median rating, and cap all the other ratings to one below and one above that. a story with: 1,2,3,4,5 -> rating 3 (median 3) becomes: 2,2,3,4,4 -> rating 3 A story with: 1,5,5 -> rating 3.6 (median 5) becomes: 4,5,5-> rating 4.67 A story with a 1,4,4,5,5,5,5 -> rating 4.14 (median 5) becomes: 4,4,4,5,5,5,5 -> 4.54 A story with 1,2,5 -> rating 2.7 (median 2) becomes 1,2,3 -> rating 2 In essence, this solution lets everyone like or dislike a story based on its current rating. A rating of 0.5, really means “I always downvote this story” and a rating of 5 means “I always upvote this story.” But a rating of 4 means “I upvote this story, unless it’s rated at 5 or more, then I downvote it.” But it doesn’t let anyone's vote count any more or less than anyone else’s. So review bombs get a lot harder to pull off, and people can rate things lower than a 5 without worrying about it. Do realize storyportals.com has half points, so just assume its a 1 to 10 scale. Bomb Proof Rating System Pseudo Code Inputs: A list of the number of ratings at each value (assuming a 5-star scale) for example: • 1 star -> 2 ratings • 2 star -> 3 ratings • 3 star -> 6 ratings • 4 star -> 2 ratings • 5 star -> 1 rating A clamping value. This should be linearly interpolated to have no effect once you have enough ratings. I suggest the following values: • 0 to 20 ratings -> Clamping value of 1.0 (makes it very review bomb proof) • At 50 ratings -> 1.5 • At 100 ratings -> 2.0 • At 500 ratings -> 2.5 • At 1000 ratings -> 3.0 • At 5000 ratings -> 3.5 • At 10,000 ratings and above -> 4.0 (effectively off) So, at 35 reviews we’d have a clamping value of 1.25, and at 7,500 reviews it would be 3.75 How it works: First find the median (the rating in the middle) by counting down from the top until you reach the halfway mark (number of reviews /2). Then find your upper and lower clamping values by adding and subtracting the clamping value. In our example the median review is 3, so the clamping values are 2 and 4. Next find the clamped values of all the ratings. In our example this would be: • 1 star gets clamped to 2 • 2 star is left alone • 3 star is left alone • 4 star is left alone • 5 star gets clamped to 4 Then simply find the average of those values. In our case: (2*2)+(2*2)+(6*3)+(4*2)+(4*1) = 44/15 for a rating of 2.93 Where the old system would have given: (2*1)+(2*2)+(6*3)+(4*2)+(5*1) = 43/15 for a rating of 2.86 So, you can see in most cases it will have no or little effect. And once the clamping hits 4, it would have no effect. So this would help out smaller stories more than the ones who have already found an audience. But in a case where someone has four 5 star ratings and one 1 star rating, it would change the rating from 4.2 to 4.8, stopping most one-off review bombers. I’d also suggest locking any IP from making any reviews for a day or two after they leave a 0.5 star review. So people could still do it if the really hated something. But no one could do it systematically. Either that or always show every reviewer the story’s score as if their rating wasn’t clamped. To do that, take their rating, subtract the clamped value from it, divide by the number of reviews, and add this to the displayed score. (So you don’t have to recalculate the base score for every story.)

Create a chapter rating system where people can like, love, dislike, feel neutral about the individual chapters they are reading to allow authors to see which chapters hit or miss with the majority of their reading audience. Such rating systems could be used to help balance/offset the approval ratings from overly negative feedback. For example, if an authors has written a story the people find hard to engage with in the beginning (so many give it a bad review), but it gets much better as the tale progresses. Many will write a bad review based on the first few chapters, bombing the authors stats right at the get go, and in many cases causes the author to lose interest in continuing the story. If there were part where you could rate the chapter and provide a small comments section (ie: Why you rated it), this would provide much greater feed back to authors allowing them to see what people liked/loved/hated on a case by case basis.

currently the "dungeon" tag lumps both stories where the protgonist/s are adventurers diving into one or several dungeons, and dungeon core / dungeon master novels where the protagonist is responsible for creating and/or improving/managing the dungeon. both genres are good, but when you are looking for one type of story and the list is filled with the combined mass of both genres it gets a bit frustrating.

Many writers have expressed frustration that the amount of time that their story lasts on "Latest Updates" is so short. I have some suggestions that could make it easier to find more stories for readers and increase discoverability for authors without sacrificing what is working well. 1. Adding a "Latest Updates" by Genre/Tag Many writers have expressed frustration that the amount of time that their story lasts on "Latest Updates" is so short. What if we also added a "Latest Updates" by genre/tag? It's not just about finding the most popular stories or the ones that updated within the last few minutes. Readers want options. And writers want discoverability. But it would have to incorporate all of the genres and tags, not like Genre Rising Stars, where some of them are hidden. Speaking of which... 2. Making All of the Genres/Tags Available for Genre Rising Stars Other than "Newest Fictions" and "Latest Updates", Genre Rising Stars is the next place writers hope to show up. Let's face it, most will not reach Rising Stars. But Genre Rising Stars is relatively accessible. Readers who love certain genres likewise use this to search for books. But some of the genres/tags are hidden. You have to take the URL, remove said genre, and add the genre or tag that you are looking for - and you have to know to put an underscore where some spaces are! Many readers aren't going through all that - or don't even know they can. In my opinion, we should be doing what we can to increase the ability of readers to find stories, not make it more difficult. Another solution to this would be to enable more results for searches. 3. Enabling More Results for Searches On Amazon, if you want Epic Fantasy, you click on it and boom: you have all of them. You may get 50 or 100 results, but then you click to load more. Prolific readers who love a certain genre can keep looking for gems. Writers who are newer and have had a little success but not enough to make Rising Stars due to not writing in the popular genres can now be found. I feel like this just makes so much sense and it would be an easy tweak. The fact that "Epic Fantasy" is the biggest category of fantasy on Amazon but doesn't even have a tag on storyportals.com is a topic for another day... 4. A Tag Limit Some of these suggestions would work best if writers had a limit on tags, like they do with genres (where it is 4). With tags, perhaps it could be 5. The point would be to pick the tags that best describe the story. Even under the current system, this would allow for new stories to be discovered via Genre Rising Stars. The fact is that many writers spam their tags (and who can blame them) to increase discoverability. But this method actually hurts discoverability because now all of the same books are on all of the same Genre Rising Stars. I am slightly exaggerating but you get my point. If authors had to select their most pertinent tags, it would make it possible for other stories to make some of these lists without a few stories hogging all of the spots. TL;DR: By making all of the tags visible for Genre Rising Stars, adding a "Latest Updates" by genre/tags, allowing for more results for searches, and placing a limit for how many tags an author can select for their books, storyportals.com would allow vastly more options for readers and facilitate discoverability for writers.

I find it a bit distracting that the advanced search panel stays open after setting the search parameters and clicking 'Search'. It would feel cleaner and more streamlined if the panel automatically collapsed after the search is submitted, and could then be reopened only when needed to adjust the criteria.

Some user-ads link to the first chapter instead of the overview/story page, meaning if you decide to follow the story, it shows up in the followed stories page as having read a chapter already, causing some small confusion when you finally get around to reading the story.

prevent trolls who rate things 0.5 stars without reading a fiction at all by hiding their ratings and reviews from everyone but them. they get to think they are causing harm without actually doing it. Easy to detect as I have seen several of these trolls never have more than 1 or 2 reviews in their profiles above 0.5 stars. Edit: This should also include protections for low ratings on the first few chapters as some are likely to see this and skip to chapter 2 or 3 and rate it 1.5 stars instead (which has already happened to me since I posted this)

I often encounter the issue where a story I’ve marked as 'Read Later' gets stubbed before I have a chance to read it. It would be helpful to receive a notification if an author plans to stub a story. Additionally, having a category for 'soon-to-be-stubbed' books would be great, so I can at least have a chance to read them before they’re no longer available.

Right now readers can leave a 1 star or any low rating after a single chapter. This can easily kill a story before the story gets started and is given a fair shot. Additionally, the average stars is shown on top of latest releases which new readers often click into from the latest updates section of the front page. They see this low rating without knowing its only from 1 reader and assume the worst, leaving the story to find a higher rated one. By letting authors hide ratings until they reach 5, you allow the story to grow past a few chapters and attract new readers.

Putting stubbed fictions in the best rated list just winds up as advertising for KU, and if the reader doesn't have it and doesn't notice before they start, the fictionus interruptus is rather unpleasant.

I feel as though it would be nice to not read a book and only then find out it’s on hiatus

Currently, the choice of ad formats on RR is quite limited since there are only two types: banner and rectangular. Of the two, the rectangular format is the one most commonly used by authors, but it's very small and doesn’t efficiently capture the essence of a novel. The text is hard to read, and creators mostly rely on bright colors and flashy images to grab attention. My idea is to introduce a third, larger ad type. Instead of the usual images that creators have to design and moderators have to approve, this ad would allow authors to use their Shoutout Code, meaning the cover, title, and blurb of the novel, displayed directly on the main RR page. What are the advantages of this kind of ad, in my opinion? - It speeds up the story selection process for readers, as they can instantly see the novel’s details from the ad. This helps prevent clickbait from meme ads and reduces the likelihood of 0.5-star review bombs. - It gives authors another way to promote their story while also getting more mileage out of their Shoutout Code. - It cuts down on ad moderation needs and avoids the issue of performance drops due to impression fatigue, since there's no need to constantly swap out images. - It gives real value to ad packs over $55, as there's no need to buy 10 small ads since the Shoutout Code remains the same and doesn’t require multiple designs. - It could improve the CTR-to-engagement conversion rate. The main issue with this idea would be ensuring that these ads don’t show up on other fiction pages, as that would be unfair and unethical, but only on the main page. There should be a cap on impressions per user to give everyone a fair shot (otherwise the ad might run until the next geological era), and the minimum cost should probably be higher. Overall, it’d be an interesting addition. RR’s ads are good but pretty basic in terms of structure and variety. A small addition like this could really benefit everyone.

I have 15-20 books on my read later and i want to be able to filter by the one that habe been completed, or by a genre that I am in the mood for

I'd like to see a percent complete stat on the books in my library. You can calculate it in whatever way you want, but I'd like to know at a glance more or less how close I am to reaching the most recent chapter.

Sometimes I see an advertisement to a story on the site and don't register that I want to click on it until after I've moved off of the page. Is it possible to put all active advertisements on a page so I could go find the one I saw.

It's totally understandable for RR to not offer an API for readers - but please 🙏 can we have an API for authors? I would love to update chapters directly from my writing tool - rather than have to update them manually. RR needs to get better at supporting author tooling

At the moment the stats we get on ads are ridiculously sparse. There’s no way to optimize anything if we know just a flat CTR. The most important stat to know would be Read Through Rate. If a person clicks on an ad, how likely it is they: - bounce immediately off the page/chapter - click to read the first chapter/to the next chapter - follow - favorite One ad might have 3.4 % CTR but convert only 14 % of clickers to readers. Another ad might have 0.9 % CTR but convert 70 % of clickers to readers. Which one is better? At the moment, there’s no way to know. Or even know which ad is which.

When you open to a books page under the about fiction it would be cool to see what ads the author created for the book. It would also be cool for a place to see the funny meme like ads all in one place, just to browse.

I was reading a story just recently that's been deleted - I was starting to question whether I'd read it on storyportals.com or some other site somewhere. The annoying thing about it was I couldnt remember the title/authors name. I eventually found a reference to it in detailed history (I'm pretty sure non premium members do not have access to this, so it's even worse for them). I'd like to ask that deleted fictions stay in follow/read later lists even if deleted, maybe with a red title or something, even if they cant be accessed. That way at least I can maybe find the story/author again somewhere else if I couldnt remember the exact title. Some kind of notification would be nice too instead of it just disappearing into the ether (I know that has been requested elsewhere). It'd also be nice to know (if possible) _why_ a fiction was removed such as it breaking the rules, because I have _no_ idea why this has gone bye bye.

Alright, hear me out—what if we had a "default author’s note" feature? Basically, you set up a note once, tweak it whenever you feel like it, and it’ll automatically be the default pre- or post-chapter author note (there should be an option to choose). It should also "update" on every chapter it is in if the "default AN" draft is ever edited or tweaked. But if you want to write a fresh note for a specific chapter, you can do it like normal, and it’ll override the default one for that post single post. Why? Because manually typing (or copy-pasting) the same thing every time is a crime against laziness. This way, we can maximize laziness—er, I mean, efficiency—by not having to copy-paste the same thing every time. Set it and forget it kinda thing.

There has been a change some time ago, unclear when, so that ads to fictions marked not interested are excluded. This is good for both the advertiser and the reader, because it reduces clicks on advertisements to a story that the reader is not going to read anyway, which is a waste of money for the advertiser, and a waste of time for the reader. The same change should be made available (potentially optionally) to stories that the reader has favorited or followed, which indicates that the reader is already reading the story, for the same reasons (waste of both advertiser's ad and reader's time).

I see this was suggested about four years prior, but lately I'm finding the rising stars to be unreliable in finding good fics since they vanish fast for my reading speed, and popular this week has the opposite problem where it doesn't change very often week to week. As a reader, here is my path through the site: If I saw something that interested me but didn't have as many chapters out yet, I would wait a few weeks, open up storyportals.com again when I had time, and find the story again pretty quickly on the rising stars. Now, feels like if I don't check each week and actively mark down a bunch of possible ones to read up on later, the next time I look into the rising stars, those fics are gone. And finding an old fic just by vibes of what I sorta remember is difficult. This is because as I've grown older, I don't check storyportals.coms every day but instead once every few weeks in order to go on a deep binge. I think a list to get a nice overview on all the big hits of the month would be handy for readers like me that get a chunk of time once or twice a month, that way I can see the fics the community all picked out and vetted. I know there's plenty of filter shenanigans I can do to get this kind of feed going, but it would be really convenient. Popular this week is the closest to that kind of list, but month to month it doesn't change enough, so it sort of feels less like a 'recap for this month's best hits' and more an actual 'What's been active this week.' Thanks for coming to my TED talk

Can we add the words per day report in the writing competition to the analytics section? It's pretty awesome for evaluating your overall chapter pacing for long form writing.

I hate subscribing to patreon cause the website wasn't designed for books/readers in mind. As one example, i have hard time remembering what chapter i left off of while storyportals.com keeps track for me. Anyways just give authors the ability to implement a payment model however they'd like on storyportals.com itself. If they want you to spend 5 dollars to access the rest of their novel sure. 5 dollars to read ahead, sure. If you head honchoes of RoyalRoad dont want to sell books, then limit authors to putting the latest 30 chapters to read head, idm either way. It'll save me the inconvenience of using kindle or patreon and it'll help yall's monetary issues for relying on ads. P.S. infact steal all of the patreon features like author-subscriber chat, rough draft access, etc. and design it around how a literature community would use it would be 10/10 for every1

Hello team, I'm reading quite a few stories simultaneously, and sometimes I would like to put a story aside for a while, so that I can go back to it a few months later. There are 4 folders in the library: follow, download, favourite and read later. Let's ignore downloads, which is for offline reading. All the stories I currently read are in follow. The precious few I really consider gems are in favourite. And read later has tons in it, everything that piques my interest. And I'm kinda stuck for stories I want to put on hold, because if I put them back in read later they get drowned in tons of stories, and I also don't necessarily want to favourite them. So my improvement suggestion would be to have additional folders in the library. Of course I know this would mess up your statistics, because follow and favourite are very important to track popularity. But if you create a pause/on hold folder, everything in that folder could still be considered as something that is being followed. Thanks for reading me and have a nice day. Nacra

I think it would be nice, if you could filter the Follow List (https://www.royalroad.com/my/follows) my fiction status, i.e. being able to only show ongoing or stub fictions or to not show any completed fictions. It might make sense to remember that selections (the same way the format of the follow list is remembered)

Not everything is best read in smaller doses; some of them need or want to build a (tiny?) backlog. Some of them I want to specifically let build up because I'm anticipating a cliffhanger, and want to wait past that, some I just find better in bigger chunks, and some I just am bored with but not ready to give up on yet. Let us have a snooze button based on time or number of entries (chapters? posts?) with either some pre-defined values or maybe a scrollable date/number list to choose from for our follows list, so that we can keep up on some things, and sometimes have a backlog show up.

It would be nice for the rising stars drop down menu to include at least a separate section for the tags in case we're looking for specific tags. I already saw they have them but you would need to manually put it on the URL just to look through it.

I would really like it if there was a button that suggest a title from my read later list since I have lots of titles in my list and have trouble choosing among them. This leads to decision paralysis and I lose precious reading time. Of course, the button should implement true randomness for fairness to authors. Thanks.

The autosave feature regularly loses me work because my main computer loads the browser I use for writing in the background, saving over the chapter I was working on on my laptop without me realising. This has happened many, many times and I can't seem to stop doing it. My suggestion is to simply have a popup appear if the text to be saved is more than ten words shorter than the text it is saving over. A warn if the IP is different would also be helpful.

Instead of just favourites, which is fine, customisable lists like Wattpad where we can put down "Cyberpunk Books", "LitRPGs", "Dragons", "Portal Fantasy". Favourites is fine, but having to go through 400 favourites to find one book when you don't remember the name can be difficult.

We have spots for Facebook and Twitter handles in our profiles. In my experience, storyportals.com writers overwhelmingly use Discord. Would it be possible to add a spot for Discord user names for those of us who would like to make that information available?

I can say I think it would be a amazing feature to be able to hide fictions with the hiatus mark it gets kind of annoying to keep clicking on fictions all over the app and then being disappointed I wish I could just turn them off not just not seeing them in search but the whole app

I think the function of the open next chapter button in the library needs to be changed or have the option for changing. If you haven't finished reading a chapter and a new one comes out the open next chapter button will take you to the next chapter. Having the option to modify it would mean less chance of missing part of the story if you are coming back to it

I know it's possible to hide the rating value of a story, and disable notifications for reviews and comments. But things like follower count/review count and comments can still be seen, and you only have to swipe down to find the reviews and comments. I think writing on RoyalRoad would be more enjoyable if the author had the option to hide these things. It would be interesting if we, as authors, had more freedom to decide what we want to see or not.

See title, finding all my own ideas is a pain. I would like to search for the author of ideas or possible a place with a list of all my ideas. If there is a way it was not obvious to me. I tried searching for my name, author: my name (with space and without)

After reading stories that are 100% completed, I want to know I've read them, but they also aren't my favorites sometimes. I request to the site to have a new area next to favorites and read later that says stories already read, so that they don't clutter my favorites or follow list.

To be able to comment/read comments about some phrases, paragraphs in the chapters; it adds a lot more liveliness to the reading experience, and many other possible benefits.

It would be nice if we could see the number of upvotes on a review we wrote on the "my reviews" page (https://www.royalroad.com/my/reviews) without having to go and click into the stories.

I have like at least 50 books in my read later and I don't want to search for them individually every time I want a new book to read.

Do not allow misleading fiction advertisements. If an ad is designed to display a character like they're the main character, but they aren't, that's misleading advertisement. Something is being promised that isn't true. Ban that bullshit, please.

I would like to have a history of ads shown to me, like the reading history. I directly click on next calter out of habit/ convenience, but I can't click on the ad after that. So if it seemed interesting, I currently have no way to find its story.

Create a tab to list currently running user ads, I saw one I actually wanted to click on, but refreshed the page and couldn't get it again.

Could we have a toggle to search either the novel, the drafts, or both?