As the title says, is there any way to sort the full story list by total view count? It would make it a lot easier to browse through the archives, especially the older stories, but I can't seem to find anywhere on the site that would allow any sort of sorting except chronological.
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No, there is no way to sort by views
It's not really a popularity contest here; the view totals are there to encourage the authors. Ranking stories by views would have the opposite effect.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Erinspeak
In the history of this site and other similar sites there have been instances of people trying to game the numbers. When emphasis is placed on number of: view, comments, kudos, etc. people do what they can to make their stories look as robust as possible.
It's human nature. Go to any youth sport and watch the idiocy on the sidelines. Not so much the substitutes or coaches, but the parents. Children bring out the best . . . and the worst in us. For authors, stories are our children.
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
It's a bit of a shame, it can
It's a bit of a shame, it can be very difficult to find older stories that are both high quality and meet your tastes. When you keep abreast of new stories the tagging and searching systems are sufficient, but definitely lacking for stories over a month old.
The only surefire way is finding authors and going through their backlogs, but that is obviously quite limited too.
As an aside, it is correct that metrics of popularity such as views/comments are both inadequate metrics of quality and potentially open to manipulation, but are they truly worse than nothing at all?
What about the stories posted before Kudos?
Before Kudos were in place, there was another system, that was never converted over when the system switched to kudos. As a result, stories before a certain date would have little to no kudos, because they were before Kudos were installed and the data has been lost over time.
Another issue, is that views are going to be Larger on Older stories, because we allow search engines to spider the site, which adds a view here and there, but over time that here and there really adds up.
Honestly, the BEST metric is probably number of comments. I mean yeah, bad stories can generate lots of comments on occasion, but more than likely the HIGHEST comment counts are on stories where people are saying they like the story, or caring enough to give constructive criticism which allows the story to improve into a quality story over time.
-Piper
And no, there isn't
There's no way to search by number of comments, either.
No help for it, you'll just have to read a story and see if you like it. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
that doesn't work
IME the number of comments is proportional to the amount of time the story takes to deliver. A story that's posted in its entirety in a few days stays on the homepage or story list very briefly, so it gets very few comments.
Not complaining, just sayin'
There's no numeric arbiter for judging stories. I like it when people post their favorites lists - that's the way I find things I like. I filter those recommendations according to the poster, and the other stories on their list. It works well. Thanks Melanie E. :)
not as think as i smart i am
Thank you for all of the
Thank you for all of the replies everyone. I suppose that I understand the reasoning behind not allowing people to sort by views or such. It's just that, as Asha said, it makes it a bit difficult to find a lot of the older stories--seeing as how this site had been running for nearly a decade before I found out about it, there's bound to be a lot of good ones that I have never even heard of. Once again, thank you for the response.
What that means to me
Yes, this site has been running for a long time, and many many stories have been posted. It's haystacks full of stories.
I think about that when people talk about what sort of stories "do well" here or are "popular" here or what is accepted or not accepted.
Who on earth has that much of an overview? I doubt that anyone since the late StanMan has read everything that's been posted here.
Kaleigh Way
Classic reposts
You'll have noticed just lately that there have been a number of "Classic" reposts to the front page. These even included part ONE of Bike!!
This seems to me to be a good way to remind the current readership of the excellent work that went before and, as others have said, have been buried beneath the many equally excellent later works.
Penny