It’s been a few weeks since our last story review update and we wanted to give an update on the shelves and changes you can expect to see starting today.
Let’s start with the leaderboards. The original leaderboards consisted of 2 features:
Automated updates to each story’s ranking, resulting in daily changes to the shelf order
No limits on the number of stories that can be displayed per shelf
We are excited to report that starting this week, we’re rolling live, automated rankings updates to the leaderboard shelves again!
This means that for all of the leaderboards in the app, the general trending section, and each genre-specific trending section will now update their rankings on a daily basis.
Note that we’re still working out the kinks between the ranking you see for your story on Portal, and the ranking in the app. Most stories should be fairly close, but we have noticed some discrepancies and are working to correct that.
In addition, we’ve updated the overall leaderboard to now reflect the story statuses. The combined trending section currently scrolls to 500 stories, and will now expand to include stories that are Unreviewed or blocked from the Top 100 per our last update.
For the time being, a story must be Approved to be shown in the genre leaderboards. However, now that live updates are back on, you no longer have to wait for our manual content updates to see changes in the rankings or newly Approved stories by genre. As the number of Approved stories increases, the length of the genre trending sections will increase too!
Our hope is to be able to expand all the shelves even more in the coming weeks, so our team is still working hard to get through the review requests. Due to the volume of requests we received, it’s taken longer than anticipated, which we know is frustrating. We are committed to reviewing these stories, and will continue to do so.
In the meantime, please know that if your story doesn’t show up in the leaderboards (and isn’t banned), it’s still in the app! Your readers can still find your stories via Search or your author profile.
Please let us know if you have questions or comments by posting below or reaching out to our support team!
So does this mean unreviewed stories will be showing up in trending again? I’ll be honest, I really hate seeing that aspect come back. It feels like one step forward two steps back.
I’m more having difficulty grasping what this section means:
If the trending section is being expanded to 500, that means the stories past 100 (even if they are unreviewed) will be shown? From what I understand, the leaderboard represents the top 100 and the trending section will be the larger number of 500.
Hi @Liz, one of my stories was reviewed and approved and was back on the leaderboards last week or the week before. With today’s update, it’s literally vanished. Is this normal?
The first quote applies to the general trending section, which covers all genres. For the GENERAL trending section, the first 100 stories can only be Approved stories. Blocked or Unreviewed stories will show outside of the top 100. You find this trending section in Stories We <3.
For GENRE trending sections, stories will only show if they are Approved. You find these trending section in each specific genre.
@Liz - I’m curious if the review process is still being performed in the order that requests are received. I requested a review two months ago but there are stories that have been reviewed within a week of request or even within a week of publishing altogether, so clearly these are not being performed in order of request. Any clarification would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you for the clarification, even though I still really don’t like this. If unreviewed or blocked stories are still going to show up after you scroll past 100, it’s less convenient but still very, very easy to get to. I really feel strongly that this is a step back from the guidelines update and the things presented in that post.
Right now the genre sections are limited to show only Approved stories. Genre trending sections will be extended as the number of Approved stories in each of those genres increases.
Action, Adventure, Thriller and Horror have shorter shelves because they have fewer numbers of Approved stories.
Yeah I’m all the way confused. I still see the same exact popular stories in each genre as before, you know, those well into the millions and hundred thousands reads lol this is confusing but whatevs I suppose
lol this is confusing but whatevs I suppose 
