I hope this is in the right category, but after talking with a reader, we had an idea.
Some of the current heated debate comes from the fact that some popular stories constantly trend high which doesn’t give smaller authors a chance to get recognized. I suggested two trending sections for each genre, but my reader had another idea to add.
Each genre has 3 trending sections.
Stories marked complete
Popular trending stories with stories over a certain number of reads
Rising star stories with stories under a certain number of reads
Now, this does not help a certain issue where some stories have not been updated in almost a year but consistently trend high. I don’t know if it would be feasible to move those stories to the completed section after so much time elapses between updates?
With the proposed system above… once a story is marked complete, it is automatically moved to the completed section. This helps not only writers actively working on stories, but also readers that are looking for completed stories to read.
The other two sections, once a story reads a certain read count, it is moved from Rising Star to Popular Trending. I don’t know what a fair read count would be.
This is a good idea. I know there’s a few feature requests for different ways to organise the app to make more stories visible whilst also keep things fair. There’s always new stories being added to the app, so they really need to expand themselves to reflect their growing library of stories.
Would be a bit hard to know what to do with discontinued/hasn’t-been-updated-in-forever stories, like you mentioned, but I don’t think that would be a huge problem. The rising stars section would probably be the hardest one to implement in my opinion; hard, but not impossible.
This is actually a great idea because if there were 2-3 shelves under each genre, probably the big authors wouldn’t complain either because they could also earn a few spots in their section that are currently “stolen” by some smaller authors. Determining these two sections wouldn’t be easy, but Episode has all the records and statistics, so they should have an idea how to do it.
