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Well, the polls are closed, and the results are in. This poll had our highest turnout ever, and the results were pretty clear.
Over half of you want us to fling open the doors to everyone... with the caveat that if they really suck, we can get rid of them. So, I will look into making the necessary changes to the site. It may take several weeks, however, as I have other programming tasks I have to do first. (not related to The Pub)
Now, in an effort to learn more about designing user interfaces... the second-highest vote was that it should be easier to recommend authors. To those who voted this way, I ask... "Huh?" Seriously, how could I have made this process easier?
Eric Storm
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Eric Storm wrote:
Now, in an effort to learn more about designing user interfaces... the second-highest vote was that it should be easier to recommend authors. To those who voted this way, I ask... "Huh?" Seriously, how could I have made this process easier?
I was one of those that voted this way. The way I thought of it is when I recommend an author give a bar graph or something to say how many votes have been made for that person.
Example Persons X, Y and Z
X has 50 votes
Y has 70
Z has 10
Z is really good and people see that she has such low numbers and votes for her and ends up pushing her to 100.
Right now people only see X, Y and Z so assume they have been voted and don't need to be voted for again.
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I suppose I see your point about that, though it's not exactly making it "easier to recommend" someone by doing that.
And please don't use that PC "'she' as a neuter pronoun" bullshit in front of me ever again. (Or are you advocating we only vote for girls? )
Eric Storm
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Eric Storm wrote:
And please don't use that PC "'she' as a neuter pronoun" bullshit in front of me ever again. (Or are you advocating we only vote for girls? )
More like wishful thinking that we might get more girls posting their stories here.
Another thing, when a person is nominated, we can include a link to their stuff, why not make that link visible to everyone? This way if they are not familiar with the author, being a normal lazy human being who can't be bothered to Google the name, they can easily find that person for themselves and make an educated vote?
Last edited by Storymaster69 (2010-09-10 21:33:29)
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Well, hardly matters at this point, but...
The whole point of the "recommend a new author" system was for you to recommend authors you were familiar with, not for the list to become a voting booth. In other words, it was designed to be, "I read this author on some other site, and I'd really rather they were here, so I'm going to list their name." The inclusion of the "click here" list was supposed to be a simple matter of convenience: "The site already has the information for these authors on file, so if you want to recommend one, just click here, instead of having to type it all in again."
The assumption made was that people would actually actively participate, and so such handholding and heavy-handed encouragement would not be necessary. My fault for making the assumption.
Eric Storm
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Inded Eric, you should know that people are nearly smart enough to do something like that on their own. I voted for the make it easier option, And I should have said why,and what I meant but... I was thinking easier for an author to get in, versus easier to recommend more.
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