Malonymous
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The remains of a deleted novel.
I have been getting increasingly concerned about many longstanding issues with Scribble Hub, issues that have led to a number of content creators, both big and small, leaving the site—sometimes moving to another. With an ongoing lack of clarity and communication, this has gone unaddressed for years now, and it’s gotten worse. This is what I’ve seen in the years I have been an author on Scribble Hub, the core problems, and how we can make this site work better for everyone.
1. Reviews have always been ‘feast or famine’.
This is one of the oldest and most self-evident issues you’ll see regarding reviews on Scribble Hub: novels either have many reviews or very few—if any at all. What happens when the first review (or more) are negative and outright discourage the author from creating content on the site?
It’s needlessly crippling for newer authors and completely useless for hobbyists. This is never good for the site. Even readers who leave a negative review get nothing if they want more and the author stops posting.
Other web novel sites have certain features to promote user engagement, which can prevent this problem:
Providing incentives for users to post reviews.
Having virtually no requirement or barrier to entry for reviews with automatic posting.
Allowing comments under reviews.
Allowing authors to review their own novel. Many years ago at the very start, authors actually could do this here. You can still see self reviews that were posted before this was changed.
Of course, these aren’t without their potential downsides. I’m not actually suggesting any of them given the biggest issue with the site, but more on that later.
In the past, we did have active efforts to bring in new users (and reviewers) to the site. From 2019-2021, Scribble Hub saw many semi-regular feature updates and writing contests with prize money. The last feature update was over a year ago. The last contest ended over a year ago. The previous moderator who managed contests did great, but sometimes life gets in the way. So far, no one else has been appointed to take over.
While we would love to see a change here, there’s more convenient room for improvement elsewhere.
2. There’s an ongoing lack of clarity and communication that wastes time for everyone involved.
For starters, let’s go over the review guidelines. It’s recommended to give them a read if you’re posting a review.
Before they are shown publicly, reviews on Scribble Hub must be manually approved by moderation to make sure they adhere to the guidelines. Some of them are suggestions, others are rules that are enforced:
No reviewing the author, genres, tags, or other reviews
No excessive profanity, or spoilers outside of a spoiler tag
No one liners
Must be at least 1-2 full sentences of coherent English related to liking or disliking the novel
From what we can tell, those are the basic criteria in a nutshell for getting your review approved. While the “No one liners” rule could be improved, the key issues you may encounter here are what’s not clarified, or quite frankly, what’s misleading:
3. The Report system is a waste of time.
Reviews are not automatically posted; only reviews that follow the guidelines are approved by moderation and shown publicly. At the same time, reviews are only removed from the site if they don’t follow the guidelines.
When it comes to the report system for reviews, users have been getting the wrong idea about this for years because this has never been clarified. It’s common practice that services with a report system won’t offer responses. Here’s the dilemma: extreme cases aside, authors with a concern will need feedback from moderation via email or PM to know what specific standards are being used for approving reviews.
For example, you may find other sites that don’t allow posting a review that misrepresents the novel. That’s apparently not the case here, which is surprising given the “reviews should be presented as fairly and objectively as possible” guideline. However, this isn’t the crux of the matter, and it’s understandable considering the biggest issue with the site:
4. There simply aren’t enough moderators.
This is not a new idea on the forums, and it’s never been fully addressed. There’s no quick fix to find trusted staff to help manage the site. However, there’s room for improvement that doesn’t require more mods, and it seems like the site was never adapted with this in mind.
This is sadly the reason for many other issues that users run into.
5. Unapproved reviews (and the readers who submit them) are ignored.
If you submit a review and it’s not approved, nothing happens. It will never show up and you won’t see a notification mentioning that or explaining why. This doesn’t encourage participating. Fewer users will end up using the system.
This will turn up on the forums: a user wanted to post a short, positive review for a novel they enjoyed. When the review never appeared, they ended up asking publicly to find out what’s going on because there’s no communication.
Even without those examples, there’s a case why we should reconsider the “No one liners” rule. It’s a barrier to entry, there’s no safeguard for “your review is too short”, and more reviews can address the existing problems when there are too few.
At the very least:
6. There should be a small character count requirement for reviews that are doomed to be rejected and ignored anyway.
If you try making a profile post with over 500 characters on the main site, it won’t work. A pop-up will let you know that your post has exceeded the maximum limit.
By the same token, we might as well have the opposite for reviews. A small character count minimum would provide users with instant feedback when their review is too short to ever have a decent chance of getting approved—50 characters, as an example, or whatever is longer than the longest one liner.
This is automatic feedback that doesn’t require additional staff. If we do want to see more reviews here, this is always going to be better than leaving users ignored.
7. There’s a bigger problem regarding communication for the novel content guidelines. The policy for handling certain rule-breaking novels is basically shadowbanning.
The content guidelines themselves for novels are alright. The illegal, prohibited content of course gets removed quickly. No issue there.
For other guidelines, the policy is to remove the novel from search results, tag rankings, and updates on the front page.
The problem? There’s no notification when this happens.
Again, an example that turned up on the forums: the author of a popular novel ended up posting about this issue publicly after their novel was hidden and they were never notified when or why. After getting a response, the author deleted their novel and moved to another site.
On the one hand, credit where credit’s due that there isn’t favoritism based on popularity here. On the other hand… Why are authors not getting notified about this?
This isn’t Novel Updates where authors are never directly involved with the site. These are content creators who are contributing to ad revenue by building something here. Readers might not notice when their reviews aren’t approved and never show up on the site, which is already sad enough. Authors are going to notice when their novels are hidden. They’re going to come asking about it, even publicly, and they’re probably going to be pissed for the same reasons that people despise shadowbanning.
This can be handled privately with less, you know, enragement. If it will take a minute to address no matter what, they should at least be able to get a PM first in these cases.
You could say, “Authors should know what the rules are!” In general, I would agree.
8. Novels may be silently delisted from the site for reasons that aren’t in the rules.
Apparently, there might be certain inflammatory terms or topics that aren’t mentioned in the content guidelines and will get the novel hidden. This was, again, an example that turned up on the forums for the same reason.
The original posting about this has disappeared, so it may have been something else or… who knows. I’d rather not know. You’d hope these issues could be handled privately instead of waiting until they end up here.
9. “You’re not supposed to care.”
When it comes to reviews, there will always be controversy about subjective standards. Long story short, whenever reviews get brought up on forums, many responses seem to boil down to some form of this idea, that authors shouldn’t care about reviews of their novels.
And you know what? It’s true: most authors are probably better off not bothering with reviews.
That brings us to the ultimate problem with the system.
10. The last feature update made the site worse.
For the first three years of Scribble Hub, the desktop version of the site had the same layout as the mobile version for the front page of novels. On every novel, reviews had their own dedicated page instead of putting everything together all at once.
A little over a year ago, the last major update changed this for desktop, and only for desktop. Some users prefer it this way, just like some users prefer light mode, and some users prefer dark mode.
It’s always better when you can choose. For the layout, you can’t. Why?
Let’s say you prefer dark mode. Imagine a world where Scribble Hub doesn’t let you choose the theme, and the whole site only used dark mode. Then one day, it’s decided the desktop version will only use light mode. Now your eyes bleed whenever you try to use the site, and meanwhile, the mobile version was never changed. You’re left wondering, why not let users choose?
There’s nothing new here. Looking at all the previous examples, there’s really nothing new here. These are problems that have made the system problematic for every kind of user (including moderation) for up to four years and counting. Now a whole year has gone by since the last update, the first year the site hasn’t seen a major anything.
Here’s the bottom line: either authors are supposed to care about this system, or they’re not. Scribble Hub leans toward the latter, yet the site doesn’t reflect that. It’s gotten worse, you can’t choose, and you’re left wondering what’s going on here.
If nothing else… Why can’t we choose the status quo?
Now don’t get me wrong. Of course Scribble Hub has gotten a lot of things right. People wouldn’t offer suggestions if they didn’t care. There are fantastic features here that other web novel sites don’t have.
At the same time, there are longstanding problems here that other sites don’t have. And we don’t explicitly need more moderators to address them.
TL;DR: The Answer
#1. There is no simpler solution than letting content creators decide for themselves.
Several sites that host web novels don’t even have a review section. In a lot of ways, they’re better off for it.
The admin has even mentioned getting into fights over reviews here. And… for what? Really, what are we doing here? This isn’t Novel Updates where the review section is the only major on-site comment area for novels. Scribble Hub never needed this.
Instead, too often we see this turn into a problem without a purpose, that no one wants to deal with, for a system that we sadly never had the resources to manage without leaving users ignored.
There is no simpler solution than letting content creators decide with an option to turn off the review section for their novel, making the choice permanent like deleting a novel, a big decision that can’t be undone. This is a feature that could have benefited the site years ago.
Beyond that, let’s fix the existing system.
#2. Desktop users should be able to choose the original layout.
It’s always better when you can choose. For all of the reasons mentioned above, there isn’t a good reason to not let users choose the original ‘front page layout’ for novels that is still featured on the mobile version.
Example: the main site has a drop down menu with the setting for Light or Dark mode that looks like this.
We could have a “Layout” setting with an option for New or Original, with the default obviously set to New for desktop so there’s no change unless you choose it.
#3. Authors should be notified when they have a novel hidden from the site.
Again, they’re going to notice, and they’re probably going to end up asking anyway. If it takes a minute to address no matter what, this can be handled much better privately should they get a PM first.
#4. If we’re not going to allow short reviews, there should be a small character count requirement to give instant feedback when a review is too short.
There’s a case for lowering the barrier to entry by allowing shorter reviews. If not, and they’re getting ignored anyway, readers who try to post a very short review can receive automatic feedback with a small character count minimum—whatever is decided that’s longer than the longest one liner, for example.
If we do want more users to actually use the system, it would be great if readers were notified when their reviews aren’t approved. Should that require expanding the mod team, that’s definitely a good reason for it.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
