Popup asking for Feedback on low star ratings

[Rinne]

When people give 1* or 2* ratings they rarely give feedback on why they did so, which can be rather frustrating.
I don't want to force them to give feedback but a small popup or something similar reminding them to do so might go a long way.

Just giving a low rating doesn't tell us anything except "I don't like this" and it's not helpful at all. They could dislike it for any number of reasons after all.

 

[Tony]

On that subject, there was a feature request for removing your own rating at one point, primarily for authors who have accidentally rated their own story. You are in an interesting trap once that happens, because you can't take back the rating, and you don't want to rate yourself with a low star, so you just wind up rating yourself 5 stars.

My thoughts, if it's only the single rating from the author's main account then it probably doesn't make that huge a difference, but having that option would also make things more honest. If you do include a feature along these lines though, maybe just something where the author can't rate their own story, then I would like to suggest another feature for the author to update their statistics. Right now, your statistics do not update until your story has been interacted with in some way (comment, rating, or chapter post.) Since I have already made the mistake almost half the authors on this site likely have, I have started changing the rating I have given to my story and then refreshing the page in order to update the statistics.

Yeah, now that I write everything out, I don't think either of those are particularly big issues. One doesn't make a huge impact, and it also acts as a work around for the other issue. It's just a strange quirkiness of the system to bring to your attention in case you ever get the time to consider it.

An alternative is just to make rating removal universal, not just authors.
While it's rare, a "remove my rating" button might be useful for people who decided that their rating was premature, or they rated something that they didn't intend to.

Admittedly, the former is probably nonexistent, but the latter might not be so.

But then again, that presumes that there's more than a handful of people who actually care.

Yeah, I'm guessing about the only people who actually care are the author themselves having accidentally rated their own work. (It's actually incredibly easy to do if you access the site from your phone.) And, again, just one biased rating is probably not going to make that much of a difference. The problem would be authors who make fake accounts just to up-vote their own series, which appropriately get deleted as Tony just said.

I was referring to authors who made fake accounts to give their novels 5 stars. I think it's totally fine to rate your own novel. I don't think one rating would do anything once you have enough ratings.

I'll add a feature to remove your own rating in the future but it's not important enough so it's not on the top of my "to do" list.