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I have been thinking: there are some truly terrific stories on this site but many more god-awful ones and unless a good story is featured it's hard to find the good from the bad (yes the player ratings is an indicator but still... there's too many). Perhaps the rules for deleting sub-standard stories should be upgraded, this would also help free up some space on the site? These are a few idea for ways the minimum-quality required to prevent deletion could be upgraded from harshest to light:

- If a story has a Player Rating of 4 or below and has been published for more than 5 years it should be deleted. (These story games are ok but it might be better to make way for something newer?)

- If a story has a Player Rating of 3 or below and has been published for more than 1 year it should be deleted (I can't see any value to these stories except taking up space).

- If a story has a Player Rating of 2 after one month it should be deleted, regardless of length.(These are stories 90% of people don't like but they're currently not bad enough to be deleted).

I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on this, I just think it might be a way of improving the overall quality of the site, I think the rule where if a story still has a player rating of 1/8 after one week it should be deleted is a good one.

I think linking the Player Rating to the time until it is deleted might be good as in:

A Player Rating of 1 = 1 Week until deletion.

A Player Rating of 2 = 1 Month until deletion.

A Player Rating of 3 = 1 Year until deletion.

A Player Rating of 4 = 5 Years until deletion.

A Player Rating of 5 = 10 Years until deletion?

This way a writer has time to improve his story and re-publish it to try and improve it's score if he or she wants to keep it on the site :)

To be honest, I'm not really in favour of raising the minimum site standards even further. In my opinion, we should also encourage new, inexperienced writers to start writing. Deleting games that are 4 or lower does send a message that only the better/best games have a place on this site. The current site guidelines, where stories with a 1 or 2 rating are unpublished after a certain amount of time is, in my opinion, a good enough measure. 

Furthermore, the quality of the site is already reflected by the top stories that appear on the 'storygame' page. I don't think that deleting more games will improve the quality much further for the average visitor.

As for the 'freeing up space' on the site, I wasn't aware that there is a lack of space on the site, how much space does a storygame take up? 

Deletion doesn't actually free up any space. It just makes the stories inaccessible. So yeah, maybe some of these stories are using up data, but getting rid of them isn't making them use up any less. Also, I think stories rated four or five should be the "standard" for quality, and not be considered for deletion.

Agree.

Are all the stories rated 2/8 or 3/8 from 2004 a valuable addition to the site? I understand the point about not discouraging new writers but perhaps fixing a timeline would give them some stimulus to improve rather than stay at the same level and keep churning out parts 2, parts 3 etc of the same sort of thing? I'll go with the majority opinion though, if everyone thinks these stories should stay then fair enough :)

Yep I can see how having a timeline attached to games might adversely affect the rating system, maybe another direction would be best to continue raising the quality standard of new story games, things like Kiel's Writing Exercises certainly help. Maybe a link to the do's and don't of story writing articles in the Help&Info section for new users when they first join up? If the 2/8 story games don't take up any space then I guess the site can host as many as new authors can produce :)

Whoa! There's a user who actually tends to all the deleted games?! Seems like a pretty rockin' dude.

The thing is, this is a non-professional, amateur writing site. For amateurs. There will be new writers trying their hand, and not all of them are going to be good, and it's fine to be new, it's fine to be not so great at writing, and it's fine to be an amateur and get better overtime. The reason we kicked out WC, and the reason we have minimum site standards, is because there's a fine line between being an amateur writing site and a shitty writing site, and I'd say we're well above the "shitty" line at this point. We don't need tighter restrictions.

Whoa, whoa, you wanna delete 4s and 5s? Easy now, there's some good stuff in there. You're talking about ridding the site of average and genuinely good works. They're not perfect, perhaps, but they're good. "The vampire hunter" is an example. It's not spectacular, but I love that story. xD

I'm all for the unpublishing of 1s and 2s, maybe 3s, but killing off our average stories seems too far for a public writing site. Plus, it might very well screw up our rating system. "Well, I don't think this deserves a three, but I'll give the author more time." or "Well, this only really deserves a 4, but I'll say higher because I might like to come back and read it again some day..." or "It's not a 6, but it doesn't deserve to be removed."

Agree with this too.

We're not CoG.

"unless a good story is featured it's hard to find the good from the bad (yes the player ratings is an indicator but still... there's too many)"

But it's still a good system. Afterall, there is an option to filter games by rating, so if you really want 4 star minimum stories to be the only ones showing up, then you can use the filter to do so.

I'll be honest, my first story got 3 stars (6/8) and I'm actually proud that my first story got that rating, so of course I would be angry to find out that it got deleted, even 5 years down the line as you mentioned, just because it wasn't "good enough". Now perhaps if I left the site and never came back, I guess there isn't anything I could do, but what if I wanted to come back just to visit and find out my story was deleted? Well I would be pissed and never come back every again.

I would definitely support removing the 2s after a certain amount of time, and maybe the 3s as well after if meeting certain criteria, such as being unfinished. An 'feedback plz' interest check from 2007, I think we all know is never going to be picked up again.

Sometimes there are perfectly decent games that I'd nevertheless not rate higher than a 3 or 4, because they're short or simply aiming to be an entertaining way to spend five minutes and not great literature. I'd hate for them to get thrown in the mix with the just plain bad ones. 

Agreed.

At some point, we will comb the stories, but it won't be based on rating alone.

I don't think so, if there was a good story out there that had a rating of at least four, why would we delete it? This would discourage young and new writers here on the site by having their works crumbled to pieces in front of them. I'd rather keep those stories and think, "I remember creating this, that was fun!" instead of "Oh, I remember this, it was the one that was deleted."

I doubt they'll actually be deleted, more likely unpublished. And the talk was about two and three star stories, and even then not based on the rating alone, if you'll look at 3J's last post.

This isn't a site just for writers, don't forget. There's far more readers than writers, and quality work that can be easily found, even off the main page, without having to pull the galoshes on and do a bunch of wading is the kind of thing that makes them want to stick around. The internet is overflowing with sites where anyone can post anything, zero effort required. People looking for stories appreciate an accessible site that still has some kind of standards. 

And again I don't understand the attitude I often encounter where having standards somehow 'discourages new writers'. Nothing stops them from writing. The site does encourage people to only publish work that's had a good amount of thought and work put into it, and I don't see that as a bad thing at all.

What if in one week, only one person played it? Then the story might get a one rating, and in the next week, since no one else played it, the story would be deleted.

I am not in favor of this. It would be unfair to the people who've just experienced a love for writing. They are new writers, and make mistakes, whereas the people who've been writing all their life would have absolutely no problem with this.

You're necro-ing an old thread... and the admins can worry about the guidelines. They're the ones who delete stories that are not up to standard, and they have yet to outline the new standards, so protesting right now is a bit meaningless. Besides, this thread was only a suggestion by a member.

And we will get to this at some point. Sorry it's taking so long. I finish exams on the 15th, so maybe we'll start sometime after that.

I know you will.

And I don't feel you have anything to apologize for. We all have school / jobs / families, and it's the holidays. It can wait.

Bumping this. Sorry if it's necroing but it's still a very relevant topic and I didn't see the point of starting a new one to say pretty much the exact same thing.

Though I'll focus my request specifically on the stories with a rating of 2.  They're everywhere and almost universally as dire as the 1s, but right now they can only be deleted if the story also has a length of 1.  The problem is it's pretty difficult to write one that short, even if you're not trying. I've done some experimenting and word counts and such and just a handful of pages with 100 words each can quickly add up to a length of two or a three. My own tiny flash fiction piece was counted as a three.

If we could agree with something like, stories with a rating of 2 and length of 3 or less are removed after a month, that would still leave ample time for an author to improve or expand a piece even just slightly, and clean out so much of the chaff.

I agree with this. I think the minimum standards on the site are still a bit low and while I wouldn't want to put new authors off I think they often lack the motivation to improve their stories. If a story gets rated 1/8 it means just about everyone hates your writing because it couldn't be called a story in any shape or form but to get a 2/8 all an author really needs to do is use some punctuation or have a few named characters. There are lots and lots of 2/8 stories on the site, many of them years old, which will never be improved or read except to pick up a free point.

I think having a time limit where your story is unpublished if it fails to reach a certain level of quality will encourage writers who truly care to improve their work and if they don't care enough to make it better than a 2/8 then we don't have to care enough to read it if it gets deleted in one month or so anyway. I'm not sure how tricky this would be to implement but it would help raise and keep the site's writing standards that little bit higher (though there is always a mix of good and bad stuff). I think any new or writer over the age of 7 could produce a story rated 3/8 or higher if they put the time in, read the Help and Info section, asked for help from members etc.

I agree as well. I think stories with a rating of 2 should get the same treatment as stories with a rating of 1, regardless of length.

I just hope that people don't start rating poor games 3 in order to avoid condemning a game to deletion.

Well, on one hand a longer story is proof at least SOME effort was put in, even if it's got terrible grammar or whatnot.

It's pretty hard to get a 2 here unless the story is just very, very bad, on multiple levels though, so it's not like I would mind 2s being removed, it's just that anything with that rating, and under a certain length, is almost guaranteed to be something dashed off in less than a day, which seems to be the biggest problem the site is facing right now.