Hey! It looks like you're new here. You might want to check out the introduction.
Show rules for this event
>>Trick_Question
Heh, sorry, I'm not Roger. I'm just asking a pertinent question.
Does guessing wrong lower your score?
Heh, sorry, I'm not Roger. I'm just asking a pertinent question.
Does guessing wrong lower your score?
>>PinoyPony
Nope! Guessing wrong doesn’t.
(If it did I’d be in the triple digit negatives by now lmao.)
It only count if you get it right. ;)
Nope! Guessing wrong doesn’t.
(If it did I’d be in the triple digit negatives by now lmao.)
It only count if you get it right. ;)
>>BlueChameleonVI
There's precedent for someone entering a lot of stories. The very first one of these we had (which was hosted by someone else, and so isn't on this site, and in fact the anthology of entries seems to have been deleted from FiMFiction), I made 9 entries. I did 2 to 4 plenty of times, and in my last hurrah for regular participation, I entered 6. Then there was the one time sharpspark entered what, like 25? Or maybe they had a co-conspirator. Still, there were a ton of entries from just one or two people.
Sharpspark got some of the same criticism that time, but they did bring up an interesting point: the more entries there are, the more entries make the finals. Sure, if sharpspark claimed a lot of the finals spots, it'd push other authors out, and it's possible to write a lot of solid entries. But it's more likely that they'd end up more or less scattered around, and that's what happened: sharpspark didn't claim any more finals spots proportionally than with fewer entries, and the result was that one more of the other authors' stories got into finals than if sharpspark hadn't entered at all. So sometimes it actually is more inclusive.
On reviewing... eh, yeah, there's kind of a karmic balance in doing a lot of reviewing if you're going to get a lot of reviewing, but that can't be enforced, and I wouldn't want to anyway, because people certainly might not have the time or confidence to review. Personally, I don't really care if you don't contribute reviews, though I will cop to one of the effects someone else pointed out: inflating the overall story count can push potential reviewers away. I would have chimed in on reviews if there were fewer stories, but yours weren't what pushed it over my threshold. Even without yours, there would have been too many for the time I could commit.
Another thing is that it's really hard to predict what people will like. The times I did more than 2 entries, I kind of went for multiple genres. You kind of have to. If you write 6 sad shipping stories, they start to run together, and it brings them down collectively. It's hard for readers to rank them against each other, and when they're not distinctive, they tend to fall down ballots. Not memorable isn't the same thing as not good, but when you have more than a dozen stories to rate, it can be pretty tough to mentally separate those.
So it helps to diversify, but even then, you only have so many genres to cover. And some genres just don't do well. Some have the deck stacked against them more than others. Comedies tend not to do as well, since taste in humor is more subjective than taste in many other things. Random stories, heavy doses of violence, and poetry are also examples of what can be inherently polarizing, and even well-executed ones can suffer in voting.
As someone else pointed out, voting results here don't necessarily predict how well a general audience will receive it. I have plenty of stories that finished well down the ballot but got lots of views and good vote ratios when I posted them to FiMFic. There are lots of good authors who frequent this place, and things that finish down in the 25th percentile are often still very workable stories. Controversy tends to play better here, actually, but it's still not immune. If you want to do a grittier take on Celestia, some people will still call that OOC automatically (and yes, I know it's not as simple an issue as that makes it sound).
I've been in the same boat, where I put in multiple stories, and the one I thought for sure would do best ends up way down the list. A lot of people have. Maybe the story just doesn't resonate with the particular readers who voted on it. Maybe you were too close to the source and couldn't see that the story didn't communicate what you wanted it to. Maybe it's just bad luck.
>>Aragon said something that's kind of true, and I'm hoping it just didn't come across quite right. And that is that flash fiction isn't the best place to learn to write. I mean... you have to add a lot of qualifiers before that becomes true. It does teach you valuable skills that are applicable in longer fiction. Flash fiction is the best place to learn to write if what you want to write is flash fiction (and there are plenty of professionals who specialize in that). Other than that, it's just... different. There's cross-pollination that happens, of course, but if I'd said, "Romance novels aren't the best place to learn to write," not as many people would immediately agree, yet I think that's just as true. There are lessons to be learned from long-form romance that can benefit many other kinds of writing, but you learn those other kinds by doing them. So I don't think it's fair to say that about flash fiction, since it's just as true to say it about any category. Writing in a category helps you learn to write that category, and there will be some side effects that bleed into other categories. But the best way to learn writing X is by writing X, and it's not really fair to blame Y for that. If you want to specialize, do. If you want to write a wide variety of things, do. Just make sure you're getting the writing experience that will correlate with and reinforce that.
There's precedent for someone entering a lot of stories. The very first one of these we had (which was hosted by someone else, and so isn't on this site, and in fact the anthology of entries seems to have been deleted from FiMFiction), I made 9 entries. I did 2 to 4 plenty of times, and in my last hurrah for regular participation, I entered 6. Then there was the one time sharpspark entered what, like 25? Or maybe they had a co-conspirator. Still, there were a ton of entries from just one or two people.
Sharpspark got some of the same criticism that time, but they did bring up an interesting point: the more entries there are, the more entries make the finals. Sure, if sharpspark claimed a lot of the finals spots, it'd push other authors out, and it's possible to write a lot of solid entries. But it's more likely that they'd end up more or less scattered around, and that's what happened: sharpspark didn't claim any more finals spots proportionally than with fewer entries, and the result was that one more of the other authors' stories got into finals than if sharpspark hadn't entered at all. So sometimes it actually is more inclusive.
On reviewing... eh, yeah, there's kind of a karmic balance in doing a lot of reviewing if you're going to get a lot of reviewing, but that can't be enforced, and I wouldn't want to anyway, because people certainly might not have the time or confidence to review. Personally, I don't really care if you don't contribute reviews, though I will cop to one of the effects someone else pointed out: inflating the overall story count can push potential reviewers away. I would have chimed in on reviews if there were fewer stories, but yours weren't what pushed it over my threshold. Even without yours, there would have been too many for the time I could commit.
Another thing is that it's really hard to predict what people will like. The times I did more than 2 entries, I kind of went for multiple genres. You kind of have to. If you write 6 sad shipping stories, they start to run together, and it brings them down collectively. It's hard for readers to rank them against each other, and when they're not distinctive, they tend to fall down ballots. Not memorable isn't the same thing as not good, but when you have more than a dozen stories to rate, it can be pretty tough to mentally separate those.
So it helps to diversify, but even then, you only have so many genres to cover. And some genres just don't do well. Some have the deck stacked against them more than others. Comedies tend not to do as well, since taste in humor is more subjective than taste in many other things. Random stories, heavy doses of violence, and poetry are also examples of what can be inherently polarizing, and even well-executed ones can suffer in voting.
As someone else pointed out, voting results here don't necessarily predict how well a general audience will receive it. I have plenty of stories that finished well down the ballot but got lots of views and good vote ratios when I posted them to FiMFic. There are lots of good authors who frequent this place, and things that finish down in the 25th percentile are often still very workable stories. Controversy tends to play better here, actually, but it's still not immune. If you want to do a grittier take on Celestia, some people will still call that OOC automatically (and yes, I know it's not as simple an issue as that makes it sound).
I've been in the same boat, where I put in multiple stories, and the one I thought for sure would do best ends up way down the list. A lot of people have. Maybe the story just doesn't resonate with the particular readers who voted on it. Maybe you were too close to the source and couldn't see that the story didn't communicate what you wanted it to. Maybe it's just bad luck.
>>Aragon said something that's kind of true, and I'm hoping it just didn't come across quite right. And that is that flash fiction isn't the best place to learn to write. I mean... you have to add a lot of qualifiers before that becomes true. It does teach you valuable skills that are applicable in longer fiction. Flash fiction is the best place to learn to write if what you want to write is flash fiction (and there are plenty of professionals who specialize in that). Other than that, it's just... different. There's cross-pollination that happens, of course, but if I'd said, "Romance novels aren't the best place to learn to write," not as many people would immediately agree, yet I think that's just as true. There are lessons to be learned from long-form romance that can benefit many other kinds of writing, but you learn those other kinds by doing them. So I don't think it's fair to say that about flash fiction, since it's just as true to say it about any category. Writing in a category helps you learn to write that category, and there will be some side effects that bleed into other categories. But the best way to learn writing X is by writing X, and it's not really fair to blame Y for that. If you want to specialize, do. If you want to write a wide variety of things, do. Just make sure you're getting the writing experience that will correlate with and reinforce that.
>>Trick_Question
Short answer: I'm messing with the session code, and hopefully it's fixed now.
Long answer: The reason that the server would crash and have to be reset every ~45 days is that new sessions being built up by non-persisting clients would eventually fill up the server's storage. These sessions were all useless, but distinguishing them from actually useful sessions to clear space is expensive.
Instead of doing that, I decided to change the session storage from being in files on the server in /tmp to being in the cookie itself. The upside of this is that errant sessions don't endlessly fill up space on the server, and session data survives a server reset. This is a relatively old idea that's regained popularity since ways of doing it securely have been made robust. The downside is that the cookie data is sent on each request, increasing bandwidth, and that cookies have a size limit of 4KB. However, since the session only contains the user id, this isn't really an issue.
The Perl module that implements this cookie store, though, has a few kludges to it that prevents me from doing a few things I want the session to do: (1) setting the sameSite, httponly, and secure flags on the cookie; (2) only resetting the cookie when necessary; and (3) resetting the cookie if its more than a day old, to prevent expiry.
Coming to your specific question: With this module, the cookie that stores the data is actually different from the one that stores the session id, and the config setting I set to make the cookie expire in 1 year instead of the default 1 day only applied to the latter, so while the session itself persisted longer than a day, the data did not.
So to get the session behaviour I wanted, I wrote my own session handler, which should behave nicely and not cause any problems from now on.
Short answer: I'm messing with the session code, and hopefully it's fixed now.
Long answer: The reason that the server would crash and have to be reset every ~45 days is that new sessions being built up by non-persisting clients would eventually fill up the server's storage. These sessions were all useless, but distinguishing them from actually useful sessions to clear space is expensive.
Instead of doing that, I decided to change the session storage from being in files on the server in /tmp to being in the cookie itself. The upside of this is that errant sessions don't endlessly fill up space on the server, and session data survives a server reset. This is a relatively old idea that's regained popularity since ways of doing it securely have been made robust. The downside is that the cookie data is sent on each request, increasing bandwidth, and that cookies have a size limit of 4KB. However, since the session only contains the user id, this isn't really an issue.
The Perl module that implements this cookie store, though, has a few kludges to it that prevents me from doing a few things I want the session to do: (1) setting the sameSite, httponly, and secure flags on the cookie; (2) only resetting the cookie when necessary; and (3) resetting the cookie if its more than a day old, to prevent expiry.
Coming to your specific question: With this module, the cookie that stores the data is actually different from the one that stores the session id, and the config setting I set to make the cookie expire in 1 year instead of the default 1 day only applied to the latter, so while the session itself persisted longer than a day, the data did not.
So to get the session behaviour I wanted, I wrote my own session handler, which should behave nicely and not cause any problems from now on.
>>Trick_Question
A while back I spent a while thinking about the guessing system and how to make the awards meaningful.
Most of the relevant ideas I posted in this GitHub issue. Admittedly, most of the thinking was about the avoided detection award. The most relevant part:
Maybe there's actually a solution after all: punish wrong guesses slightly (maybe 1/5th of a point), enough to discourage uninformed guesses, but not enough to discourage mising a guess. Then, with uninformed guesses not diluting the data, an "avoided detection" award might have some meaning.
A while back I spent a while thinking about the guessing system and how to make the awards meaningful.
Most of the relevant ideas I posted in this GitHub issue. Admittedly, most of the thinking was about the avoided detection award. The most relevant part:
Another thing I try to keep in mind is that wrong guesses are basically meaningless, at least as far as the observed data is concerned. Most people make about 6-8 informed guesses, and then either don't bother with the rest or just throw in a mostly random one.
Maybe there's actually a solution after all: punish wrong guesses slightly (maybe 1/5th of a point), enough to discourage uninformed guesses, but not enough to discourage mising a guess. Then, with uninformed guesses not diluting the data, an "avoided detection" award might have some meaning.
>>RogerDodger
Perhaps wrong guesses should be penalized based on the probability of a random guess being incorrect. If I wrote two stories out of fifty, guessing me incorrectly should be worth minus 1/24th of a point. That way, guessing me for every story would be worth exactly zero points.
Perhaps wrong guesses should be penalized based on the probability of a random guess being incorrect. If I wrote two stories out of fifty, guessing me incorrectly should be worth minus 1/24th of a point. That way, guessing me for every story would be worth exactly zero points.