Greasy Fork

Adjust percentages on multi-chapter works?

Hi,

This is a very useful script! One thing that I have noticed, though, is that because each reader of a multi-chapter fic generates multiple hits (at least as many as there are chapters) but can only kudo once, the ratio is artificially low for long stories.

So, if there are two stories that were each read by 100 people and 50 of those people kudoed, but story A has one chapter and story B has four, story A would show a 50% ratio and Story B would show a 12.5%, despite the same percentage of readers kudo-ing. (For simplicity's sake, I'm ignoring hits from bots, re-reads, etc.)

Would it be possible to alter the way this calculates the percentages to account for this difference? The idea I have is that there could be a number of chapters variable and the formula to get the percentage could be adjusted, so that instead of

var percents = 100*kudos_count/hits_count;

you could do something like

var percents = 100*kudos_count/hits_per_chapter_count;

where hits_per_chapter_count was hits_count/[number of chapters in the work].

With this change, both story A and story B would display the accurate 50% ratio.

Thanks for considering my comment and for writing this script!

After fiddling with this, I have managed to make it work. I've created an altered version of the script so others can try this variant if they would like to: AO3: Kudos/average hits per chapter ratio. Min, please feel free to incorporate this code if you would like to add an option for this to the original script, and thank you so much for doing all the heavy lifting in the coding!

Hi,

Thanks for the comments! I'm glad you made it work for you and others who want to count it like that.

I've considered that approach before, but decided against it. I just don't think it works out. I think the assumption that every reader generates a hit per chapter is incorrect. For one, many people will only read a story once it's complete, and give it only one hit. (As far as I know, even if you click through every chapter, if it's in one go then it's one hit.)

Looking at an actual example - the most kudosed story in one of my fandoms has a ratio of 4.5% and 14 chapters. While you might think 4.5% is too low for a popular fic, 4.5% * 14 = 63%. That's not a percentage any fic gets after it's been up for a bit. And then there are fics with over 100 chapters.

So, while not taking chapter count at all makes the percentage lower, just multiplying it by number of chapters certainly makes the percentage artificially high. I wasn't able to come up with a formula that seemed fair, so I figured it's best to just count pure kudos/hits and let the user take it with even more grains of salt for multichapter works.