KoraL If you are going to do that, why not cut to the root of the problem and do it the Royal Road way? If writers feel that a rewiew is spam or abuse or unfair, they report it to the staff, who will decide whether it's fair to delete the review.

Why go in such a roundabout manner and let the writer delete reviews, just for readers to report them? It's redundant. If you're going to introduce the whole report mechanic in the first place, just have the writer report the reviews instead of allowing them to delete them at their own discretion, and then have an additional step of readers reporting the writers for doing so.

      Demonic_angel thats not the point, if the author is deleting actual constructive criticism and all the good reviews stay then that may bring him to the front page more likely to bring him views, while other authors who similarly have good reviews but don't delete constructive critism reviews may not get into the front page because of him.

          Tomoyuki Well, some people do want to get on the front page and if Webnovel staff see a novel that is highly rated won't it have a better chance to get picked?

              FREEPALESTINEplz I don't think good reviews get anyone to the front page. Only power stones have the power stones have the power to bring someone to the page on rankings. As for featured, that's mostly from contract or trending. Not because of reviews. Reviews basically have no importance when deciding the front page featured

                FREEPALESTINEplz What does that have to do at all with what tomo just said? The editors hand pick who is on the front page. Do I need to retype that into simpler terms for you to understand the underlying meanings?

                    Tomoyuki That makes no sense whatsoever. How am I shooting myself in my foot?

                    Because they are both report button options. P.S. Obv I was just screwing around with you on this one. Too bad u didn’t get the joke.)

                    Tomoyuki Royal Road does this, and it works far better than leaving the power to delete reviews to writers. Obviously a third party will be more impartial than a writer who wants to preserve his/her 5 star rating. Even better, they will get rid of those emoticons and fake 5 star reviews that artificially inflates the ratings.

                    I completely agree with you on this.

                    Tomoyuki Isn't this better than reporting authors, which absolutely does nothing unless you're that determined to ban/blacklit them?

                    But for whatever reason, we have the system that we have now and authors that delete reviews with constructive criticism to keep their 5 star ratings SHOULD be banned.
                    The author’s right to delete reviews is akin to a policeman carrying around a gun. He is expect to use it for protection but when he intentionally uses it to shoot down an innocent, you’d obv expect him to go jail.

                            Tomoyuki I don't care about getting into the front page. It's meaningless. Also, the Webnovel staff are the ones who chooses which stories get into the front page, they don't just randomly pick the highest rated stories.

                            Lilliny What does that have to do at all with what tomo just said? The editors hand pick who is on the front page. Do I need to retype that into simpler terms for you to understand the underlying meanings?

                            Now correct me if I’m wrong, but they’d obv pick among the more popular novels? And for a novel to become popular, they’d obv need to start off by having a high rating..

                                  Tomoyuki Why I replied to your reply of 5 head? To give a reason for why someone would want to report.
                                  But when I said "Limitations" it doesn't have to include reporting from your pov or can include the report from someone else's pov. Basically, whatever solution tops at the end can replace that, to prevent the deletion of constructive criticisms.

                                      Tomoyuki I wholly agree that it would not be optimal, but with "delete -report - review" fewer deleted comments reach the review stage than with "report -review" alone thus Webnovel could hire less manpower, which they may find optimal.

                                          Tomoyuki yes, just look at the prompt for example . Some people have way too many stones that is ridiculous. Authors creating new accounts for voting themselves and such. Even some original stories are like that

                                              Deleting reviews is something I don’t mind being moderated because I have a strict criteria for doing it.

                                              That said, there are far more toxic readers/commenters than writers on this site, so like Tomoyuki said, a report function for such a thing would do more harm than good.

                                              a month later

                                              how about reporting a novel that is suspected from using bots or is boosting their novel through the use of fake accounts... this seems to be unfair to me...

                                                jaylei_4096

                                                As Authors we all know who is botting and who doesn't and what i can tell is that many authors already tried to report them. It is useless.

                                                Even the qidian's website that exists since a much longer time doesn't punish this.

                                                    Probably shouldn’t weigh in on this at all... just want to point out three things:

                                                    1. There is another thread that asked a similar question in a different, perhaps better, way. It was something like, “Should authors be able to delete reviews on their own stories or not?”

                                                    2. Report doesn’t have to mean ban. Reporting a problem just means to tell someone about it. The original post might be asking “is there a place to alert a moderator that an author is inflating ratings by deleting reviews below 3 stars?” I do not want to speak for the original poster; however, I feel the suggestion that he wanted the author banned was an assumption. Seems like both sides think a report system could be useful, just in different ways. (I.e. reporting an author for rating inflation vs reporting reviews that make fake accounts to spam reviews)

                                                    3. This system can be abused in either direction. What we appear to have going on in this thread is a debate over who uses the rating system maliciously more, readers or authors. Someone actually directly said this in their response, and they claimed that readers were more likely to abuse this system. I thought it was a great argument that didn't attack anyone with a different opinion.

                                                    My opinion was stated in the other thread I mentioned. I’ll just add that I agree with whoever said that it is hard to trust a system that weighs “stability of updates” equally with “writing quality” when trying to use the system to judge the quality of a story. Seems like writing quality should be valued higher than how fast updates come out for that particular metric.

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