Webnovel.Forum

Dan_Ryder Hmm, i truly did enjoy your food with what little i was able to taste at that point. It had its problems, it wasn't a 5 star michelin, but it was still quite a good 4 star restaurant. Tho i couldn't even get to the point of forming any solid thoughts or giving a rating because i was only able to take a few bites when the owner suddenly started hovering over my table. The owner couldn't seem to be able to accept someone saying things he didn't approve of. Even comments that are made in passing between words. So somehow i was basically spat on by the restaurant owner about a dozen times out of nowhere as i was eating, just for daring to say anything. At least that's how it felt to be getting your dozen or so different comments being deleted one after another with the owner not even deigning an explanation. The owner was somehow adamant on hovering over my table and spit on my face every time i dare open my mouth, implying that i don't have a right to say anything and whatever i say is trash. (Now i understand that the owner thought that all my opinion is void to begin with since i was eating the free opening food he served. The free food he uses to attract people into his restaurant. They can only eat and shut up.) The owner was above talking to me. It felt like i was just seen as a cockroach he can crush with his spit. Just spit more and more as my whole face and the food is covered with it. And then when i snap and take all his spit and throw it back at him at the end, the owner was somehow baffled why i would do such a thing. Can you understand my side of things a bit better with this analogy then?

Dan_Ryder you are a massive hypocrite dude! I've just read the reviews on your work, you leave troll 5 star reviews while deleting anything below 4. they need to remove your godly power and suspend you for being such a puss that's incapable of accepting criticism.

Moe_Cyan_Pile that's what reviews are for dude, if your work looks like shit for the entirety of the free 40 chapters, then I'll tell everyone that it's shit.

btw dude I'm just using u as an example, i don't know you or your work, sorry if I'm being aggressive here.

Vyte they delete legit one/two star reviews while allowing spam/troll 5 star reviews. I've been saying it for years that they need to remove the daily exp for reviewing and remove authors power to delete review and hand it to a 3rd party to moderate.

N0xiety When a dog comes and starts shitting on your lawn do you reward him with a treat and tell him good boy keep shitting on my lawn or chase him away and clean up his shit.

Dan_Ryder nice dude! very nice.

calling people dog when you don't agree with them.

MiddleEastern Thanks for expressing your view.

I've personally never deleted one.

Veronica8 i was not talking about you personally, as i don't know you nor your work. and sorry if it seemed personal.

I'm just against allowing authors to delete reviews and webnovel should remove the ability.

MiddleEastern All good. I sort of realized that but thought to add the line just in case.

You're good :grin:

N0xiety That's a funny analogy:)

N0xiety your analogy is funny, but sad too since it is true.
Entitled authors are rampant on this platform hence I do not trust the rating of any original story.
I also read the first chapter of the author's book you answered to and tbh it's just real bad spit and might contain viruses ;) It feels like a 10 year old kid is trying to convey that the protagonist is evil, real evil, like do you get it? he is evilest evil can get... like evil evil evil... and he thinks he is evil like all the time thinking he is evil and should become more evil so he can reign evil above all those evil, but who are not as evil as he is, since he is the most evil evil out there.

Sorry about that :D could not help to not make a little joke there.
Some writing style is just like punching you in the face, repeatedly, and since you tried telling the authors this fact once and they react with spite, get personal and insult you then just let it go. Let them stay the bad writer that they are, no need to give criticism or waste time on an ungrateful person.
There is so much more positive things you can do or nice people who you can work with or influence.
People will eventually realize that being overprotective of their writing is hurting themselves and getting fake compliments is actually hurting their growth, but when that time comes it might be to late and they fked it up too much already :D
Like those authors having "no time" to correct their weaknesses.

MiddleEastern Check my onions and see if you like em.

Well, jokes aside, it's 99% a lost cause and you are wasting your time.

MiddleEastern do not waste your time on this, there have been enough people complaining about this practice for years and WN is not going to change it. Do not try to reason with authors who have a god complex and think every reader has to worship them, for they have graced us with their godly scripts to be passed on to generations to come.
In reality those are just self-centered poor creatures who want to earn some recognition and some bucks and since they are contracted now they delude themselves into thinking they will be the next JK Rowling or JRR Tolkien or whoever you want to name. In reality their writing is still subpar and they will be forgotten by 99% of the readers by next week. Since they do not even try to grow and better themselves they will remain stuck and become bitter by time.

In the end you should just read and support the novels you really like on this platform and leave the others alone. Support the work you like, not blindly supporting the author, and eventually some author on this platform, who is willing to work on themselves, will be able to produce something worth printing and will get their due recognition, but this will not happen to people who insult others, because they cannot receive any kind of criticism.

Veronica8 I agree, a 1 star review with "This is a shit novel" while they have read like 5 chapters should be deleted. I just don't see how feasible it is to have a third party take care of all those reviews like @MiddleEastern suggested. At least the author gets a notification and can delete it right away. I do agree that there should be no EXP for reviews anymore, that way only genuine readers will spend the time to write one.

RABBITICOL your onions are very important to me, give them up now!

I just got triggered when I saw the author like that, being a hypocrite. I know it's 100% a lost cause because people are dumb, the mob will read anything and webnovel have no reason to kick money.

MeriemR It is not about those 1star reviews.
What people are upset about is the 3.5 star review of several hundred words, written with care and written in good faith, that got deleted and on top sometimes also getting an insulting personal message.
The kind of author people are talking about who calls people a dog when he/she/it is not agreeing with you.

All this behavior just to boost their rating, which actually is not important at all, since what counts are the chapters being read, the rankings and the chapters being paid for, also gifts and support through patreon/kofi and the like.

MeriemR it's not about the feasibility of a 3rd party moderation team, it's about the current system which encourages shity reviews for exp and the authors ability to delete criticism. These need to be dealt with ASAP,reviews give ZERO insight into a novel because it's an advertisement at this point.

MiddleEastern well I went back to reading on websites of translators, since people only translate web novels, which were successful and which they liked.
Don't know what got me to open up WN forums lol. Nothing changed, it is still the same mess.
Still frustrated readers and authors with god complex. TBH most, like 90%, of original novels on this platform suck, contracted authors and premium novels included. Too many think they can make quick bucks and there are no editors, so quality is sometimes nonexistent and what WN cares about is the word count, hence the 100k words before any novel can go premium.
As you said it is about money, no one really cares about the quality of these "novels". If quality was considered 99% of the content here would never be published.

Veronica8 Now English is the language of international communication. Nowhere to go :)

EternalNightLotus Very true!

I find it hard to believe this discussion is still going on.

Reviews are worthless as a rule, and the whole system is a joke. 95% or more of so-called reviews aren't even reviews. They're mind farts.

What's sad is that so many readers are guided by those silly little stars. And that they waste time reading that 'review' crap instead of reading the story.

If they bothered to read the first page of the story, they would x) instantly know whether they personally like it or not, y) develop their own critical faculties, z) save themselves tons of time. It takes less time to read a page of a story than to dig through dozens of asinine 'reviews'.

I think the whole system was set up that way so that kids who want to write could engage in interaction. It was never meant to be a serious system, just something to encourage people to get more involved (and maybe watch more ads while they're at it. I wouldn't know, I don't use the app).

So my suggestion would be to stop treating the review system with seriousness it doesn't deserve. I use it solely (and rarely) to encourage kids who clearly have talent to keep going.

And yes, authors definitely should have the right to delete the bullshit masquerading as 'reviews'. But it's probably best just to ignore it.

Gourmet_DAO You can speak other languages as well. I'm always impressed when others can master other languages with English. It's impressive.

Veronica8 Russian is one of those languages in which I can also speak and write, it is a second language.

Veronica8 Yes I agree, the authors should only be able to remove spam posts and real content reviews should be locked. Short one liners or two liners should be comments on chapters not on the book as a review. It would be an easy fix too, all webnovel would have to do was make sure that the reviews have a word count they can't be below. They have it all over their site, the word count limits in certain places, just not reviews. Which astounds me. The letting authors only delete spam and not good criticisms how they would implement that baffles me. I legit have no clue. But it would be nice and a girl can dream. XD

KitKatxKK Reviews have a min requirement of 140 characters, which doesn't help much. Ask them to increase it, maybe, so there can be longer Imma-smash-mah-keyboard-and-see-what-melody-it-makes.

bottosapien Unfortunately people would just google something random and post an excerpt of some random website or something similar. I'm actually surprised more of the spam reviews aren't that already since that takes much less effort than spamming 140 random characters on your keyboard.

chu_chan I've read couple of books from this site, and most of the big authors act like they are on a high horse, legit if you roam the top rankings only few are actually gems, while most are what you call just decent books. The story are littered with the wuxiac formula and cliche troupes, that literally you can't expect something new. And I don't like complaining about writing style but I really suggest if the authors step up on their game, put some ambience on their writing, perhaps avoid flat lines if they can. George RR Martin is a God, dude, you can't compare him with anyone here, his diverse characters are very realistic, not to mention they all collide on a plot that forks into multitude of possibilities and the twists are consistent. Most big authors here only focus on their main character, and on a single plot, I also dislike the fact they kept dumbing down their female leads. Well just an observation.

Most authors here in Webnovel are not typing to improve but typing to earn money. Here in this website, there are only a few authors who respect constructive criticisms but the rest? Hell no. All they care about is their stupid ratings and bullshit five star reviews. I reviewed a fanfic yesterday and poof, it got deleted. The author even said he appreciates all forms of criticisms, and then in the next day he deleted my review. I'm getting triggered by WN's system here. Don't give the rights to the authors to delete their reviews. it's a waste of time to depend on rigged ratings.

Most authors here in Webnovel are not typing to improve but typing to earn money. Here in this website, there are only a few authors who respect constructive criticisms but the rest? Hell no. All they care about is their stupid ratings and bullshit five star reviews. I reviewed a fanfic yesterday and poof, it got deleted. The author even said he appreciates all forms of criticisms, and then in the next day he deleted my review. I'm getting triggered by WN's system here. Don't give the rights to the authors to delete their reviews. it's a waste of time to depend on rigged ratings.

I reviewed a novel called "New Age of Summoners". The novels grammar and storyline are terrible beyond comparison, at least until the 100 chapter after that I dropped it. I wrote a 1 star review because of the grammar and storyline and it got deleted. I saw a few other 1 and 2 star review at that time. I revisited the novel site today and found my review deleted, but not only mine but all reviews under 3 stars are nonexistent. The worst thing is that the novel has a rating of 4.6 even though its terrible and got many negative reviews before. The support didnt give ashit when i reported this. This system is incredibly stupid and broken.

Dyrem Omg yes I hate looking through the reviews and seeing the same three people give five stars with only EXP!!!! as pretty much their Entire Review. It’s such a waste like, at least add something, anything!

Dyrem Omg yes I hate looking through the reviews and seeing the same three people give five stars with only EXP!!!! as pretty much their Entire Review. It’s such a waste like, at least add something, anything!

To be honest, I rarely bother reading reviews much less rely on the star rating. Most reviews are either trolls being trolls or authors/fans rigging said review section. What I usually do is simply go to the Browse section and select a genre I'd love to read (i.e. romance, fanfiction, comics) then select either Updated or Collection.

Updated = I can see that said novel is still active or new
Collection = Number of possible readers = It got to be good if lots of people read it? (I rarely use this method)

Then I read around 5~20 and sometimes up to 40 chapters (depending on available chapters) based on how engaged I got to a novel. Some may consider that 5~20 chapters aren't enough to check whether a novel is truly good or not but this is why being able to write a good Prologue/Intro is a must, it allows the author to hook in readers.

Back when I still used the review function, I honestly tried to write a constructive criticism free of bias as much a possible with a clear format
2stars = I don't plan on reading the novel in the future
3stars = I plan to revisit the novel and see whether the author improved or at least tried to improve on what irked me away from the novel (i.e. grammar, character, plot, etc).
4~5stars = I plan to read the novel up to the end unless there's an unexpected development (i.e. author dropped, somehow it got worse(it's rare but it happens), or simply it went to a diverging path I didn't like).

Sadly, most if not all my reviews of 3stars and below got deleted... Hence, I stopped using it.

Well, I'm an author myself and all I can say is if reviews are done, I'll be more than willing to keep them for the constructive feedback. But if a review is done just to point out that the novel is bad which differs from most, then I might consider deleting it as the review doesn't even specify why, but just, "it's bad", something along those lines I would say. Never deleted a review before, but I guess that's the type of review that would honestly be unappreciated.

Veronica8

As I've read each of the comments in this discussion, I came up with an idea. Why don't we make a discussion by the name of UNBiased Rating System. In this discussion we'll have both readers and authors in the discussion where feedback, both negative and positive are allowed. In this case, authors can't delete the posts of other people's opinion and people can express their true feelings. At the same time, we can report any messages that are deemed to be unnecessary.