Why doesn't anyone bother commenting on the main page? Years ago, I used to get a dozen or so comments for every chapter, but now it's dead silent. I know people are still reading, but no one seems to want to comment anymore.

 

The place is a mess.

 

They disabled anonymous comments. Now people need to be logged in to comment, and barely anyone is.

 

Many people post stuff that's not very good, then they get pissy if you try and give them constructive criticism. Then there are the sad people who take joy in telling you how much it sucks, regardless.
And finally, I think the internet is full of narcissistic ass-wipes who can't take a second away from their life to comment or even vote. How hard is it to click a thumb? They want everything for free and they have no idea how hard us authors work to produce something good for people to read. Hey, we work for comment! Come on, say something.
I'm with you, man.

 

I turned of comments because i got fed up of trolls. Now I write gor me or selected people and dont care on people's opinions really.

 

There are less comments because there are fewer readers. You may think you are getting lots of people reading your story, but what's actually happening is your story is getting indexed by search engines. This site has been around for many years, and all of the search engines (not just the big three, but hundreds of other little ones too; don't tell me you've never heard of the Mongolian Sheep Herders search engine?) constantly hammer this site for new content. Since new content is posted every day, it's prime pickings for those search engines. My guesstimate is that 75-80% of the "views" are actually robots.

Takes a little of the wind out of your sales, I'm sure, but it's reality. That, and people are generally lazy fucks who'd rather read and whack than take a minute or two to write something useful. ::: shrug :::

 

My average seems to be one vote in roughly a hundred views and one comment in several thousand.
If your story is good enough, maybe your readers achieve their goal before they reach the end, where the voting buttons are. At least, that's how I console myself.

 

It's been ten years since I've written any really computer code, but based on what I have done, it seems that it wouldn't be too difficult to only count unique "reads" and not count robot hits. I've always wished they wouldn't count every time someone or myself reopens the story to comment or read comments.

 

Don't forget, there was a bug (maybe still is) where every read counted as 3 reads to inflate numbers.

 

That's possible to an extent, but not really as accurate as you might think. Besides, the goal at this site is to show as many reads as possible because that's what advertisers want, more traffic, not less. Same thing with the number of members. More members, more advertisers. Yes, there's no advertising here, but there are at other sections of this site, and the owners could argue that people drawn here are going to be drawn there too.

Further, to not count robot hits you'd need a list of all of the robots, by IP address, not by their "names" (like Googlebot) and to filter unique hits on re-opens and such would be more extensive tagging of visitors to create sessions and then you have to deal with IP pools where unique visitors could share an IP address within a given time frame................................there'd be no advantage for the site owners to do this. Hence, inflated numbers. Good ideas on your part, just not good from their POV.

 

Hey, y'all make good points only to prove that me at about 50yo came about durring the of comps and that back then I made way more money being a so called stud fishing in AK, most money, Iron working etc. before going back to school and working for state justice depts and accounting depts. Any and all can do what their heart desires and I would love to start programing at 50 and 60 minutes from CBS says that many do so OK> do what you want and by the way get back to me if you have a way to have a woman guide me to her pleasure into my first MMF experience.

 

Just that some of us not too old guys still retain smarts have money,or not yet have skills and then some brainwise, with the grit to not have entertained a Dr. as far as the little blue pill and sometimes would'nt mind the benifitof the doubt as far as we are not fading away in most if all facets of thoughts of the predecessors to our successes. Not to mention our succesors to whome we mostly adore as to be so ultimately successful to higher degrees!