Successful Story Hours - a simple analysis (raised from the thread)

I started a SH (AU: Ashes of Zarhan), now that I finally have a campaign again. Just a couple of comments and such, though, but I'd think that would be expected since it's only had two postings. I just wish I could put in actual dialogue, but it would be impossible for me to remember even a sliver of it without a tape recorder and some way to transcribe it. As it is, it's more like Andy Collin's site; a narrative of what happened that session. What y'all are seeing is the handout my players get the next gaming session to remind them what happened, who's where, and who they've encountered.

Edit to put in the SH URL like I should have before :)
 
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I have a player who keeps a quote log, but before that (and sometimes even with that) I just reconstruct dialogue. It doesn't have to be precise. It just has to capture the "voice" of the character in question.
 



This triple post has been detained pending interrogation regarding activities deemed seditious to the State.
 
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MerakSpielman said:
The interesting thing about this scoring method, whatever its faults might be, is that long-established stories don't necessarily have an advantage over the newcomers...

Of course, it would be more accurate if you only counted the posts that were story updates from the author... As it is, my score would go down precipitiously if my players started posting comments. Of course, switching to this method would be more complicated than its worth since you would have to manually go into each story hour and count the author/update posts.
Click to expand...

Also, you have to take into consideration the fact that Piratecat goes through and deletes most of the "junk" posts every so often when the thread gets too large, for the sake of the boards' stability. Thus, his rating should drop a heap, but probably still leaving him in first place.

A quick way, if you didn't know, to get the number of posts by the author of the story hour, is to click the number of replies next to the thread title on the Story Hour forum page. Though that still leaves a lot of non-update comments by the author in the calculation, it's a bit more accurate. You could also divide the views by the number of days since each story hour's start.
 
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Call me crazy, but I don't understand how this calculation gives you anything able to judge popularity better than simply looking at page views.

Assuming I'm understanding the reasoning behind this correctly (not guaranteed), then I see a couple of problems. First, not necessarily everyone who is reading is making posts. Second, some people will check the thread after every reply, in which case a certain percentage of views aren't actually due to updates, but to commentary by others.

So I'm just confused - what exactly is accomplished by doing this calculation? All it does is give a relative idea of how many people who are reading are posting. Even then, you'd need a more in depth analysis, since the author probably constitutes the majority of the posts. It also fails to take into account how long a SH has been around, which is important. So basically, it seems completely meaningless to me, especially as a measure of popularity.
 

My many story hour threads- currently 'active' threads are linked in my sig- have the following ratings:

My old (first) story hour- 12.669
Agents of Chaos- 12.246
To War Against Felenga- 13.935
The Politics of Tirchond- 13.643
Cydra: the Early Years- 9.571
Of Sound Mind the Halfling Way- 12.975
 

Interesting method of analysis. I'm happy with the 14.3 for my current thread, which is higher than the approximate 10 views per post of my past story hours.

I've been keeping a written party log since 1982, previously just for my players. I had sent an electronic version of a new module to PirateCat a little over a year ago, and he told me about ENWorld and suggested that I post it here. Modifying that for other readers has not been that much extra work, just a case of providing some extra background context and stripping out references to the player's real names. I really do appreciate the occassional reader's comment or question.
 

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