This is really for Martin, but I wanted to share my query with others. Because of the current contest, and because I’m seeing numerous new stories being posted daily, I was wondering how many stories are on this site. So I found the Statistics section and found the answer: 17,007. I saw how many registered users the site has: 57,307 (as of Oct. 21, 2023). Wow, that’s a lot.
But then I tried to figure out what were the numbers in the three columns below that trying to indicate. Particularly in the “Category selection” column, I was surprised and pleased to find “Alien” to have the highest number, 910783 (pleased because I often really like alien stories). But what does this represent? The number of times a user has accessed a story with this tag?
Just curious - and happy to see the site is well-used (and financially supported).
The columns indicate how often a particular value has been selected in the filters.
For categories it means, how often someone explicitly selected “alien” at the category selection. Not exclusively, he might have selected other categories as well, of course (which would also be counted) and of course if someone just keeps “all” it wouldn’t show up here.
With the tag filter stats it works the same, but with the reverse logic. I.e. “scat” at the top means that this is the tag that’s blocked most frequently.
The site is well used, but as I’ve said in the other thread, it seems to have hit a level where there is not much, if any growth. I wonder if and what I should do about this.
I’ve run an email list for 28 years. In my experience there also is a “plateau” where membership seems to not increase very much. I have two ideas of how to deal with this, based on experience.
You could ask interested members to form an outreach committee whose job would be to make sure links to GSS are placed strategically—where people are looking for gay fiction (or porn).
The risk of promotion is that you would probably get more people contributing substandard stories as well as making silly or spam comments.
Do more (or better: encourage others to do more) to increase the value of the site. We have already seen some of this: get volunteers organized to offer services to help proofread, or translate, or to generally help with writing stories. In other words, have GSS function not only as a repository for stories, but also a website where people can come and learn how to write effectively.
Perhaps the guys who are the biggest supporters and those help you administer the site can discuss this.
Hi @Corin - I’d like to make another suggestion. I see users are posting stories not just in English but in Spanish, German and French. Might it make sense to have translations (not of the stories) but of the site’s main portals? That might encourage more contributions from other language populations and thus increase the site traffic.
Or do what I have seen some sites do: Have a Google Translate button that will translate the stories (and the portal, if you can’t get volunteers to do the translations).
If you try to retroactively make the whole site multi-language you’ll face a huge amount of work.
Usually, if you think globally, you start the site with multi-languages in mind and only define technical labels within the code which are then mapped to actual texts with translation tables.
GSS was never started with this in mind, I’m afraid, so there’s little chance to ever translating it all.
As for the stories itself: Most browsers already offer an in place translation already. This works so seamlessly and well, that I’m really astonished. Not only is the translation itself reasonably good, it’s so seamless, you hardly notice that is has been translated in the first place.
Might be an idea for waaaay down the road, for authors to submit official translations and the story has a little “translation available” button (we all love buttons don’t we), that would drop down a bit like the interactives system; you can toggle between them like chapters but the rating applies to one work.