The Story Challenge “help desk” thread (v2.0)

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Hey all! I wanted to make a (revised and updated) dedicated thread where people could share any questions they might have about the ongoing story challenges.

Pretty much, if you’re unsure how the challenges work, or have questions on any of the challenge rules or themes—or if there’s anything about the process you could use clarity on—just ask your question here! And I’ll do my best to answer it. :blush:


Also, I've added a brief FAQ below! Feel free to ask for clarification on any of these. And I'll update the FAQ as needed.


Q: When will the next challenge be?

A: Currently I’m trying out a format where there are three challenges per year—one in late-winter, one in early-summer, and one in autumn. The winter and summer challenges are the themed challenges. And those are the ones where you get to vote on the theme! The autumn challenge is the recurring Halloween challenge, which has slightly different rules than the usual challenges.


Q: What will the theme be for the next themed challenge?

A: I like to give users the chance to vote on a slate of potential themes! So ahead of each challenge, I craft a list of five potential themes, and then the users vote for their favorite. When it’s time to vote, there’ll be an announcement on the site’s front page with a link to the poll. You’ll have a week to cast your vote. The challenges themselves open for submissions a month after the vote has concluded. This gives people time to think of a story idea that both inspires them and fits the theme.

Popular themes from previous voting slates which didn’t win their round might pop up again later, but not right away.


Q: How are the Halloween challenges different from the regular (themed) challenges?

A: Two things are different: authors are not anonymized like in the regular challenges, and authors can also enter more than one story into the Halloween challenge.


Q: Can you enter multi-chapter stories into the story challenges?

A: Absolutely! Thanks to a neat site update, you can now enter multi-chapter stories into the story challenges! They used to only be permitted in the Halloween challenges, but this is no longer the case.

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Just a quick note: there’s what looks to be an editing error in the current Rules for Submission. Near the bottom, it currently says “those chapters this”, which should either be “those chapters” or “this”, not both.

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Ah, thank you for flagging that typo! I’ve fixed it. :blush:

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So my mind had a brain fart. For some reason I read this just now as Story Challenge: Help Desk. Like its going to have stories about a help desk. Hehe

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Story concept: Help desk that doesn’t fix your problem, but hypnotizes you so you no longer care about your problem :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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How are stories rated when there are multiple chapters? Are the chapters combined somehow or is it based on best chapter…or something else entirely?

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The site calculates each contest entry’s ‘score’ by combing its top four ‘badge’ ratings (aka, the categories such as :fire: or :bulb: or :brain:) with the amount of Favorites the story got (though it stops counting past 100 Favorites). Then it crunches the numbers through a complicated algorithm to get the final result.

This also means that if a story did really well in most of its categories—but, say, didn’t do so well in the :brain: rating—then that one category it did poorly in won’t count against it.

For contest stories with multiple chapters, the top ‘badge’ rating of the story overall is the one that gets counted for the score… regardless of which chapter it comes from.

So when the algorithm is looking for a :fire: rating and a :bulb: rating and a :brain: rating and so on, it grabs only one rating for each… but will take it from the chapter where that particular rating was highest.

This means that longer-form stories which are slower to take off (because they have an introduction chapter, for example) won’t be penalized for that initial chapter having less exciting ratings.

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Amazing explanation!

Only one little detail to add: The number of “favorite” clicks is counted over all stories in a series as unique per person. Meaning that even if the same person favorited more than one story in a series, it only counts as one favorite.

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Thank you both. That covers everything I was curious about.

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I’ve noticed that I can’t edit my comments on my own Story Challenge story, but I can edit my comments on all other stories. Is this deliberate? If so, what’s the reason for that?

(Edit: this only applies to current stories, it looks like; comments on my older story are editable.)

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I don’t know the mechanics behind it, but my guess is it has something to do with how the comments from the (hidden) author are anonymized. It probably treats them similar to anonymous comments in some way, and makes them un-editable for that reason… But that is just a guess on my end! I’m not really sure what the reason for it is, unfortunately.

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That was my guess as well, but I thought I should report it in case it was something that was readily fixable.