It occurs to me that maybe I should clarify something... the star rating system is intended only to give us a
general idea of whether the stories we select to appear on EDF are appealing to our readership. While a story with a very high star rating is obviously appreciated by a significant number of our readers, that alone doesn't make it a shoo-in for the anthology, and nor does a lower rating eliminate a story. We have a fairly complex system for selecting stories, which only slightly touches on star rating. We also look at the readers' comments, but again, that doesn't guarantee anything – it just gives us an idea of how readers responded. Ultimately, it comes down to our decision as editors, and this request for nominations is just another factor we can add in making that decision (if someone loved a story enough to bother mentioning it here, it's worth a second look from us).
It's too bad that even in the tables of contents there are no links to the stories making this process time consuming.
Yes, that is too bad. I wish we had the time to do that –
someone would have to manually link each story as it was published, and go back and do that for everything already out there...
Perhaps some of you authors who have 3.9+ scores...and some of you who do not but who's story might have been overlooked or sabotaged, please post your links!
Readers may overlook a story or two, but authors should be assured that my spreadsheet system makes sure
every story gets considered for inclusion in the anthology, regardless of ratings or comments.
I don't think sabotage is much of a problem. There has only been one situation where one individual author's star ratings were deliberately attacked and lowered by some scum life forms who seemed to think it was okay to tinker with our system, but we identified their IP addresses and restored the star ratings to their original goodness. We are always alert to that sort of thing, but it has never reoccurred – and believe me, we would know.
