Putting stubbed fictions in the best rated list just winds up as advertising for KU, and if the reader doesn't have it and doesn't notice before they start, the fictionus interruptus is rather unpleasant.

I personally don't like reading anything but third person novels. Can we please get tags for the three basic points of view? It's frustrating to have to look at the first chapter to figure this out. I'd rather have tags for it.

I think it would be useful, because there are a lot of comments with such words, they just fill in the comments without giving any useful information, and the button is much more convenient, It can also be used to determine which chapter the audience liked the most what can greatly help authors.

In a system where only 4 and above is “good,” negative reviews inherently have a 4 to 1 weight advantage. So, if a story gets ratings of 5,5,5,4,1. The person who gave it a 1 has lowered the score from 4.75 down to 4.0! Whereas the median score (the one in the middle) is 5.0. Update: After thinking about it for a week and now being review bombed myself, here’s what I’d do: You really only want to give outlying ratings as much power to change a story’s score as everyone else’s, just because someone really hated a story doesn’t mean that they should be able to shift it’s rating more than someone who liked it. The median is probably your truest rating, as that’s what most people gave it. In honesty, that’s the score the story deserves… but people want a little more fidelity. So you take the median rating, and cap all the other ratings to one below and one above that. a story with: 1,2,3,4,5 -> rating 3 (median 3) becomes: 2,2,3,4,4 -> rating 3 A story with: 1,5,5 -> rating 3.6 (median 5) becomes: 4,5,5-> rating 4.67 A story with a 1,4,4,5,5,5,5 -> rating 4.14 (median 5) becomes: 4,4,4,5,5,5,5 -> 4.54 A story with 1,2,5 -> rating 2.7 (median 2) becomes 1,2,3 -> rating 2 In essence, this solution lets everyone like or dislike a story based on its current rating. A rating of 0.5, really means “I always downvote this story” and a rating of 5 means “I always upvote this story.” But a rating of 4 means “I upvote this story, unless it’s rated at 5 or more, then I downvote it.” But it doesn’t let anyone's vote count any more or less than anyone else’s. So review bombs get a lot harder to pull off, and people can rate things lower than a 5 without worrying about it. Do realize Royal Road has half points, so just assume its a 1 to 10 scale. Bomb Proof Rating System Pseudo Code Inputs: A list of the number of ratings at each value (assuming a 5-star scale) for example: • 1 star -> 2 ratings • 2 star -> 3 ratings • 3 star -> 6 ratings • 4 star -> 2 ratings • 5 star -> 1 rating A clamping value. This should be linearly interpolated to have no effect once you have enough ratings. I suggest the following values: • 0 to 20 ratings -> Clamping value of 1.0 (makes it very review bomb proof) • At 50 ratings -> 1.5 • At 100 ratings -> 2.0 • At 500 ratings -> 2.5 • At 1000 ratings -> 3.0 • At 5000 ratings -> 3.5 • At 10,000 ratings and above -> 4.0 (effectively off) So, at 35 reviews we’d have a clamping value of 1.25, and at 7,500 reviews it would be 3.75 How it works: First find the median (the rating in the middle) by counting down from the top until you reach the halfway mark (number of reviews /2). Then find your upper and lower clamping values by adding and subtracting the clamping value. In our example the median review is 3, so the clamping values are 2 and 4. Next find the clamped values of all the ratings. In our example this would be: • 1 star gets clamped to 2 • 2 star is left alone • 3 star is left alone • 4 star is left alone • 5 star gets clamped to 4 Then simply find the average of those values. In our case: (2*2)+(2*2)+(6*3)+(4*2)+(4*1) = 44/15 for a rating of 2.93 Where the old system would have given: (2*1)+(2*2)+(6*3)+(4*2)+(5*1) = 43/15 for a rating of 2.86 So, you can see in most cases it will have no or little effect. And once the clamping hits 4, it would have no effect. So this would help out smaller stories more than the ones who have already found an audience. But in a case where someone has four 5 star ratings and one 1 star rating, it would change the rating from 4.2 to 4.8, stopping most one-off review bombers. I’d also suggest locking any IP from making any reviews for a day or two after they leave a 0.5 star review. So people could still do it if the really hated something. But no one could do it systematically. Either that or always show every reviewer the story’s score as if their rating wasn’t clamped. To do that, take their rating, subtract the clamped value from it, divide by the number of reviews, and add this to the displayed score. (So you don’t have to recalculate the base score for every story.)

There should be a change on the main page: change Rising Stars and add (new) Shooting Stars ... hear me out. Rising Stars - Writers on their first novel, literally rising from nothing. Shooting Stars - Writers on their 2+ book, essentially what RS is now... How is something a rising star if it's a rewrite? And if a book is on the list for Best Ongoing, does it need to be on RS? Basically, we rename the current RS to SS (litRPG ftw) and make a new list for the actual rising authors.

It would be great if the fictions you're filtering for only needed to include one of the selected tags. Filtering for every tag you like one by one is pretty tedious.

currently the "dungeon" tag lumps both stories where the protgonist/s are adventurers diving into one or several dungeons, and dungeon core / dungeon master novels where the protagonist is responsible for creating and/or improving/managing the dungeon. both genres are good, but when you are looking for one type of story and the list is filled with the combined mass of both genres it gets a bit frustrating.

After reading stories that are 100% completed, I want to know I've read them, but they also aren't my favorites sometimes. I request to the site to have a new area next to favorites and read later that says stories already read, so that they don't clutter my favorites or follow list.

As the title says. Let us get the ability to click on our Community tab in the Dashboard > Comments, and have a search bar at the top so we can find specific comments or terms used in comments.

Please give us the same sort options for comments that we have for reviews. When I finish a new chapter and check its comments, I want to see discussions about the writing, not a line of people saying “First!” or “tftc” with no other engagement. Thank you

prevent trolls who rate things 0.5 stars without reading a fiction at all by hiding their ratings and reviews from everyone but them. they get to think they are causing harm without actually doing it. Easy to detect as I have seen several of these trolls never have more than 1 or 2 reviews in their profiles above 0.5 stars. Edit: This should also include protections for low ratings on the first few chapters as some are likely to see this and skip to chapter 2 or 3 and rate it 1.5 stars instead (which has already happened to me since I posted this)

I think this would be very useful, in this scenario readers could create bookmarks that they find most appropriate for them, such as "quit", "finished reading" and others, with a limit of five bookmarks created or less, more.

I am a kingdom building addict, and some stories are forced to have kingdom building in the name just to pop up on the search. Please fix and thank you

Currently, books marked as “Not Interested” still show up on lists etc. Maybe we could add these books into the global filtering so user don’t see that fiction again once marked as “Not Interested”

I'd love for a function to be added where readers can like/rate individual chapters. Not only will this help with ratings for the authors (bc then they'll be able to know which chapters hit well and which don't more easily), but it will also allow readers to get a better idea of how positively the work is received by the audience. Additionally, this will add much more comprehensive rating for the fiction than just a one time rating.

The last update appears to have added vibrations whenever you click something. This is super annoying. Please give me an option to deactivate it

I’d love it if there was a setting to have notifications only for novels where you’re caught up to the latest release - this way if I miss one I don’t get the notification for the chapter afterwards and accidentally skip a chapter. I believe this state should already be tracked somehow, since the display is different in the library, so it hopefully isn’t even too large a project to implement. (edit) Note: I’m specifically referring to the mobile app and its notifications, not sure how they work outside of that.

Create a tab to list currently running user ads, I saw one I actually wanted to click on, but refreshed the page and couldn't get it again.

Add a area where we can scroll through all the ads currently available so we don't have to rely on luck to find an ad you saw that was interesting after you clicked the next chapter button.

Enable the author to make a book-specific blurb when making a Volume: in the Dashboard > Content > Volumes menu

Less exterior padding for the comments and smaller profile picture icons, makes them more compact. More easy to view, easier to reply to someone specific, without it being just a continuous indistinguishable thread. An additional improvement to integrate into this system is a TY for the Chapter button. Any comment that contains "Thank you for the chapter" get filtered into this feature and instead of taking space as a comment they can instead serve their purpose as an increasing number.

This would let me know if I dropped the book because I was bored, or if I liked the book and had read everything available at the time. Ie, It should say "Last read chapter: Chapter 23 (3 months ago)", then I scan to the right of it, and see that chapter was posted "3 months ago" or "12 months ago". Then I would be able to tell if I had stopped reading simply because I had caught up, or if I had dropped it without finishing all the chapter because I lost interest.

To a rating system where individual ratings contribute to the overall story rating with a weighted influence. Ratings falling within the interquartile range (IQR)—that is, between the 25th and 75th percentiles of all submitted ratings—will have the most significant impact on the overall score. Ratings that lie outside this central 50th percentile will be progressively down-weighted based on their distance from the IQR. This approach aims to mitigate the disproportionate influence of extreme individual ratings, ensuring the overall rating more accurately reflects the consensus of the majority, similar to how outliers are visually represented and often treated in a box plot analysis.

Not sure if this has been asked already, but a way to sort the library would be helpful. For me, just sorting by unread would be handy

How hard would it be to log how many words/pages/etc... that someone reads? It would be kinda cool to get an award for reading as many words are found in various literary works... I.e. "Congratulations, you've just read more words than are found in the Bible, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and the full set of the 1976 edition of Funk and Wagnalls New Encyclopedia! There could be other kinds of random awards too tree saver award because of the sheafs of paper not needed since this is all digital. Or gallons of ink saved from the printer, etc... It could be amusing.

Makes it convenient for users

so you can make it show you stories in a range for instance "no stories with less than 1000 pages"

Give me the ability to long press a user ad (which as a premium member I have re enabled because they are fantastic) and add the result to a list of things to check out later without leaving the story I'm already reading. That's it, that's the only reason I use the site via browser on my phone still despite the app existing.

It would be nice to have the ability to search for text within all the chapters active for a book or storyline

I think it would be able to see all of the books you have finished in a single easy to find list somewhere in your profile. A “pages read” counter would be cool too but that could be super easily abused by people macroing.

Sometimes novels are taken down for various reasons, whether that’s because the author has stopped posting to move to Amazon or their story has gone in a direction that can’t be posted on Royal Road. Whatever the reason it’s really hard to realise when this happens, a notification saying “novel X has been removed” would be great, that way we could keep track of things that leave our follow lists

I feel as though it would be nice to not read a book and only then find out it’s on hiatus

A lot of reading apps have a setting where you can have it use the volume buttons to scroll down or go to the next page. That would be quite a handy function in this app.

Instead of just favourites, which is fine, customisable lists like Wattpad where we can put down "Cyberpunk Books", "LitRPGs", "Dragons", "Portal Fantasy". Favourites is fine, but having to go through 400 favourites to find one book when you don't remember the name can be difficult.

I started a thread in general talking about this, and Cinn linked me two other suggestions for the same idea: Gem Wardrobes. You can change which border you use, but not which gem. That means that once you rank up in rep, you are PERMANENTLY locked out from COSMETICS that you’ve ALREADY UNLOCKED BEFORE. Forgive the all caps, but this text box has no ‘italicize’ button. Permanently losing access to a cosmetic you already earned when you level up just seems counterintuitive to me. Sure, the new one it gets replaced with might be an “upgrade,” but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and in my eye an oval amethyst is prettier than a rainbow pentagon. I don’t see how having the lower tier gems become locked after you level up helps user interaction in any way either. The only interactions that gems promote are going in author comments and going on the forums — where you get rep. But… if they’re the kind of user that cares about a cosmetic, they’ll already be on the forums, and probably in the comments of at least one author. I’m not a programmer so my word is not law on this, but this seems like a simple change to make. It would also be a good one. There’s nothing to lose by implementing it, and it would be a nice QoL change for users.

I can say I think it would be a amazing feature to be able to hide fictions with the hiatus mark it gets kind of annoying to keep clicking on fictions all over the app and then being disappointed I wish I could just turn them off not just not seeing them in search but the whole app

When I look on the Recommended for you section on the home page, I see stories that should’ve been filtered out because they had tags I removed. This is either a glitch, or the feature was not applied here, and I think it should be.

Currently when we look at our dashboards for a given fiction, we see its current rank. I believe that rank is overall, compared to all stories, across all genres. But I don't care how my Romantasy compares to a LitRPG. I want to see how it compares to other Romantasy. Being #1 for the site is awesome, but I'd rather be #20,000 for the site and #200 for Fantasy and #5 for Romance; this should be fairly calculable. If it needs a separate page so you can specify what you want your rank compared to (one genre, combined genres, etc.) then so be it - I just want more information about how my story is doing.

In some novels (eg Runebound Professor, but also others) within minutes after chapter release the first page of comments is full of "tyfc" comments. Interesting comments come later, either on following pages or as replies to those worthless ones. In later case those replying sometimes feel pressured to pay "toll" for using them to be on first page, which further encourages hurrying to post spam even without reading the chapter. To instead encourage writing interesting comments that are worth of engaging in discussion I propose one of following: * By default sort the top level comments by rep. Worthless ones will percolate to the bottom and will still be available if someone really wants to write something but has nothing better *for some time after chapter release (eg 1hour) introduce minimal length of comment (eg 50 words), like reviews do constantly. Though I fear ChatGPT and copy pastas in this case *simply refuse posting comments frome some blocklist and put some variations of tyfc/thank you for the chapter/first! /... on it. May be hard to create exhaustive list.

I would love a Global option to only download unread chapters, and possibly an automatic download for new unread chapters. I am frequently in places without cell phone service, and it would be handy of chapters were auto downloaded for me. It would also be great if off-line reading was automatically synced back once online. It would also be great to have an option to auto delete the chapter after finishing reading it

If you made it so a reader has to read a certain amount of chapters or/and make it to where they have to have read x numbered chapters for so long (excluding sitting idle on a chapter for a long time) you would dissuade bad reviews based on 1 or 2 chapters. Very few stories that I've read have been good by chapter 1 or even 5 especially when I haven't gotten the time to soak in the experience

Currently readers have to break the flow of reading to go back to fiction page to actively follow / favourite a fiction. Would make more sense for there to be buttons by the next chapter button to quickly follow or favourite a fiction.

This is a suggestion specifically as a Reader Premium perk. Premium readers would gain a feature where they could tag a story they follow with a custom tag visible only for them, or alternatively add to a folder. This would allow readers to sort their follows by their own criteria, such as "OP Stories," "Stories with Dogs," "Good Magic Systems," "Slow Burn," and so on. I'm making this suggestion because, personally, I would really like the ability to note which of my follows happens to be a follower of my own story, because I'd like to support my fans . . . I just don't want to have to track them with an external file.