Stories are now listed by ‘recommended’. To see the newest, search by ‘most recent’. This search will then be remembered next time you visit.

I've been working hard to improve the stories section which is now listed according to most recommended by default. This puts out best face forwards for new members and encourage them to join the site. For those who still want to list by most recent, the searches are now remembered so the list will appear automatically how you want it whenever you return.

However if you want to imrove your story rankings and appear further up the recommended list then there's a number of things you can do. The 'most recommended' algorithm takes into account several factors, including whether an thumbnail and description have been entered, how recently the story had been created or updated, how many chapters the story has and number of likes and comments.

Think of a catchy title, upload a thumbnail and enter a relevant description
Your story listing is like a shop window, tempting members in to read your story. A catchy title will help, something that appeals to their imagination or sparks their interest.

Find a nice good quality image for the thumbail. This will also appear as a 'book cover' at the top of the reading page. For best results the image should be at least 800px wide. It may be clipped to fit the page, so ensure the main part of the picture (the bit you want to keep) is in the center of the image. There are many websites out there that offer free clipart and other images that you could use. Try this one for a start vecteezy.com/free-vector/fat.

The description is all important since many members will need further encouragment before clicking to view your story, especially if they're in an area with a slow internet connection. It's easier just to scroll down to look for someting else unless they can see it's something they want to read.

Add at least 3 chapters to begin with
Although writing good stories takes time and effort, it's worth adding a few chapters to start with to tempt members in and get them engaged in your story. You can alway add more chapters later when you have more time.

Try to build up a following
I've now added a 'follow' button to the bottom of the reading page. If you can encourage members to follow you, they will recieve a notification whenever you upload a new story or create a new chapter. This will get you some instant views and hopefully a few comments and likes that will push your story up the ratings. Members on this site seek out talented authors and keenly wait for new content to become available.

This list isn't conclusive, but hopefully it's a start. I haven't covers interesting plot ideas or good grammar and spelling which will also lead to more views and interest in your stories.

If you'd like to make some money on your uploads of pics, videos or stories please let me know.

Many premium content uploaders are enjoying great success with regular monthly payments and having fun creating and uploading content for members to enjoy.

If you'd like to be part of this and get some reward for your efforts or just find out more, you can message me here or via the contact us page. It's free to use and there's no committment. You can also carry on using the website in the normal way, uploading free or premium content as you wish.

Thanks for all your feedback on this. It's great that so many of you care enough about the stories section to speak up about your concerns, and I've tried to take these into account.

The stories listings have now been re-ordered so that the most popular stories are shown first. This will highlight our best stories to new-commers, hopefully encouraging them to stay. It also gives due credit to our most talented and conscientious authors who have taken time and effort to create really entertaining stories.

However it's apparent that many of you longer term members have read most of the stories we have and just want to see the new stories comming in. Well I've created a new feature that should accomodate this, by automatically saving your searches and displaying the results by default.

When you first view the story listings they will be ordered by recommended. However if you then search by most recent, this search will be saved so that when you return the most recent results are shown. You should only need to do this search once.

It will still be possible to search by newest story, but this won't be the default setting.

For those people who wish to read every new story available and are less concerned about quality, then they'll need to order by most recent. Howewer for people tired of searching for better quality stories things will be easier.

Also Authors who spend a lot of time creating good quality stories will get a higher ranking than someone who's tried less hard. I'm hoping that this will ultimately lead to better quality stories being uploaded.

I will shortly be changing the way stories are ordered on the listing page fantasyfeeder.com/stories. They will no longer be ordered by most recently created or updated, instead they will be ordered by 'recommended'. Stories will be recommended based on an algorithm that assigns a score to each story, those with the highest score being shown first.

Although the algorithm will need to be fine tunes over the comming weeks, it should show the highest quality stories first, those that have been on the site for a while and also the highest quality new comers.

You can see where your story will appear in the listings by clicking on search and sorting by recommended. There are also some things you can do to improve your rankings such as:

* Uploading a thumbnail
* Adding a detailed description
* Adding more chapters

Sounds like a storm in a tea cup. I guess there may be a bit of history that's not reflected here, either with Squish or some other members, because his response in private chat seems a little too irritated and over the top. I'll send a fairly pacifying reply to his complaint, hopefully that will suffice.

All the images will look the same except the shape (aspect ratio) will have changed from square to rectangle.

The issues we're discussing here is that some of the images appear to have gone missing in the process. If this is the case, then your story thumbnail will default to a blue image of an open book instead of the image you uploaded:

The images were resized to fit in with the new design. If anyone has lost any thumbnail in the process please post the story title here and I'll look into it. I still have the original images, so may be able to recover them.