We are happy to announce that Stories 3.8 update is now active on Gay Authors.  This has a couple of Quaility of Life updates and a major new feature.

Quality of Life Updates for Reading

We have added a new "Reading Progress" bar that appears at the top of the page when you are reading and shows your progress down the page.  (it shows progress to end of page, which does include comments). You can also turn off the progress meter in your story settings under the Stories tab if you so desire.

We also have a neat little feature for the chapter text controls.  If you are reading and scroll up, the chapter text controls will appear.  They will disappear again as you start scrolling down. This allows you to quickly adjust the reading settings.

Story Suggestion System

We have implemented a new system that will suggest stories to you that are similar to ones you enjoyed, based on how other members ranked them.  For the paranoid out there, no, this is not A.I.  It's called Collaborative Filtering and is powered by something even scarier than A.I.: Math.  Linear Algebra, particularly.

When you first load stories, you'll see that it is building the cache.

On the story listing, you'll see an indicator of whether the story on the listing is more like or less like stories you've already rated.

If you click "My Suggested Stories", you'll get a list of stories that are rated as likely similar to ones you enjoy:

This is open to authors and staff for now.  Member's will be activated later. (It takes time to build the system)

If you think that rating is not right, then you can just click on it to change the rating (including telling the system to not show you certain stories):

Only you can see your ratings.

The system was initially populated by the following logic:
If you reacted to a story, then it has a 3.
if you recommended a story, then it has a 5.
If you Reviewed a story, then it has whatever star rating you gave it in the review.

And manually rating as above will override everything else.  For example, you loved a story in an area you don't usually read and don't want it powering suggestings, you can still review it 5 star publicly and exclude it from your suggestions.

Oh, and you can also turn it off in your account settings under the story tab.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: The system caches your ratings for 24 hours so that it doesn't impact site access.  It will automatically update every 24 hours if you visit the site. if you go over 24 hours, the you'll see the older cached version and it will update silently.  If it is your first visit, that triggers the cache build and it won't show this feature until it's ready.  (To simplify, it's assigning a rating to over 6500 stories just for you.  Everyone logging in will get different ratings based on what you like.

Happy Reading!