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itainohime
Contesting unfair/inaccurate ratings?
Now, I'm not one to sneeze on critique that's offered to me. I've gotten many bad ratings on my stories before, and I've learned to take it in stride, accept the criticism, and learn from it all. However, there's one particular case where I feel I was rated unfairly.

In this case, it's regarding one of my original horror stories. The characters and the storyline are both mine, and it's archived under Original Fiction/Horror here on FicWad. I emphasize this because, when I logged in today, I saw that it has a negative rating: someone rated it as being OOC.

Now, seeing that the story is quite obviously an original one, I'm having trouble imagining how it is that my characters in my story could be out of character, and what comparison the rater used to make that determination. I'm guessing that someone just mistook it for fanfiction, and rated it as such. The problem being that it isn't fanfiction, and the OOC rating therefore shouldn't apply.

Unfortunately, there's no way that I know of for actually contesting such a thing, so for now, my story is rated as having not portrayed my original characters in-character. So what does one do when one receives a negative rating that doesn't even apply to one's story? Am I going to have to suck it up, or is there a way of contesting such a rating? I can understand where such an allowance would open a huge can of worms, but I also don't think it's fair for authors to receive such ratings. At that point, it's not even critique.
Posted at 2007-01-12 07:34:03
Ithilwen The person's finger probably slipped. It's happened to me a time or two.

No, ficwad doesn't have a system for appealing WTF ratings, but there is something that you can do:

You can make a post like this one somewhere on the forums, which will cause people to visit your story, metarate the heck out of your ridiculous rating, and perhaps give you some others that might be more appropriate.
Posted at 2007-01-12 08:19:35
itainohime That's always a possibility, too. I highly doubted that it was maliciously done.

LOL. I'll keep that in mind for next time, should it happen again. XD
Posted at 2007-01-12 09:46:08
Rous Another possibility is that someone is trolling and just rating things down. That happened to me and a few others a while back. The only think I can suggest is that you pray that the smarter readers set their filter at -1, because they know this kind of thing happens. If they do not, they they are naive and probably would not understand the story anyway.
Posted at 2007-01-12 12:18:06
Ithilwen Actually, even -1 'fics show up on an author page, regardless of how the filter is set.

That being said, it's "One of Those Things," right?

(seven minutes later) Holy crud in a HAT.
Posted at 2007-01-13 16:13:13
Rous Went to read the story. Wow! What was the rater thinking? The only way this could be an OCC is for it to be the rater himself. LOL Go, read the review. It says it all. mutters about idiots and ignoramouses
Posted at 2007-01-15 04:55:35
Neptune Hey, I know that story! I read it earlier and never did review (things came up). It's really good. =D
Posted at 2007-01-19 08:22:49
PikaBot Maybe...the person thought it was out of character for a 9/11 operator to talk like that?

I dunno, it doesn't make sense, but I can at least get into the head of someone thinking like that.
Posted at 2007-01-19 14:54:49

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