For 11 years the archive has used star ratings. It's simple in theory, give a story a rating of 1 to 5 stars, but in practice it really hasn't been that useful. One author may feel 3 stars is a solid rating, another may feel it's an insult. One reader may reserve 5 stars for only their absolute favorites, another may give 5 stars to everything they review. One story may only have one 5-star rating, another may have 20, and they are listed the same.

So today we bid farewell to the star rating system and say hello to something we think will be more straight forward and useful: jellybeans! Much like a "like" or a "kudos", readers can leave a jellybean as a small token on stories they enjoyed.

After deciding to switch to jellybeans, the next conundrum of course was deciding how beans will be distributed. If a user is allowed to only leave one per story, the newer stories have no chance of catching up with older ones. If one per chapter is allowed then that puts one-shots and short stories at a disadvantage. Taking all this into consideration, we have decided that users can leave up to 5 jellybeans on a story. So if you like a story, give it a jellybean, if you really like it, give it a couple more, if you absolutely love it, take the time to give it 5!

Though we always want to encourage reviews, you can leave jellybeans without reviewing. You can click on the jellybean count of a story to see who has left jellybeans. Hopefully this goes without saying but there should be no fighting, begging or complaining about the jellybeans. It's meant to be a simple way for readers to give and writer to receive feedback.

We now return you to your reading, don't forget to start leaving those jellybean!