After some deliberations, let's get it to it. This 's going to be damn long so read at your own interest. This aint just two cents, this gon be a whole bank account of cents. Curses are heavily peppered in this post but you cannot report it because a post should be labelled rated if "the content has ual or extremely violent situations or if you can't comfortably read the post with your parents". If you'd feel uneasy to read something that has a lot of cursing with your parents, then that means you're too damn young to be in this site. If you agree with this post, cool. If you don't, cool. If you have any constructive objections, cool. If you have any rude comments, close the damn tab.

This is from a short tweet thread I've done in Twitter a couple of days ago after "Teacher, My Daddy is Single!" has been replaced by a new featured story:

(2nd of April, 2017) "After four days, the position of my featured story has been replaced by another (hopefully deserving) story. I never wanter my story to be on top for more than 24 hours let alone 96. It ain't fair for those deserving stories that are yet to be featured. Doesn't feel great for someone who have a brutal sense of fairness and justice. It says there "most upvoted story of the day" but the mechanics isn't like that. Everyone who has been around AFF ain't stupid to not realise that. See the thing is, before with the admins choosing what to feature, there's no ty stories featured BUT they chose once in a blue moon and barely 1 per month or foremonth which is sad for the other deserving stories. Right now, every story gets a chance to be featured that lasts for daaaaaaays. Underdeveloped, cheating, or ty stories get chosen too so there's that. My story will be at the main page for at least 48 hours but my wish bout AFF featuring real deservin stories still and will always remain."

As someone who has been in this site for six years and had scrutinised and theorised the mechanics of how does a story get featured, I think I've gain my fair share of sightful opinions to share other than my tweet above:

So the site clearly states "Most upvoted fanfics and stories of the day!". How do you translate that sentence in an easier way? How can we dissect and reverse construct this phrase into a quicker translation? I don't know about yall but for me it literally means "whatever story accumulates the most counts of upvote in the day gets to be featured". It doesn't matter if it's (God forbid) a user cheated their way to the top or a well loved story clawed their way to the top. Whoever gets the most upvotes in a day gets featured the next day.

This isn't what's happening. What's clearly happening are two things: 1. A story has to reach 140-160 new upvotes in a day before the system or someone whos job is to regulate the featured section refreshes the list for the next day, and 2. the system/regulator finds or uses a magical roulette to selects a story that has already accumulated hundreds of upvotes and they feature it to show a story a lot of people loved and rooted for, or unintentionally show the stories that cheated. If you analyse the list of featured story, you'd see this theory may be correct. In my part, number 2 happened. "Teacher, My Daddy is Single already had 500+ upvotes prior being featured. The day before it was featured, I can almost guarantee it only gained maximum 5 new upvotes.

Now what if there's literally no story in one day that reached the 140 line? This leads to the answer why the featured list doesn't seem to always refresh after 24 hours. BUT somehow it doesn't match because on my side, I cannot and will not believe my story (who only gained a maximum guess of 5 upvotes) in March 28 is the highest upvoted story of March 28. That's stupidly impossible. 5 upvotes is the highest upvote in AFF Landia in one particular day? Uhm, I don't think so. And that's far from the 140 line. One thing's for sure, the rhythm of the featured story list is damn unstable but not patternless.

I am confused about this "featured stories" mess. Yep, yall heard me. I called it a mess because it goddamn is. I know that this site isn't perfect, but I know what the truth looks and smells and tastes like. I also know how a missed opportunity looks, smells, and tastes like. And it all ing . For a story to be plastered on the homepage for more than 24 hours can brew a negative effect. I personally find "the list barely changes every 24 hours" absolutely disheartening. The more hours my story stays in the main page, the more I'm concerned. So many undiscovered gold here in this site, so many wasted days. Those days, those spots, they could have been given to other deserving stories. I am beyond ing thankful my story was featured, but I feel so ing apologetic to other worthy stories out there even if I am at no fault. To all those worthy authors and stories out there, recognition will come in one way or another. Best believe.

What do I want to come out of this rant? I want, we all want rather, the featured story list to be given more attention and care by the administrators. I not only advocate fairness, but also balance. There's still a million people here in this site that are childishly desperate or hopelessly scraping to get their story out there, unjust or morally. Let alone the vagillion people here who wants to actually be updated with new stories to give a chance every day. People are innately interested in discovering new things, considered their convenience. So if the featured story list doesn't refresh every ing day like it should do, that decreases the chances of other stories even more. I also want the authors of the other featured stories to NEVER be proud let alone boast if their stories are featured FOR MORE THAN 24 HOURS cos I believe authors like this exists here. I know yall are out there bragging bout your stories that stayed more than 24 hours when your asses know it should never had been in first place. We all had/have this dream about our stories being featured (or maybe the dream of your story being featured cos you're a closet fame and you think having one star can bring you a ton more thus making you a """"star"""" too).

Don't make me ing start about the stories that get advertise more than once because the users are ing loaded with karmas and the stories that stays in the main page just because they became actual hard copy books, because I ing can.

(EDIT: I came to check the faq and saw this: "the story with the highest number of votes and has never been featured before will be chosen as the new featured story on a weekly basis". Weekly basis? I don't get this part quite right. So it isn't per day? Does this mean the highest number of votes accumulated in fours days? And weekly basis isn't every three or fours days. This part makes things more confusing tbh but I had to put this here because not everyone checks the faq section)