Regarding sugeneg's interesting proposals:

1) I think allowing the authors to "evaluate" reviewers would inhibit more reviewers than it would encourage. Besides we can do that informally anyway with the response mechanism.

2) The idea of 'rating' or honoring the "good" reviewers has some merit, but I don't think there's much likelihood that any reviewer's 25 "favorite" stories would be at all representative of the 'best' 25 stories on the site (which would be impossible to identify anyway). Most reviewers, like most readers, probably confine limit themselves to stories whose themes attract them. A listing of favorites would probably tell more about the reviewer's tastes, than the quality of the stories.

3) The 'going on strike' or 'I'm holding my breath until I get some e-mails and reviews from you bastards!" has some appeal. ;-) But I question the value and sincerity of a review that has been extorted.

4) I do agree that most reviewers have little understanding how much even a brief "great story!" can mean to an author; one could write at some length about whether this lack of emotional/sexual empathy might possibly be what brings us some to this relatively private pleasure in the first place, but I'll leave that to the psychoanalysts.

5) I do think that having to 'register' is an inhibiting factor; I'm sure that a great many readers have strong feelings about guilt/privacy/fear of exposure, if their family, friends, co-workers were to learn about their reading tastes. I suspect that the registration process is necessary to create a data base of reviews that can be tallied, searched, sorted, averaged etc (and I appreciate all those features). You are right that a brief paragraph explaining how (and why!) to register and review might help a bit. But unless one can wave a magic wand and guarantee that any posts to the site (or e-mails to the author) are absolutely untraceable, I think the 'fear factor' will always be there for some people.

Thanks for a thought-provoking post,

Boccaccio