I've worried about the rec question myself. I've done some recs at stargateficrec and agonized over which stories to rec. Partly, I want to rec stories that haven't been recommended before; the rules say not to rec stories rec'd in the same category, but I do check others so that I'm not recommending, say, a hurt/comfort story recommended the month before in a character category. I also want to rec really good stories without too many flaws, because I don't want people to be disappointed--and I figure I do have some small reputation as both a recommender and a writer of recs.
I do try to stay positive, both in community recs and on my own site. If I have criticisms, I generally try to e-mail or post them to the author. In one case, I actually contacted an author and said, "I'm about to recommend your story, and I thought you might want to clean up a problem with the way your punctuation is displaying before I do that." I figure if I have constructive criticisms, I should give them directly to the author; if they're not constructive, I tend to let them slide. I don't want people to think badly of me (to think, for instance, that I didn't notice errors), but if I'm really writing a rec, it's more important to me to be positive. I've seen a few recs of the "it's a good story if you can get past the punctuation" or, worse, "good story for X, terrible characterization of Y." Some of those have bothered me (though they aren't my stories, nor by anyone I know.) If something bothers me so much it would taint my rec, I wouldn't rec the story.
Maybe that's easy for me to say because I don't rec stories regularly. I put in far too many hours the times I did recs for stargateficrec to do that anytime soon again! (I think I made it too difficult for myself; it really is just me, and I don't want to discourage anyone else.) If anyone has recommended one of my stories with a criticism in the rec, I'm unaware of it. How I react would depend on the criticism! If someone said, "This is a good story except for the goof with the MALP," that's a fair cop (I should probably fix the goof with the MALP in that one). If someone writes, "A good story if it doesn't put you to sleep first," I'd be annoyed. :-)
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I do try to stay positive, both in community recs and on my own site. If I have criticisms, I generally try to e-mail or post them to the author. In one case, I actually contacted an author and said, "I'm about to recommend your story, and I thought you might want to clean up a problem with the way your punctuation is displaying before I do that." I figure if I have constructive criticisms, I should give them directly to the author; if they're not constructive, I tend to let them slide. I don't want people to think badly of me (to think, for instance, that I didn't notice errors), but if I'm really writing a rec, it's more important to me to be positive. I've seen a few recs of the "it's a good story if you can get past the punctuation" or, worse, "good story for X, terrible characterization of Y." Some of those have bothered me (though they aren't my stories, nor by anyone I know.) If something bothers me so much it would taint my rec, I wouldn't rec the story.
Maybe that's easy for me to say because I don't rec stories regularly. I put in far too many hours the times I did recs for