Rating System concern - Suggestions - Forums : Best Ever Albums

Patman360
Serenity Now

Gender: Male
Age: 31
Location: Cork, Ireland

Moderator

Romanelli wrote:

More bad apples than you may think. And unlike forum posts, comments, data moderation, etc...ratings take one small action with no words necessary...you can rate one 20 track album and all of it's songs in a matter of seconds without having to type in a single word or make any kind of thought other than click...click...click...instant 10.5 user points.

Click...click...click...

Plus, it's harder to see what the intent of someone is who just rates. Are they being honest, or mining points? You can see intent with comments and forum posts. But with ratings?

Click...click...click...

Yeah, I'm pretty much having this train of thought also, ratings can be used to gain easy points via continued clicking and nothing else, I'd have no problem with ratings being worth 0 points, that said I probably don't rate stuff as much as the average user here.
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platus

Gender: Male

Dear All

I was not aware about the problems my 10/100 ratings were causing and it was certainly not intentional.

Actually I use the 10 quote as a reminder to check these albums further out.
Part of them I heard in the past, others are related to groups I like.
Originally I used the wishlist, but got confused about which albums I planned to a actually buy and others I just wanted to check out.

Ideally there should be an extra feature on besteveralbums: a "furtherto investigate" or even "viewed" (for the new albums) knob or something..

Anyway, I won't use the rating system for my personal purpose inthe future and use a separate list.

I wish you all a nice day

Norman Bates

Gender: Male
Age: 51
Location: Paris, France

platus wrote:

Originally I used the wishlist, but got confused about which albums I planned to a actually buy and others I just wanted to check out.

You could use the 'priority' feature to sort out your wishlist.

latenighttv

Gender: Male

Romanelli wrote:

I've said it before...the solution is to not award users points for ratings. Everything listed in this thread happens...and there are a lot of people who do things like rate and album an 85, and rate every track on that album an 85...and they do it a lot. Ratings are the fastest and easiest way to dishonestly amass site points. If it were up to me, I'd make them count for zero user points and see how quickly the shenanigans dissipate.

I think I noticed a user who had a bit of a dodgy track rating thing going on once upon a time but they deleted their track ratings a few months back.

Having said that, I just rated every track on T-Rex's 'Electric Warrior' 100/100 - because it's a 100/100 album. Smile

Some albums, imo, do eventually show themselves to have a certain level of quality throughout (be it good or bad)...

benpaco
Who's gonna watch you die?

Age: 27
Location: California

platus wrote:

Dear All

I was not aware about the problems my 10/100 ratings were causing and it was certainly not intentional.

Actually I use the 10 quote as a reminder to check these albums further out.
Part of them I heard in the past, others are related to groups I like.
Originally I used the wishlist, but got confused about which albums I planned to a actually buy and others I just wanted to check out.

Ideally there should be an extra feature on besteveralbums: a "furtherto investigate" or even "viewed" (for the new albums) knob or something..

Anyway, I won't use the rating system for my personal purpose inthe future and use a separate list.

I wish you all a nice day

Hey man, sorry if anything I said came across rude. You seem like a nice person and like you're here for the right reasons. I used to use the "wish list" for bookmarking albums to revisit, that's what I found to be more effective, as it didn't impact the ratings. Enjoy your time here!
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Pavement415

Gender: Female
Age: 24

I found a comment spammer Shocked

he's just copying & pasting the same negative review on every album. What won't people do for points....
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albummaster
Janitor

Gender: Male
Location: Spain
Site Admin

Pavement415 wrote:

I found a comment spammer Shocked

he's just copying & pasting the same negative review on every album. What won't people do for points....

Please let me know via PM who this person is and I'll deal with it. As for other comments on this thread, I'll also deal with those people & respond properly to the issues. I'm currently away from Spain and not able to be online as much as I'd like. I'll resolve all of these issues in a few days time once I'm back home & take the appropriate action for those people that are breaking the rules. In the meantime, just to make clear to people who might not know, one of the BEA site rules is as follows:

Code:

[8] BestEverAlbums uses a points system to determine the functionality that is available to each member. Forum posts, comments or ratings may be removed if they are deemed to be made to artificially inflate a member's score and/or are not adding to the discussion. Members who are found to be doing this on a frequent basis may be banned from the site.

albummaster
Janitor

Gender: Male
Location: Spain
Site Admin

If a rating is left on an album that is outside three standard deviations of the item average, the rating will not be included in the average (which uses a trimmed mean). This is to help counteract exactly this kind of behaviour. However, if a few people do this on each item, then it might be possible, on items with a low number of ratings, to manipulate the site. There are site rules against this, and it's easy to identify the people that are doing this because their ratings will have a higher standard deviation than regular users.

However, the aspect I really don't like here is people spamming the site with artificial ratings, albums they may never have heard, just to bump up their points, so I'll investigate each user mentioned in this post and take the appropriate action (this may involve mass deleting their ratings or banning people).

For everybody else, a far better way of gaining points (than spamming the site) is to join in with the data administration and help ensure the site is a reliable source of information. Most of the users here with the highest number of points are also active with data admin. Personally, this is the biggest kind of contribution people can make as an accurate & up-to-date site benefits everybody.

Defago wrote:

What I propose is normalization at the user level - your visible ratings stay the same, but the real value the site assumes considers that user's average rating and rating variability as well. In such a way, we can have someone who gives 10/100 to everything and one who gives 100/100 to everything - both would be taken as "average" for each user and taken as a higher or lower value respectively. So people who very sporadically give 100s would have their 100s be more valuable than a 100 by someone who rates everything a 95.

I like Defago's idea & I'll look into doing something like this. I think the reason this was avoided before was to try and keep things as simple as possible.

koner1
Biggest Jilm

Gender: Male
Age: 26
Location: Massachusetts

So will this fix the tracks whose averages have been butchered by 15 different users rating them 5/100?

albummaster
Janitor

Gender: Male
Location: Spain
Site Admin

Please post a link to one of these tracks and I'll investigate IP addresses etc to see if any gaming is going on.