Just noted a potential "Hackbarth" situation, regarding Sunshine and Rainbows, a 2017 album by a UK artist named James Walsh. The album has broken into the all-time chart via #1 rankings on four recently entered user charts. Three of those four charts are from user "jwalsh97." Nothing at all suspicious there, I'm sure...
Just noted a potential "Hackbarth" situation, regarding Sunshine and Rainbows, a 2017 album by a UK artist named James Walsh. The album has broken into the all-time chart via #1 rankings on four recently entered user charts. Three of those four charts are from user "jwalsh97." Nothing at all suspicious there, I'm sure...
Oh yeah, that's a pretty obvious one — pretty clearly an unmastered Garageband-quality recording, and when the record label is listed on Apple and Spotify as "753792 Records DK," that means it was uploaded to DistroKid, probably under the $22.99 per year plan. So it's not on Bandcamp or Discogs, FWIW... Still, it probably is his favorite album, what with him having done it himself and all.
baystateoftheartNeil Young as a butternut squashProfile Massachusetts
It's not against site rules to rate your own album #1 in everything. The fact that almost all of the charts are from one user is a good sign that this probably isn't nefarious, as long as the fourth chart is friend/family and not a sockpuppet. _________________ Join us in the canon game :) / Add me on RYM
Agreed — at the very least, landofdafallen, hiphophorray5, swegg105, and heartofahchamp are all the same guy, and those are just the BEA accounts that have Prince Freakazoid charted as the #1 album of all time. Still, I'm sure he's really nice if you meet him in person! 😄
On the plus side though, I did listen to a few of the tracks from the album and it's nowhere near as bad as you'd expect for music being promoted by sock puppet accounts. I might have even downloaded "Nurse Outfit (Dissimulated)," but apparently he's not on Bandcamp and it isn't even on his Soundcloud page. Probably a licensing issue of some sort.
The duplicate accounts have now been banned. It might take a few hours for updated stats to trickle through the site (banned user rankings do not contribute towards the totals).
Hey, I've just noticed that the James Walsh album has (finally) unceremoniously plummeted out of the top 10,000. What changed to make that happen?
Looks like jwalsh97 removed it from his all-time Top 100 last night, probably because we (or you, really) noticed. That would have lost it 99 ranking points, give or take, which is a lot of points. It would be like me suddenly deciding I don't like XTC's Go 2 anymore, since ATM I'm single-handedly providing it with more than twice as many ranking points as everyone else combined. (Which I suppose is yet another reason to just say "ehh, don't worry about it" for albums outside of the top 5,000.)
Also, this might be a good opportunity for me to apologize to fellow BEA members who have albums of their own listed here on the site, and who have (in some cases) ranked them highly. I've only been here for about two years, and I wrongly assumed that this sort of thing was much more frowned-upon than it actually is — so I'm sorry for anything I've posted here in the past that suggested, by implication or otherwise, that this is necessarily a bad thing to do. (Maybe it would be if someone were doing it with several different accounts, or if someone were doing it to promote some really horrible "pornogrind" noisecore act, but if it's just one or two accounts it clearly doesn't have much of an effect on the site's credibility or anything like that.)
...I wrongly assumed that this sort of thing was much more frowned-upon than it actually is — so I'm sorry for anything I've posted here in the past that suggested, by implication or otherwise, that this is necessarily a bad thing to do. (Maybe it would be if someone were doing it with several different accounts, or if someone were doing it to promote some really horrible "pornogrind" noisecore act, but if it's just one or two accounts it clearly doesn't have much of an effect on the site's credibility or anything like that.)
Personally believe (and stated above), it's against the spirit of the site, so it's 'frowned upon' in that respect, but unfortunately it makes no difference to the scores. If multiple people are coordinating their rankings (or same person using different accounts), then it turns into gaming. Unfortunately, it would be impossible to enforce if we said people can't rate/rank your own albums (how do we know which band/artist an anonymous user is affiliated to?)
The fact that one chart can have such a big difference is due to albums being clustered very closely together in the long tail. I've previously thought BEA shouldn't provide a rank at all for albums over a certain number (e.g. top 100,000) and this would also help scalability (reducing/capping the amount of processing needed on the back end). As you've alluded to, rankings are not meaningful after a certain point due to the number of charts that they typically appear in etc, but in the other camp, I also think people like seeing some kind of number to provide a rough gauge as to how high an album ranks versus another album (this is the current direction), but there is a strong case for having a capped maximum rank the bigger the database becomes.
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