Not ranked albums don't appear of the overal year charts - Suggestions

baystateoftheart
Neil Young as a butternut squash

Age: 29
Location: Massachusetts

How about re-framing this idea as making average rating a tiebreaker after points? Doing so would expand the charts like Nick wants, yes. But more important, it would put the albums that are already in the charts in a more logical order. There are a great many albums that are tied in points, and when there is such a tie, albums with lower ratings are often above those with higher ratings. Is this based on fractional points that aren't visible to users, or done randomly? Because it's not alphabetical, based on average rating, or based on number of charts.
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albummaster
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Gender: Male
Location: Spain
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The sequence of the aggregate charts is (currently) solely based on rank points. More than often, there are fractions of points that are not displayed on screen - if this is the case, the albums will have a distinct rank but the points displayed on screen will look the same. If there's an exact tie on the number of points, the albums are ranked equally (sharing the same rank is valid if they are tied on points).

I pretty much agree with Romanelli about why unranked albums shouldn't be tagged on the end of the aggregate charts (especially the overall chart). A lot of unranked albums are here because people create charts just to add albums to the database, then they delete the chart, and add another one to do the same. In the past, I've had thoughts about combining the ranking with the rating to come up with some 'super-algorithm' to incorporate both rankings and ratings into the charts but never came up with anything satisfactory. The problem remains how to surface unranked albums if they aren't in the aggregate charts and this is definitely an issue that requires consideration but not sure it should be solved by loading the overall chart (which is meant to be a limited list of the best albums).

baystateoftheart
Neil Young as a butternut squash

Age: 29
Location: Massachusetts

albummaster wrote:

The sequence of the aggregate charts is (currently) solely based on rank points. More than often, there are fractions of points that are not displayed on screen - if this is the case, the albums will have a distinct rank but the points displayed on screen will look the same. If there's an exact tie on the number of points, the albums are ranked equally (sharing the same rank is valid if they are tied on points).

I pretty much agree with Romanelli about why unranked albums shouldn't be tagged on the end of the aggregate charts (especially the overall chart). A lot of unranked albums are here because people create charts just to add albums to the database, then they delete the chart, and add another one to do the same. In the past, I've had thoughts about combining the ranking with the rating to come up with some 'super-algorithm' to incorporate both rankings and ratings into the charts but never came up with anything satisfactory. The problem remains how to surface unranked albums if they aren't in the aggregate charts and this is definitely an issue that requires consideration but not sure it should be solved by loading the overall chart (which is meant to be a limited list of the best albums).

Good to know about fractional points, thanks. I do still think it would be cool to have average rating as a simple tiebreaker, with no super-algorithm involved.

As far as I understand, there are already hard limits on how many albums users can view in a chart. So adding unranked albums to the end would only affect a bunch of year charts, plus decade charts for the 40s and before. Is this correct? It may not give many albums more visibility, but it's better than nothing. Another idea to give more visibility could be a more customizable random album feature. In other words, a setting to only display albums above/below __ points/charts/votes/rating/ranking etc.
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dihansse

Gender: Male
Age: 60

I'm completely with albummaster and Romanelli on this: I've been thinking a lot as well why this site is based on personal charts but I do think this is the final way in which someone acknowledges that that album is important to them. There's only two things:
- maybe it should be made clear to the new but also to older members that this is the system: I indeed see lots of even older members who give high scores and comments to some of their favorite albums but don't include them in their year or decade charts.
- there are some charts here that haven't been updated in ages and maybe of former members who have simply left the site: why still include these or give some kind of higher weight to charts which are updated regularly but I think this has been debated lots of times already as well

RoundTheBend
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Yeah having a hard time valuing a ranking of something that two people have even acknowledged.

albummaster
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Gender: Male
Location: Spain
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baystateoftheart wrote:

As far as I understand, there are already hard limits on how many albums users can view in a chart. So adding unranked albums to the end would only affect a bunch of year charts, plus decade charts for the 40s and before. Is this correct? It may not give many albums more visibility, but it's better than nothing. Another idea to give more visibility could be a more customizable random album feature. In other words, a setting to only display albums above/below __ points/charts/votes/rating/ranking etc.

That's right for year/decade charts. Obviously there were less albums released prior to 1960, so there's more room in those charts. However, do recognise the need for other tools to help browse the long tail of unranked albums. The random album feature can be customised to restrict random albums to the top 1,000 10,000 etc in the overall chart (the threshold can be adjusted using the 'Set limit for random albums' setting on the profile page).

dihansse wrote:

there are some charts here that haven't been updated in ages and maybe of former members who have simply left the site: why still include these or give some kind of higher weight to charts which are updated regularly but I think this has been debated lots of times already as well

This idea is currently on the 'to do' list and will be implemented, probably at the start of the next calendar year so there's a clean cut-off for comparing against previous years (there will be an impact when comparing against historical information as the data will be using the old formula).

baystateoftheart
Neil Young as a butternut squash

Age: 29
Location: Massachusetts

albummaster wrote:

The random album feature can be customised to restrict random albums to the top 1,000 10,000 etc in the overall chart (the threshold can be adjusted using the 'Set limit for random albums' setting on the profile page).

I've used and enjoyed this customization before. Just thought it would be cool to have more options Smile

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albummaster
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baystateoftheart wrote:

I've used and enjoyed this customization before. Just thought it would be cool to have more options Smile

I'll check into adding more options to that feature...