Preventing Premature Ratings

[baystateoftheart]

Kanye West's Yandhi, which has yet to be released or even leaked, already has a 100/100 and a 10/100, apparently based only on users' feelings about the artist. Rating an album prematurely is banned on RYM and such ratings are often deleted by moderators. I know we don't have enough moderators as is, so seeking out and deleting these types of ratings might not be practical, but an alternate solution would be locking ratings before an album's release date. A drawback to that is people would lose the ability to rate an album based on something such as an NPR pre-release stream - do people think the tradeoff would be worth it?
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[craola]

excommunicate them all!
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[baystateoftheart]

[Romanelli]

My vote would be, and always has been, to not allow albums on BEA that have not yet been released. That would solve your problem right there.
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[albummaster]

BEA lists albums up to 90 days prior to the expected release date providing that there is an announced track list (to prove an album is over a certain length). There's a broad range of views on new releases here, but my own view is that there's quite a lot of utility in displaying forthcoming releases and BEA certainly isn't doing enough with them right now.

Many (but not all) releases are leaked before they are released and so users want the ability to be able to rate and comment on these as it provides other users with useful feedback. The issue here is that people are sometimes rating releases before they are leaked (something that I hadn't really envisaged) and I'm trying to think of a workaround that doesn't stop people leaving legitimate ratings. We could blanket stop ratings on all future releases but then lose that feedback which seems a heavy penalty to pay for the few users that are abusing the system.

Perhaps BEA should have a flag to indicate whether an album has been leaked or not, but I think that would be too difficult to maintain. I've just checked the album in question and there's a couple of ratings there and I think possibly the right approach would just be to delete them and PM the users in question. If this happens again, there needs to be a mechanism to report these type of ratings, and this is something that needs to be added to the site (in a similar way to reporting bad comments).

[baystateoftheart]

The two ratings I mentioned have been removed (thanks AM), but there's already a new one for Yandhi

Yeah a built-in reporting system for ratings sounds like a good idea. Should it just apply to releases people can't possibly have heard, or also to scenarios when people rate every album in a discography a 5 or 10 (despite obviously not hearing them all)?
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[craola]

i say we just ignore it. some people really do rate albums they haven't listened to, future release or not. not much we can do to curb that, and what's to stop them from waiting til it's released to do the same thing?
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[baystateoftheart]

[RoundTheBend]

Yeah - I agree with the strength in numbers aspect. Those are likely outliers.

Having said that, I agree that no ratings before an album is officially released is an ok way to go. And furthermore the not adding the album until date of release is not a bad idea either.

As for those wanting to rate based on a leak... in my opinion, they can wait.

But alas, as previously stated it likely really doesn't matter that much.

[Hayden]

I'm all for albums being added before their release dates (listen lists/queues/promo/general knowledge), I think it makes sense on a database-type site,

however, I'm all for an album's ratings being locked until the official release date (think IMDb, which, is unquestionably uglier with this issues than BEA).

90 days pre-release addition is sufficient, but if there's any way users wouldn't be allowed to vote until (whatever, 12:00am GMT on the release date), that could stop some spam/hate.

And leaks are... not as popular as they used to be. I'm finding it pretty rare for anything to leak more than 3-4 days in advance anymore. In the age of streaming, followed by a physical release 3-4 weeks down the road, that aspect's fading a little.