Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

We've all had it - Immature users holding a grudge, users wanting to keep their images on the front page of a gallery longer, or users just wanting to get their Gallery vote count up, some members resort to 0 bombing other users because they know they can get away with it unless they post a comment.

Given that scores are averaged, the less votes an image has, the more it's affected by this sort of behavior. I think, in defense of it's members and the effort (or lack thereof) that they put into their work, anonymity should be partially revoked. Other members voting on an image would still not see other members' votes unless they comment, but the image's owner could see vote history and notify moderators as to anyone 0-bombing their hard work, and moderators could properly handle the situation.

This, as I understand, might lead some moderators to concerns about members suffering harassment because they 0-bombed or gave a lower score than the owner would like, however I think this would be a small price to pay when compared to the good such a thing would do, and partially removing anonymity of a vote would all but stop this behavior quite rapidly anyway, so such concerns would likely be very short lived as a result.

In any case, an improved voting identification method IS required. whether it's through this method or a better one, something should be added to help prevent unfair voting.

Thoughts?

0 and 10 bombing is very rare in the grand scheme of things. All votes are stored in the database and it is quite easy to spot patterns, especially abusive patterns. There is also a toggle to void a vote, and a toggle to give a non-changing score to an image as well as the fact that when an image gets 5 votes, the lowest and highest scores start getting cut out which removes that abuse automatically.

However, I do agree that it can be disheartening and so to stem the few people who abuse the voting in this fashion, there will be purges from time to time. I still need to write the script to do it, but it will be easy to find the abusive users and either ban them from the gallery or from dakka altogether for their bad behaviour. This is a pending task that I'm not doing in the near term but will do and once it is done it will be run periodically.

Thanks for the info legoburner. That sounds like a better approach than relying on ID'ing a user.

I believe that most of the images I have on the gallery were votebombed for whatever reason. Most have "coolness" scores of 0-1, despite simply being minor conversions I placed in my blog. I'm not sure how an unpainted grey commander model or a primed black dreadnaught deserve scores of 0-1 in categories that they logically shouldn't even be eligible for scoring (painting? They aren't even painted). It's also seemingly random as different pictures of the same model will have widely differing scores. I personally believe that they were just scornful votes against me as a user rather than any inherent value of the models themselves.


I would very much like having the anonymity of votes removed. At least in this way I could understand the trends, rather than simply having to "deal" with them.