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Some of the vote counts for stuff seem absurd. There's Golden Demon quality stuff with 3s or 4s. Do you think you could make a comment mandatory for votes below 5. That way they are forced to give some rationale for their vote instead of spamming bad votes to rain on peoples parades.

Possibly. It shouldn't affect the overall score though; AFAIK there are normalisation algorithms applied to smooth out the average and discount absurdly low (or sometimes high) scores.

Perhaps if your scoring falls outside of a certain range from the standard deviation of votes, rather than if it is just a "low" score.

Don't really want to have to comment on all the stuff that I rate below 5 (which for me is an "average" model score) that actually warrants less than 5.

I usually rate tabletop quality 4 though.

I agree maybe if it falls outside the standard deviation for a bit or maybe a 1 or 2, but I can see a storm of "thin your paints" if it goes that way.

Maybe the voting system needs to be a little more defined or structured? One to ten is quite an arbitrary scale; everyone has a slightly different way of applying it. Someone might consider a 5 to be average while someone else might rate average as a 6 or 7. Other people put different stock in painting techniques or quality - for example, some people might consider a decent tabletop standard to merit a 6 or 7 while as n0t_u pointed out, he only rates it as a 4.

Maybe Dakka could formalise the banding a bit more - so a boxout on the gallery voting page breaks down the scores - ie if you think it is tabletop standard then it is a 5, if you think it is Golden Daemon standard then it is 8 or above; something like that, that way everyone has a pre-determined scale of marks to decide what to award when voting rather than relying on their own internal scale which can vary greatly from person to person.

Sounds pretty good Filbert. would probably help a lot, I know I personally vote scores based upon different things and still give them the same vote, even though overall, one may be visually more appealing than the other yet someone may have a beautiful metallic technique or a great way to paint faces and skin but isn't very adept at blending? so the score will match up, if we had a scale we could adhere to to make sure we were giving accurate votes i think it would help even out the scores.

I agree, the only reason my average seems so low is because it opens up more for the better jobs as generally nothing seems to go far below the average to me.

Maybe adding in a single word to describe the number next to it or something? Though it should be simple enough not to need more than maybe a sticky in one of the painting sections as a guideline.

Well for me I'm extremist. Lamb dressed as mutton gets a 1 or 2 from me for annoyance factor. Average gets a 4-6, super stuff gets an 8-9.

Here's the deal:

A public rating on the internet always has to be taken for what it is...you're dealing with a myriad of opinions along with a myriad of people voting for reasons they alone know.

Even if you further codify the system to try to identify that a 4=tabletop standard and an 8=Golden Demon standard, it won't change anything. First of all, people still have wildly different concepts of what a tabletop vs. Golden Demon standard is (for example). And even if you wrote pages explaining exactly what was meant by these category numbers you would still end up with some people voting them too low or too high.

That's the nature of public voting. In fact, the more you codify the rating system the more people get bent of out of shape about it. I think CMON is a perfect example...they specify what their ratings mean and then when people don't get the rating they expect, they get much more irate because they feel they deserve a certain rating.

With a public anonymous voting system, a picture rated an '8' for painting doesn't mean that its necessarily better than a picture with a '6' rating...rather that's just what the votes currently say, which can easily change as more votes come in. More importantly, you have to think of it like a poll, there is always going to be a +/- variance because there can be votes thrown in there that really are out of whack (although we do have a system in place to filter out really extreme votes from the norm on a particular image).


Rather than telling you that your model is better than somebody else's model, the voting system has a much, much more important function, and that is to help sort the pictures when people do a search. And while it may be a bummer that a picture that probably should be an '8' is currently a '6', in the grand scheme of things just making sure that picture isn't down as a '1-3', for example, is much more important.


Ultimately we're okay with having a rating system based on people's own personal opinions, because if an image gets enough votes, it always ends up where it should be...the only problem is when an image doesn't get enough votes.

I'd often be happy if I get votes at all.
"Needs 3 more votes" doesn't help me to know where I stand ...

On the other hand I know that I myself should vote a lot more. But then again: One time I took an hour or two and really looked through the galleries and voted. The next day my vote counter still said that I gave 0 votes.

doubleT wrote:I'd often be happy if I get votes at all.
"Needs 3 more votes" doesn't help me to know where I stand ...

On the other hand I know that I myself should vote a lot more. But then again: One time I took an hour or two and really looked through the galleries and voted. The next day my vote counter still said that I gave 0 votes.

Are you sure you were logged in at the time? You can vote in the gallery without being logged in, but obviously those votes won't count towards your profile's total.

Yes. And I tried it again, yesterday. Directly after posting here, I went to my own gallery and after that I viewed random pics, voted and made suggestions for tags, as asked.
I must have browsed / voted for at least half an hour, still my counter is at 37 (as before).

Well, it's not that I want to show of how mony times I voted in the gallery, it's just that I don't want to seem greedy, asking for votes while my counter is low and doesn't change.

Did you log out and log back in again after you finished voting? The counter only updates when you log in/out from what I remember.

Thanks. Tried it and there they are, my votes since yesterday.

Actually, I always stayed loged in, never loged out.

Your votes say 87 now. They update every 24 hours or so (cant pull it in dynamically in real time as it would be too big of a hit on the database unfortunately).