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Currently if one were to run a search to rank all the images in the gallery by their overall score as in this link...
http://www.dakkadakka.com/core/gallery-search.jsp?sort1=5

You'll see some great stuff. But the voting system in the gallery has been manipulated to put one work before all others. It has a single vote (presumably 10/10) and has had the voting closed so as to prevent further voting. As a result it is ranked above all the other fine works with many many votes but which come in with consistently high scores of 9.9 and the like.

But the first image isn't actually that good, it's not 10/10 IMO, as while impressive overall the close up shots show that some of the detailing is rudimentary.

It's a bit sad that the voting system appears to have been manipulated to cheat at boosting this in the gallery to get views. The other images owned by this user all allow voting but this one doesn't, and conveniently has a single 10/10 score boosting it to the top of the gallery prior to voting being disabled.

I'd be interested in the feelings of others on this matter.

I agree with your concerns. It seems like pieces with locked ratings correctly do not display ratings, but still registers for searching?

You don't see the rating until you get 5 votes, then it shows the average. But prior to that the image is still ranked on it's average whatever that might be. Hence one 10/10 vote effectively makes it the best model ever painted in the gallery.

I've seen people voting for their own stuff before but because more people vote over time the position at the top of the gallery is only a temporary one. Disabling voting stops further votes but the average already established is maintained which is what has been done here to pin this at the top of the gallery's all time best.

I think that disabling rating should remove all ratings.

That would make sense, if the forum software allows for it.

I agree disabling should remove the rating, to counter possible accidents it could have a popup like it does when you go to delete an image.

Unfortunately I also see it being abused as they could disable when it gets a bad rating then enable again allowing them to refresh it. I'm not sure how in depth the mod alert in the gallery is, though it would also be nice if it could work like the forum.

It should be setting all votes to 0 on disabling of votes. There are/were 122 images not like that and there are a couple of cheeky ways around it. If it continues to be an issue I'll add another bit of code to block the workaround. For now, I've manually reset all scores to 0 for images with disabled voting.

Thanks Lego.

If people see another like this feel free to PM me.