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.

Good idea.

yakface wrote:

Valhallan42nd wrote:Hmmmm... Seems like the two vote line is far harder than the one vote.

I think people were a little more gung-ho to get that first line up to the max, but after that perhaps a bit of the enthusiasm wore off. I know my ability to contribute to the cause has been a bit limited this week as well.


Ultimately we may need some sort of counter that lists how many images you've voted on to spur people onward. Everyone seems to like a little bit of competition.

I mentioned that a while ago, but I think lego' said it wasn't quite set up to do that very easily. But even if not site-wide, I'd settle with knowing how many images I've voted on myself, just so I know how many votes I need to put down every day to have hit everything within a given amount of time... allowing for growth, etc...

My concern with the counter is that people will just vote incorrectly to increase their vote count. At the moment there are around 2000+ 10/10 votes in the system, including 10s for paintjobs on unpainted models, battle reports, etc. While we can cope with a few people trying to up their average in the current system (it will just ignore their vote), it would be a bigger problem if people were just trying to get a better score.

Due to the dropoff in voting, I am going to change the vote counting process temporarily. The voting will now become an average of all votes, and every single vote will count. This will mean that for a few weeks there will be a crapload of 10/10 images that shouldnt be 10/10, and anytime someone votes an image 10/10 it will get pushed to the top (hopefully to get pushed down quickly by everyone else). I can do this now because every image has at least one vote, and it will enable me to cut out the crappy low rated images now instead of later. Once the graph shows that the vast majority of images have at least 5 votes then I'll switch it back. I'll put the gallery changes up sometime in the next week (still testing them right now).

Heh. I was worried that I'd been doing that for a while, when I retrospectively deluded myself that '0' was '10' in the turbovoter. I admit, I've accidently tapped the occasional wrong vote (giving an unpainted model a painting score, but being unable to go back in the turbovoter!) in over-zealousness, and experimented to see how voting scores worked by re-voting with various numbers on my own images.

On that note, how are the ratings currently calculated if not by averages?

Right now (and in the far future), they use the average of the middle 80% of votes - they skip the lowest and highest until just 80% of the votes are left, then it takes the average from that.

looks like a big uptick the last day or two.

Due to the change in the voting structure, this is no longer as pressing as it used to be so I am removing the sticky on this thread for now. Thanks for all your help everyone, and keep voting as the more votes we get, the better the gallery will become!

what's the criteria for going back to counting 80%?

5 votes on 90% of images. It will probably take quite a few months as now voting is optimised to give 3 votes instead of 5, but at least there are far fewer WIP/junk images slipping into casual browsing now.

Can you put the graph on the gallery main page? It's an interesting status report.

I might be able to put it in by the turbovoter, but I wont do a release just for it so it might take a few weeks before you see it.

One thing about the voting though - as always, some people seem to be out to just give you the finger. For example, some of my TWAR got 4 for painting and 4 for coolness...

Overall...I would drop the scoring and voting system, or make it a possibility, not a necessity - I would love a gallery to share my stuff for free like this - love it! and what better place than my fave community. but frankly don't care what it "scores" and rather avoid all the clear "have a go at him" scores, and concentrate on a system where you need to write the comments.

The voting is a necessary evil as it is the only way that we can make it possible to casually browse through with some sort of ranking. Tags alone will not work as there are simply too many images in some tags already, so another set of scoring is required. The 'have a go' scoring that is too low or 'I love myself' scoring that is too high will sort itself over time, both as the average increases from real votes, and as we switch back to only using the middle 80% of votes which cuts out the trollish voters.

migsula wrote:One thing about the voting though - as always, some people seem to be out to just give you the finger. For example, some of my TWAR got 4 for painting and 4 for coolness.

Well that's what you can expect from the unwashed masses. If its basic unconverted space marine it gets 10s, but if it is something new they are not sure how to react to it. The same can be seen allover with other figs from other companies than GW receiving lower scores.

Best thing to do is to ignore the scores especially at this phase as there is so few votes cast. Your stuff seemed to have only couple of votes on them except the space marines of cource

I wonder if by side of Army Profiles, we could have Painter Profiles??

I've stopped updating my pbase, and my mac account is kinda non GW in feel, so dakka would be ideal, but like I said, the voting system's not it for me (and a few friends I've talked with) we already have CMON for voter types, so dakka could be little different IMO.

I was thinking that while it's true some people will vote lower just because they are schlubs, it's also equally probable that you will pick up some votes from fanbois that may balance it out. System is not altogether bad despite resembling CMON.

migsula wrote:One thing about the voting though - as always, some people seem to be out to just give you the finger. For example, some of my TWAR got 4 for painting and 4 for coolness...

I quite agree. I had somebody go through one of my new galleries and rate just about everything a 1 or a 0. This is for stuff that's full painted, on fully painted terrain. I've gotten numerous comments about how cool it is in the gaming store, and it's definitely painted to at least a table top standard. The pictures are not the best, which is why I haven't necessarily posted them in the modeling and painting forum, but they're pretty neat, and you can get a view of some to my Cities of Death stuff.

Overall...I would drop the scoring and voting system, or make it a possibility, not a necessity - I would love a gallery to share my stuff for free like this - love it! and what better place than my fave community. but frankly don't care what it "scores" and rather avoid all the clear "have a go at him" scores, and concentrate on a system where you need to write the comments.

Exactly. It would be nice to have some of the stuff opt out. That way the total number of things that need to be voted on would go way down.

The problem with the opt out stuff is that the whole gallery system was designed to be a superior cmon style system, with better sorting, better voting and far fewer adverts. On top of this we added the capacity for remote image hosting to sweeten people's desire to share their wargaming related images. As a result of this, things are designed to be closely linked to the voting system throughout the gallery which means it will be quite a bit of work to implement a voting opt out properly. Because of this, I'm not too keen on the idea of going in and changing a lot of the underlying structure of the gallery before we even have a decent number of votes in place. It will take quite some time for votes to average out (55000 votes on 20000 images at the moment - need at least 150000 votes before things will become truly fair), and so I'd rather not expend precious development time working on this when it will hopefully sort itself out over time.

If images are opted out of voting, and someone wants to view battle report images for example, how will they be able to sort through great photos of painted armies and terrain and crappy quality photos of grey plastic next to cardboard box hills? Low trollish vote scores will get corrected by the masses over time, the only real benefit I can see would be to people who are just using the gallery for image hosting, and while this is something we do want to encourage, I am less inclined to expend large amounts of development time to that as it would not bring in nearly as much leak through traffic to the rest of dakka as optimising other parts of the gallery.

Until a few weeks ago, all votes under 5 votes were hidden so that this sort of thing would not be an issue. To make things more entertaining for the voters I changed this, but it does come at the expense of the image posters. This is just temporary until we have a lot of loyal voters, but it still might take a while. I'm sorry that I had to do it this way, I much prefer the other method we had which cuts out the trollish voters automatically, but we will switch back to that fairer mode in good time.

migsula wrote:I wonder if by side of Army Profiles, we could have Painter Profiles?.

What sort of thing did you have in mind for Painter Profiles? I'm always open to ideas

legoburner wrote:

migsula wrote:I wonder if by side of Army Profiles, we could have Painter Profiles?.

What sort of thing did you have in mind for Painter Profiles? I'm always open to ideas

I could be wrong, but I think he's suggesting that kind of like we have 'army profiles' separated out from the rest of the wiki articles, we should also have 'painter profiles' where people can display a selection of their work. Kind of like a gallery but without the voting, I presume.

If this is what you're getting at Migs, then it is already possible to do using the existing wiki article software, either in your user wiki profile page or you can always just create a new 'article' that is just a place to display pictures of your work. If that's something you're interested in creating let me know and I can help you out with any questions you have.


But ultimately, creating a 'profile' using the wiki means you're missing out on the coolest part of the gallery: The fact that you can upload giant 10mb pictures and people can zoom into them to check out the details. You no longer have to take 3 or 4 pictures to show off different parts of the model, you can now just submit one giant hi-quality picture and users can zoom in to check out all the detail they want to of your model.

Other sites have had the ability to 'click in' to see a giant version of the picture, but no mini-site has ever (to my knowledge) had the ability to zoom and drag at will without loading a new page. That's reason enough IMHO that you, and anyone else who takes a great deal of time to convert, paint and photograph their pics should use the Dakka gallery.


Yes, you may get the odd person who votes too high or too low for your image, but you have to think of voting as an important 'tool' and not the absolute value of the quality of the miniature. It is important to have some way to rank pictures of miniatures with a fine paint job from those without, and the voting system does that. It isn't perfect, but over time it does tend to self-correct. There are people who see a picture that is voted too high or too low and they will purposely vote the opposite in order to counter-balance.

And as Lego said, once all the pictures in our gallery have 5 votes on them, we will flip a switch and then the voting will only display the median 80% of votes, so the extreme high and low votes will be ignored.

Ultimately I would really like for some of the top miniature game painters like yourself to use the Dakka gallery as their 'home base' as we do hope that it provides features that no other standard hosting site or gallery site does combined into one.

On semi related question about gallery and voting, i was wondering if there can be some sort of option to allow us to see the maximum and minimum score received on the gallery itself. I have noticed paintings that's definitely nice receiving 1s and bad painting receiving 10s for example.

What is the trend now? I eyeball it as the number with votes is barely keeping pace with the number uploaded.

Time for another get out the vote campaign?

LunaHound wrote:On semi related question about gallery and voting, i was wondering if there can be some sort of option to allow us to see the maximum and minimum score received on the gallery itself. I have noticed paintings that's definitely nice receiving 1s and bad painting receiving 10s for example.

The max and min will get cut out in the future. I'm considering creating a detailed vote breakdown for each image but it wont be for quite a long time as I'm a bit nervous about how much load the gallery is putting on the server, so dont want to add to it just yet!

Kid_Kyoto wrote:What is the trend now? I eyeball it as the number with votes is barely keeping pace with the number uploaded.

Time for another get out the vote campaign?

The number of votes is sufficient right now. We get over a thousand votes per day, out of 15,000 views per day and 150 new images per day, so enough to sustain us and continue to grow. There is no urgency with getting enough votes now so we can grow at a more leisurely pace and see how it goes.

New images do not seem to be pulling in votes. I noted in another thread that I had to go back 8 pages to find something with more than 1 vote and all the one vote ones I saw were mine.

I think the randomizer favors items with scores when for now we need it to favor unscored items and new ones.

It got changed yesterday so this should start sorting itself out. You can see the uptick in the voting levels already.

Well I think we can safely say we ain't never gonna reach the goal.

But at least the number of images with no votes is slowly rising again. For a while there it was really looking bad.

Kid_Kyoto wrote:Well I think we can safely say we ain't never gonna reach the goal.

But at least the number of images with no votes is slowly rising again. For a while there it was really looking bad.

So optimistic. Perhaps you should work for the government

Maybe it's never going to get there because our output is so much higher than people
voting. I mean, people don't come to Dakka to vote for images. We come to dakka to
discuss games. If we have some extra time, we vote for images.

i'm turbovoting for a few hours.

Kid_Kyoto wrote:Well I think we can safely say we ain't never gonna reach the goal.

Not true, we have 98805 votes right now across 32020 images and the ratio of votes to images is increasing at a much faster rate than new images are being uploaded - aroudn 5:1 which is what we need to hit that goal. As soon as the blue line hits the top, the others should start increasing more rapidly as the algorithm for allocating images to vote has changed quite a lot since the last surge of voting.

There is not a huge need to get more than 2 or 3 votes per image, the reason 5 is used now is because that is where the voting mode switches and only uses the middle 80% of votes, removing any extreme/joke/junk votes and making the gallery fairer.

Once again, thanks to everybody who votes, I hope you get some enjoyment out of it at least rather than it being a chore.