voting bug?

How about we give it a few weeks and allow the Admins a bit of time to fine tune it?
It hasn’t even been active a week yet. :curious:

I also prefer the old system merely for quickly showing me the better quality artworks in the galleries and 95% of the time the rating was justified in my opinion. Although I also like the thought of having the stars appear in the post of the person who commented, but then less people would vote and there wouldn’t be a more accurate average.

Anyway.

There’s just one thing that has me confused. This new system allows me to vote either 5 or not vote. So theoretically any image that has stars is rated exactly 5.00. I noticed in one gallery that some images have ratings of 4.8889 or 4.6667 or something like that. How is this possible? Are there a select few that can vote less than 5?

Anything less than 5.0 would have been scored on the old system.

These would be images that had votes before the new system.

Just so everyone knows what is happening.

The old system didn’t work very well, it was easy to “game” and there were some, as Leigh would say, asshats who voted people down for no reason other than to take away stars.

So, we’ve been looking at ways of revising it to provide a better result.

Unfortunately the system is embedded in vBulletin, and any changes are changes to the main code-base, not just an external plugin - so any changes I make have to be careful not to break everything else.

Over the next month or so, I’m going to tweak what we’ve got here - to build something that is more useful. There were constant threads about the OLD system not working, so going back to that really isn’t an option - I’m aware that what we have now isn’t quite working yet either, but it’ll get better.

I thought that might be the case but this image has a less than 5 rating and dates from the 22nd, but this thread dates from the 20th. Just curious that’s all.

thanks salmonmoos for keeping thinking about it. i truly don’t want to post here only to see (or not to see) the opinion of the jury. The opinion of all users is worth the same to me (and hopefully for you too). i feel sorry for all who are in this 5-star row at the moment, after having invested a lot of time in their work. i won’t post a thing here anymore before this is fixed.

i totally agree that the old system was very biased and leigh just became my hero with the statement “People keep abusing the system because of their own shallow, pathetic lives, so we’ve changed it.”
I couldn’t agree more.

But…the new system isn’t exactly perfect either. My opinion is that it should be easy to create a pretty balanced system. You should introduce the 1 2 3 4 options back but, to vote, you must reply to the thread first. The rating should be included in the reply (the people may have the option not to rate too). This way when you give out the rating you are almost obligated to motivate it and maybe also give out crits and comments to help improve the artwork. This way the downrating trolls of cgsociety won’t be protected by an anonymous status and also people who use multiple accounts to rate should be easier to spot. My 2 cents. Eighter way…the old system had to go.

After thinking about this new system change again–I’ll miss the old one. It worked fine.
I think the complaint of rampant de-starring is overblown and that excessive over-rating is turned a blind eye to, or more accurately, not seen at all as an issue. Both of the problems occur early in the process and wane out as votes accumulate.

The OLD game reflected the general mindset here, in all its glory and blemishes. Yes, there were voters that down voted, but not nearly as many 1-star voters as one may think. How do I know? I kept track of many showcase works to see the 1-star voters in action. I did not register many. Just because someone drops a star, does not mean someone shafted him or her with a 1-star vote. You can drop from 5 to 4 stars with a single 4-star vote. Sure there are some voting vandals (rust never sleeps) and voters who seem to deflate the inflated highs out of some sort of vigilante justice thing, but I don’t see it as some evil underworld movement of Asshats, out to steal peoples gold stars (and lawn gnomes).

Exceptional work usually gets high vote counts and is usually ‘plugged’, insuring even higher vote counts. As votes build up, the rating becomes more objectively reflective of the voting block as a whole, eventually neutralizing BOTH of the offending issues.

As far as 5-star rarity is concerned, I think it should be a very rare thing to see. I think the very best of anything should represent less than 1 percent of any category consisting of hundreds or thousands of candidates, as there are in numbers of artists here.

Old system or new, I think any systems results will always have me scratching my head. The problem with the voting lies with the general tastes of the voting pool here, which I find myself at odds with often.
Maybe I’m just getting old. –and wiser? Hmm, older for sure.

Just my non-cents.

I can appreciate the desire to change the current system. Afterall there have been complaints and trying to improve it is only a good thing.

However, I think we have to appreciate that most people (in my highly limited viewpoint) use the voting system not as an ego points scoring system, but more as a means of identifying art worthy of having a look at.

I never realeased I did this until this evening, when, oh what happened, I looked at 10 pages of 2D gallery and only 6 pieces had any stars what so ever.

Are the stars for awards, or are they there as an indicator a piece of art is worthy of clicking on?

I for one would like to see more stars on more pieces of art. If I had submitted a piece of art over the last couple of days, I would be feeling fairly sore right now.

All the best.
David

I have never given 5 stars to anyone. I have not used the new system once, and probably never will. It’s art, for crying out loud! There has to be other options beside “I hate it” and “I love it”. Almost in every work there’s something good. And almost in every work there’s room for improvement.

The old system was not bad. If you need a new one, make it so:

New users < 30 posts - three stars
Users < 100 posts - five stars
Users < 200 posts - seven stars
Users > 200 posts - ten stars

And keep the stars “out of ten”. And make a limit of 5 posts a day for users with under 50 posts. Takes them a good ten days to gain five star capability.
Show total, but pick the possible plugged ones from those who got the most 10 star votes.

I should imagine this current change has made your job of picking up features harder than it was before.

Here’s another way of looking at it. Do you believe its possible to rank art from best to worst ?

C’mon, pictures with only one or two stars always had something wrong in the execution, three stars were good, but the subject was not that popular or there were flaws in the execution, and the four stars were “could be plugged” work. The fact that no one got five stars was just an illustration of the fact that nothing can be truly perfect.

The stars are not the value of the work, just the average of what people voted, no more, and no big deal if awesome work gets only three stars.

The old system had a meaning, and it was never supposed to show the absolute value of the work.

Damn I miss it.

I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. Sure it says “I love it” but think of it more like a “this is good enough and should be noticed” type of selection.

The rating system is not really there to validate the artists merits by putting them in a scale of one to five (that’s pretty shallow). :argh: The system allows our users a mechanism to filter things for us that should go to the front page plug system or be queued in the CGChoice voting system. We can’t look at each thread even though we’d like to be able to. We do rely on our users to moderate (in a limited capacity) for us. This is what this rating thing is really used for.

Art isn’t great and untouchable, it’s just a way for communication, and even more an attempt to do something with quality. It can be very well rated (as everything) after choosing criteria: Workmanship in this case. Rating the way to communicate is certainly more subjective, but absolutely common (e.g. when choosing photos for a publication).

Therefore ideal would be to have separate rating possibilities: one for the technical execution and one for the content - asking possibly too much from the user…? :hmm:

I think frankly, if you are relying on a 1-5 rating to tell you what your work is worth, then you are doing it wrong. Furthermore, if you only view and critique pieces based on their rating, then you’re also doing it wrong. The rating system is a guide only, and should be treated as such.

totally agreed, but the fact is that the old system was indeed a working guide, when there is just about nothing now.

It’s a very romantic thought to create ‘art’ just for ourselves, but mostly it’s not the case (except for therapeutical reasons). We are social beings and dependent on the opinions of others. I’m fine with my work being rated with 1-5 stars, or how ever. While i’m not doing it for myself there will be a rating anyway. But i agree with you absolutely: no one should take it too seriously, it’s a guide only (not necessary how to do it better, but at least how to please better - in my eyes there is nothing wrong about that).

I love the way everyone used to complain about the old system, so we changed it, and now everyone is complaining about the new system.

I guess you just can’t win.

:shrug:

Yes (if I understand the question), but we don’t do it the other way around either.
Assessing what the best art is doesn’t start with assessing what the ‘worst’ art is first and working up (or visa versa). You can rank what you consider the ‘worst’ art the same as ranking the best, though it would be a much more daunting task. Since there is a mod minimum quality filtering process (from what I understand) that takes place before a work is deemed submittable, there would be a lot of work of similar ‘worst’ quality (more than in the ‘best’ quality pool) that would make choosing a hairsplitting nightmare. You wouldn’t have work that looked like a 3 year old did it (5-star best worst art) in the entry pool to make things easier. Choosing the worst quality art would be, I’m sure, an uncomfortable process on many levels. You would also have up-starring vandals–the complaints would be low.

Those who didn’t complain about the old system, who actually thought it worked fine, are complaining now. Those who complained about the old system, those who thought they were unfairly under starred along with others, should be singing praises at this point. This thread should be 20 pages long with halleluiahs. They must be confused or don’t know this thread exists. I think a mod sponsored sticky-poll in the GD forum, explaining what’s going on, before a new (or modified old system :applause: ) is signed off on, would get a lot of useful multi-camp responses.

I dunno.

I think the importance of feedback from fellow artists goes down the drain with this new system. The reasons to publish anything on showcase threads is to get exposure and constructive chritique from other artists. If we would make the art just for ourslves, why would we even post there?

I confess there’s been situations where I have voted less than what I would have initially given. Those situations are ones where some of the lesser quality pieces have got four or five stars. In order to help getting the rating to a more realistic figures I have given only one star even if it would have been “worth” three stars in my personal scale. If that makes me a result manipulator of the worst kind, do please suspend my account. What I did I did for the sake of fairness and I have no regrets about it.

I use(d) the stars as a partial quide when checking the new pieces. I usually check(ed) the four star ones, the ones with zero stars and from the rest those who got the most interesting thumb or a lot of replies.

For my own work (I have only one piece in showcase so far) I was really intrested to see where it ended and wether or not it was what I expected. It was, and I was happy that my initial feeling about it was about right.

I think there was a lot of people who seldom wrote comments when they browsed through other people’s work, but gave stars more frequently. I know I did. Usually when I disagreed with the amount that was presented. And the star system is less “fanboyish” than dropping something as original as “Cool!”. There really is times when there’s not much to say other than “****”.

Having said that, my world is not going to end however you choose to make it work. I just think some kind of a scale served a purpose. And at present that purpose is missing.

Leigh, Khendar and Kirt: I hope none of you took my first post as offence. It was certainly not my intention. I was merely trying to offer a suggestion of the method to use and underline a problem there is in the new system from my personal, subjective standpoint.