and those people who are saying "donate a few bucks" are missing it. the ability to rate will bring exposure to the site and then the added perks of donating will get them to do so. if you think there aren't enough perks to donate if you open up rating to all, you haven't been paying attention to how many new people ask "how do i delete a comic" or "how do i edit a comic"

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what if nigger meant kite

p.s. one score. not a donor and non-donor score. too elitist and ineffectual. ineffectual because it assumes the donor score will be the more highly regarded one, and this won't be the case since the number of votes for the non-donor score will quickly dwarf the number for the donor score. who gives a shit what 100 people think compared to what 1500 think. the only way to care is to polish up that word elitist. lose/lose proposition

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what if nigger meant kite

Well, the main reason for the donor-only voting isn't because of quality. It's because of cheating. People will create lots of dummy accounts just to vote their junk up. At least right now you have to pay for your dummy accounts.

I'd love to open it up to everyone but I have a feeling it would create way more work for me and there would be a lot more complaints of stupid voting bullshit.

Though if anyone has any suggestions, I'm definitely interested. 

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www.bradsucks.net

Say, could you take that donation I just sent and split it up into 30 separate $1 donations, and credit each of those to the 30 dummy accounts I just set up?

Top Rated, here I come!

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

The easiest thing would be to have a 30 probation period before non-donors can vote, and just run a usermap system. Then come down hard on anyone caught cheating.

As for allowing comments by non-donors- I can see this resulting in little viagra ads below our comics.

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Dinosaurs had eggs bro, the chicken came way later.

Bradi hear ya, but that's pretty sad commentary. i mean, who the hell cares if your comic is high rated if you're the one that put it there? congratulations, you like your own comic. whoopity shit.

Bradcould you do something like one vote per ip? people could still find ways around that but it would probably reduce the problem because they'd have to work for it

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what if nigger meant kite

It's true, it's ridiculous. But people will do it just to piss off everyone else. And then your rating system means zero.

That'd help a bit, though it's not too hard to get around that these days.

One idea I thought of would be to make the ratings/rating history public so that the honest/disgruntled users can track down cheaters instead of it being my job.

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www.bradsucks.net

Brad

Then you'll introduce the era of retaliatory voting. Get ready for drama.

mandingo

The problem with that is if multiple people who live together, not everyone gets a vote. And anyone who shares the same public terminals (library, internet cafe, etc) or are on a campus network would be out in the rain. That's happened a lot in Kingdom of Loathing. Multiple accounts show up on the same IP and all the accounts get hosed for multi abuse, even though it's a campus network and they're different people.

Not that a lot of people on SC share IPs, but there have been a few. Me and boorite, Chicka and Nate, mandingo and Twi, Lucky and Humpenstein, arsg and Cities (i think?), etc.

choadwarrior

And that's different from normal how? 

Not that it matters, but it's fun for me to mention: Nate has no idea how the voting system works yet. He still needs my help to make a comic. Which is why he hasn't had any new material in a while. Once he discovers how these forums work, watch out.

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Mediocrity at its most average.

attitudechicka

Can he tie his own shoes?

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Bradi'd be down for this. it would help with personal accountability so someone doesn't go rating every comic someone did bad just because the guy pissed them off in the forums or scuffed their puma or whatever

ivytheplanti think it would be worth it though if it allowed us to open up the voting. especially since brad could probably make an exception and allow multiple votes from an ip if a multiple-donor household requested it, such as you and boo, or me and twi, or gabe and longshoremen

gabe_billingsCan he tie his own shoes?

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what if nigger meant kite

I think making votes public is a baaaaad idea, either it's going to up the agro or result in everyone voting each other "good" so that they don't get a bad rating themselves (which is pointless). As it stands if users want their feelings known they can leave a comment. It's also difficult considering people interpret the rating system differently- In the past I've rated comics "okay" even though I thought they were "good", but didn't feel they were on par with the comics I've rated "good". The other question is should previous votes be revealed or removed (like when the comments went public). The former isn't really fair to the people that voted assuming it was in confidence, the latter will completely screw up the top-rated list. 

A usermap would solve the problems of people that share an ip- basically it tracks every account/ip that has been used in conjuction, and maps out any relationship between them. What Brad does from there is up to him.

No matter what's changed, if non-donors can vote then people can get around ANY system one way or another. Proxy ip's aren't hard to set up. And to be honest anyone petty enough to do this sort of thing is going to be the sort of asshole to go to any length to do it. And it's not people bumping their own scores that worries me, it's some turd voting down other people's work using 30 accounts.

I think what we really need to ask is - What good can come of this, and what bad can come of this?

There's a lot that can go wrong, and the only positive I can see is that it might get us some more regular users. It could also drive away a lot of the current regulars, or even ruin the site for us all. Every now and then a flame war crops up as it is, if this doesn't cause more it'll certainly make it worse when it happens.

The other thing to think about is that short of changing nothing but opening up voting for non-donors Brad is going to have to put in a lot of work making the changes/fixing bugs etc. Even assuming he wants to do this, is this really what we'd most like him to be doing with his time? I can think of a dozen other features off the top of my head I'd rather see- ranging from cusomisable "favourites" drop down in the maker interface to a html editable user profile page to extra panels in our comics.

Brad PLEASE think this through and make sure you know exactly what you're doing before you do it.

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Dinosaurs had eggs bro, the chicken came way later.

mandingo

I don't get how that would accomplish any personal accountability.

1) If someone is on a bad-voting spree for one or more users there will be a shitstorm in the forums, on comic comments, and elsewhere, but it won't change the votes. It might even encourage more against people who join in on the turdicane (I just made up that word). How does that hold people who have good comics accountable for bad votes they get because they come to the defense of someone who is getting shit on?

2) If someone votes another comic bad in good faith, but the recipient votes that user's comics bad in retaliation, then how did that hold the good faith user accountable for anything except an honest opinion and the consequences?

3) A troll hell bent on causing turmoil will intentionally vote comics bad just to get attention.

4) This all lead to more complaints to Brad about real and percieved fighting, etc. "He voted me bad because I voted him bad, but I meant it and he didn't blah blah blah BAN HIM!"

5) I think most users vote on comics based on their content and vote on users based on comics/behavior/personality/etc. Making this public would change that and you'd see comic voting take on the same characteristics as user voting. Yes, I know there are people who down-vote comics out of spite, but I honestly think that is a small percentage.

6) I agree with everything Injokester said.

Things have been relatively calm for the past few months. I'd like to see it stay that way.

I agree with Choad and Injokester. Personally I like the way the voting works at the moment, and like Injokester said, I'd rather Brad spent his time adding new and awesome content rather than changing something that really doesn't need changed.

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The following statement its true. The previous statement is false

As someone who only VERY recently changed from scumbag non-doner to doner I would say that it was the incentive of cool things like voting and editing that did it. If it had been a non doner thing I probably would not have done so.

I also agree with Injokester. About everything. The site is one of only five I bother looking at these days on a regular basis due to its intelligence, humour and ease of use. To be honest, unless something is VERY wrong/the level of income is just not worth it any more I'd say leave it as it is.

no, it holds downvoters accountable for downvoting every comic someone ever did, say.

i can understand the sentiment of wanting it to stay anonymous though. if only for hurt feelings alone when someone genuinely votes okay or bad on a comic. there's also the possibility that the people who vote would vote less, or only vote good, not wanting to risk ridicule, which would promote a sheep mentality which is icky. though there's also the possibility people would stay true to their votes but maybe just explain them more in comic comments. either way, it's still worth it to me, if it would open up the voting. plus Brad said it would cause him less work since cheating would then be monitored by the community, not more as some others seem to be suggesting. it would have to be a "from this point forward" thing i think to be fair to people who voted under the assumption of anonymity. another alternative would be to only reveal suspect strings of votes. for instance, a system notices thread saying so-and-so just voted "bad" on 50 straight comics by such-and-such in 4 minutes.

but keep in mind, the issue is still opening up the voting. getting rid of the anonymity in voting is just one suggestion. i still favor the idea of a single vote per ip. i think people overestimate how many people would really be arsed to set up a proxy, especially if they've never done it before, like me. i downloaded a proxy add-on for firefox so i could try to get around a poker site that only allows 5 searches a day. i couldn't figure it out so i downloaded 4 more anonymizer add-ons that didn't work. i was annoyed within 10 minutes and said fuck it and i'm still searching only 5 times a day. limiting votes by ip would really help imo

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what if nigger meant kite

Yeah good points. Public voting is a super bad idea, melodrama city.

I already record all IPs just about everywhere. But as you can see with the trolls that get through (or maybe you can't, the moderators do a great job of swatting them down), it's still a pain in the ass.

And not to mention there's no real incentive to be a dumbass troll but lots of people do it. Having a voting system is like having a troll scoreboard.

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www.bradsucks.net

How about public voting for current donors just as an experiment (on user rating and comic rating)?

This will result in a smaller shitstorm and give you more data to um, process?

Then you can create a 5-strong panel of invigilator adjudicators with a high comic and moral fibre, mmyers jes lawson etc.

The reason for this would be that if someone thinks they have been rated badly they can 'alert' it to these panelists who can overturn the bad rating if they think poor judgement has been exercised.

Only when each of the 5 panelists have agreed that an unfair vote has been made will the rating be reversed. So resolution on each query will take time but we have plenty of that anyway.

That's Numberwang!

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GOVT. Warning: Do not smoke around children they will badger you for fags.

What about converting the current ratings system for comics to five stars rather than an arbitrary score?

Also I agree with a comment made earlier (I think by injokester) about good/okay/bad not really covering what I think about certain comics (rarely if ever would I rate a comic bad, I would probably just not rate it, and some of the comics I have rated okay seem to justify a higher rating.) Whilst no ratings system will ever be perfect, a marks out of ten contributing to an overall star score would be my suggestion for an improvement.

I agree the good/bad/okay system is kind of dumb. I've been toying with the idea of removing the okay and bad ratings to eliminate downvoting. I don't think I ever vote anything okay or bad, I only really care if a comic is good.

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www.bradsucks.net

Brad

I think that's a solid idea.  Then a comic can be "top rated" based on the number of "good" votes it recieves.  Great taste, less drama.

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I has a flavor!

Brad

The only downside there is we won't ever see a lot of change in the first page of the toprated- people leave and new members will still vote on the older comics.

What are the chances of having a second toprated list just for comics made in the last month or so? (Then tack on the previous months list below it so it's padded out a little).

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Dinosaurs had eggs bro, the chicken came way later.

Injokester

Pretty good, here you go.

It's not actually just the comics in the past month but instead tallies up votes recorded in the past month and displays that. I can look into the other way if it's an issue. I figure this one actually gives an impression of what people are voting on now.

[edited by Brad on 05-01-07 at 10:05:30am]

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www.bradsucks.net

I'm in agreement with instead of making voting public, we should just tweak the current system. I also get stuck when voting on comics because I'll see one that's good, but not as good as others I rated good, and I'll see one that doesn't deserve a bad, but not quite an okay. Usually I end up just not voting when that happens, which sucks because I'd like to give good votes.

At the very least, if the current rating system could be more synchronized with itself, that would be excellent. There's only 3 choices currently available and yet it maps to a 1-10 rating. That makes my organizoholic mind run screaming. Switching to a 1-10 rating would add more flexibility (or even a 1-5). That way, comics people think are the best thing ever can get 10 votes, and comics people think are good, but not the best thing ever can get whatever varying vote they see fit.

I think someone said all that before, but I'm starting to forget my own name lately.