A general survey about P.A. and RYM

That it is. It's about time someone made that clear - having an algorithm that diminishes the effect on ratings is a good thing, but that doesn't cover for reputation damage. Time to shake things up, finally?

 the 'pret pakket' haha. 

Edited by Angelo - March 28 2015 at 02:38

Angelo wrote: I was more thinking about requiring an e-mail address and a real name to be provided when creating an account for starters. ;-)

Edited by Dean - March 28 2015 at 06:09

Dean wrote: the weighting system used to reduce the effect of abuse affects all rating-only votes Seriously - why should we force people to write reviews in English?

Isn't the weighting system designed principally to encourage more written reviews? (I'm sure it wasn't designed to minimise the effects of manipulative ratings, that's just a fortuitous consequence of weighting a written review)

I'm not so sure of the gains to be had by foreign language reviews. Spoiler alert: I'm being lazy here and should really research this but... given the huge number of foreign language albums in the PA database, it stands to reason there must be loads of foreign language Prog sites in every continent. Ergo, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that a translator could be found amongst such a site's membership to translate their 'flagship' reviews into English. There is even an opportunity here to forge links with the broader Prog community by setting up a review translate/exchange partnership. I'm sure we have loads of multilingual critters on PA...

...and has some very interesting, undesirable side effects as we see now...

Dean wrote: ExittheLemming wrote: Dean wrote: the weighting system used to reduce the effect of abuse affects all rating-only votes Seriously - why should we force people to write reviews in English? Isn't the weighting system designed principally to encourage more written reviews? (I'm sure it wasn't designed to minimise the effects of manipulative ratings, that's just a fortuitous consequence of weighting a written review) I'm fairly sure that weightings were introduced as a result of abuse of the rating-only skewing the average score of an album. In all other sites that use weighting (IMDB etc) its primary use is to lessen the effect of abuse. Initially the weighting system was for collabs only and included their rating-only votes, this was later changed to be for reviews-only with an extra weighting for collab reviews. Yet the weighting mechanism used by PA makes the impact of rating only reviews practically negligible towards the average score of an album? (unless they number in the hundreds of thousands which is mercifully rare but not unprecedented, as you will readily testify) ExittheLemming wrote: I'm not so sure of the gains to be had by foreign language reviews. Spoiler alert: I'm being lazy here and should really research this but... given the huge number of foreign language albums in the PA database, it stands to reason there must be loads of foreign language Prog sites in every continent. Ergo, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that a translator could be found amongst such a site's membership to translate their 'flagship' reviews into English. There is even an opportunity here to forge links with the broader Prog community by setting up a review translate/exchange partnership. I'm sure we have loads of multilingual critters on PA... In a few cases where lengthy and obviously earnestly serious reviews had been published in Spanish, attempts to find someone willing to translate them came to naught and alas they were deleted. Any human-translation partnership requires organisation and management as ad hoc systems are prone to fizzle out over time as people move away or become disinterested. Sure there could be (must be?) many foreign language Prog sites but there are no multilingual ones.

OK a review exchange partnership with foreign language sites would clearly require organisation and management, but do the people round here honestly believe that a volunteer site will actually succeed in reflecting the views of its multilingual membership without the input, energy and work of erm....volunteers? We're often accused of ethnocentrism and I would concede the 'English only' stipulation probably plays into the accusers hands to a certain extent. Although I've now come round to the view that the 'ratings only' review facility should be scrapped, I'd be loathe to do this without recourse to providing some sort of contingency for foreign language speakers to be able to contribute meaningfully to the site. Is it even beyond a reasonable doubt that the site owner cares little for manipulative ratings as long as visitors are clicking on PA's revenue generating buttons?

ExittheLemming wrote: Is it even beyond a reasonable doubt that the site owner cares little for manipulative ratings as long as visitors are clicking on PA's revenue generating buttons?

Apologies, this is in response to Raff:
Another Italian once said: Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.
Might 'things that require accuracy' include articulating their opinion about an artistic work without the danger of being misinterpreted, misunderstood or subject to ridicule? (Although we're both conversing in English and that hasn't been much help up to now...)


Edited by ExittheLemming - March 28 2015 at 09:09

Dean wrote:  I should point out here that album chart position uses a different calculation system that is not related to the average weighting system which takes into account the number of ratings an album has.

^ this is all speculation at best and no-one has a problem with the site owner earning a profit from his investment. My misgivings just might stem from what I infer as an expedient largesse extended towards transparently abusive member activities.
Similarly, no-one is remotely qualified to know the motives of member maxfax, yet he is still an active PA member 3 days after I contacted the Admins to confirm I had received a PM to review the 2nd Corvus Stone album which the band have publicly confirmed he/she was not authorised to send. Do we also consign this documented abusive behaviour to the too hard basket?