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Topic ClosedA general survey about P.A. and RYM
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lazland View Drop Down
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Points: 13241 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 28 2015 at 09:59
^ whilst I agree with you, Dean, that Max is probably not making shed loads of money from PA, I would not have thought that the running costs are that high.

In any business, the major cost is wages (or personal drawings/salary if you are a one man band). Max doesn't have to suffer that - he has a load of volunteers to do it for him, does he not?

The ratings only system is a pain in the arse, simple as, and should be done away with.
Enhance your life. Get down to www.lazland.org
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ExittheLemming View Drop Down
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Points: 11415 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 28 2015 at 10:00
Originally posted by Guldbamsen Guldbamsen wrote:

Iain: maxfax is out of here whenever he reads the mail I sent him. It doesn't make sense to suspend him, if he doesn't receive any explanation and just keeps on doing what he normally does.
(I have also suspended all of his other accounts plus nuked every rating of his)


Thanks David, much appreciated (me flying off the handle yet again) Thumbs Up
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Points: 23098 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 28 2015 at 10:16
No problem - to tell you the truth I almost suspended him before I thought it through.

As for the whole ratings discussion, I too am in favour of dropping them altogether.
“The Guide says there is an art to flying or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”

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Dean View Drop Down
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 28 2015 at 11:42
Originally posted by ExittheLemming ExittheLemming wrote:

^ 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.
Originally posted by lazland lazland wrote:

^ whilst I agree with you, Dean, that Max is probably not making shed loads of money from PA, I would not have thought that the running costs are that high.

In any business, the major cost is wages (or personal drawings/salary if you are a one man band). Max doesn't have to suffer that - he has a load of volunteers to do it for him, does he not?

 
It's not completely speculation because during the infamous GoogleAd censorship fiasco M@X did say that the major operating cost is the server and bandwidth. When Andy and I pressed this further in the AZ he was more candid about the numbers involved, we were both surprised by the bandwidth used by the site. Obviously I am not at liberty to disclose any of that here. 

The running costs are not high, then neither is the income from advertisers.

While most of us are happy to pay around $10-$20 per month for a broadband connection, those for are download bandwidth - a server has heavy upload bandwidth usage so the costs are considerably more than that. $300-$400 per month would not be unreasonable for the complete package. Please note that this is a for dedicated server and is not the same as the low-cost Web-hosting services you see advertised.

Anyone can get the Alexa projections of what the site is worth in terms of monthly web-traffic off the interweb, all you need to do is search... given that those kinds of sites speculate maximum worth rather than average or net value then it is easy to see that the monthly income is not dissimilar to the possible monthly running costs.

So yes Steve, the major cost of a business is wages - if this was a waged site then its costs would be more in-line with a comparable size business. 
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timothy leary View Drop Down
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Points: 5319 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 28 2015 at 12:04
What about members who are not good at writing reviews but are honest with their ratings? To take away their voice because of people who abuse ratings seem a tad extreme. It seems if you look closely most abusive raters have brand new accounts. They signed up to do damage. Why not make a waiting period of 6 months before you can rate an album or a certain time period which will discourage the abusers. I have seen abusers who were on the site for a week rate a thousand albums.
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Dean View Drop Down
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 28 2015 at 12:40
Simple Tim - one requires constant work for some poor sod and the other doesn't.
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timothy leary View Drop Down
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Points: 5319 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 28 2015 at 12:42
So are you saying a waiting period will not affect ratings manipulators?
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 28 2015 at 12:47
It will have some effect but probably not that much. We've seen spammers set up accounts that lay dormant for months before they are used so I can't see manipulators being any different. Many of these guys are serial abusers anyway so a delay period isn't that much of a hardship if they have a continuous stream of accounts waiting to become active.
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twalsh View Drop Down
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Points: 328 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 28 2015 at 13:20
Ratings could probably be limited to Forum Groupies or even Forum Senior members.  i bet this would eliminate the most egregious ratings abuses.
More heavy prog, please!
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Points: 11415 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 28 2015 at 17:04
A rating only review, sincere or otherwise, contributes precisely nothing to the site. PA is at core, a music review site and archive of Progressive Rock and it's related artists, not a voting booth.
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Points: 10213 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 29 2015 at 00:56
Originally posted by twalsh twalsh wrote:

Ratings could probably be limited to Forum Groupies or even Forum Senior members.  i bet this would eliminate the most egregious ratings abuses.
What he said. However, after such limitations, all the comments that may lead towards an "investigation" on the reasons why & how people are rating the albums - that must be banned. I mean, this is assuming that there will always be some comments that decried how "balefully" was rating did by someone else and in the case that only the PA' Senior members (and Collaborators & Admins) are allowed to rate, that kind of the comments ought to be removed from the forum promptly; of course, with a warning to those who post such a comments.
Non-English speakers who maybe really want to (only) rate the albums at PA, they can reach that senior member status for example by going to the polls and doing even a copy/paste of the name of some at the poll listed band / album and to post it in the polls threads though they will not be able to vote in the poll 'til they are reached the status of senior members.
Indeed, there is no better solution than what twalsh suggested.


Edited by Svetonio - March 29 2015 at 07:36
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Dean View Drop Down
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 29 2015 at 01:22
LOL

You can only become a Groupie or Senior Forum Member by posting on the forum. This means that non-English speakers would be excluded from rating-only, thus removing the only justification for having the feature at all. Clown
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driftingsun View Drop Down
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Points: 28 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 29 2015 at 10:46
What do you see, earlyprog? You sound angry :)
Pat
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Kati View Drop Down
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Points: 6253 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 29 2015 at 23:36
Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by Angelo 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. ;-)
People lie. Email addresses can be faked and spoofed, and my real name is Winston Leonard Spenser-Churchill (I used to be a British flag ... but I got better).

Prevention is better than cure - removing the ridiculous "instant rating" function would help considerably, in fact setting a rating-only needs to be made more complicated so that people cannot join the site with a fake email address, blitz 100s of albums with ratings and bugger off. Forcing a Catchpa test for every rating would slow them down and reduce the number of bogus rating they could achieve in a given time. Auto log off after each rating-only would also slow them down (or after every 2 or 3 anyway). Separating rating-only from review-rating would make a big difference.

Automatic IP address checking should also be employed to prevent two user accounts being used from the same IP address. (Genuine members who share the same IP address can be added to an "accepted exceptions" list).

However, since it is the rating-only voting abuse that gives the PA a bad image then the sensible recourse of action is to remove the feature completely. The original premise that it allows non-English speaker to contribute to the voting is flawed: the weighting system used to reduce the effect of abuse affects all rating-only votes, not just the bogus ones. Those non-English speakers are being punished unfairly for the crimes of a few idiots. The better solution (and this is so effing simple it's stupid) is to permit reviews in any language.

Seriously - why should we force people to write reviews in English? We can say that we prefer reviews to be written in English and English reviews can be given preference on the Front Page and on Band pages to emphasise that, but where is the harm in permitting people to write in the language they are fluent in? All I can see is benefit - the quality of the reviews will improve, the reader-base will increase and by using online auto-translators those monolinquists among us (such as I) can read what they write. It is better to have a great review written in Spanish, French, Welsh, etc, than a poor one written in English.


Well signing in for PA (a reputable site) makes it harder for people to make fake ratings, I only recently discovered that one does not need to sign up to rate an album, hahaha this is insane and I feel bad for the admins now really it must be a nightmare for the admins to decipher between real ratings or not Confused any other site one at least needs to sign in via email of social network, no wonder PA has rating problems Ouch hehehehe it's your own fault, deal with it Big smileLOL
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Kati View Drop Down
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Points: 6253 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 29 2015 at 23:58
Originally posted by lazland lazland wrote:

^ whilst I agree with you, Dean, that Max is probably not making shed loads of money from PA, I would not have thought that the running costs are that high.

In any business, the major cost is wages (or personal drawings/salary if you are a one man band). Max doesn't have to suffer that - he has a load of volunteers to do it for him, does he not?

The ratings only system is a pain in the arse, simple as, and should be done away with.
 
Lazland, hello! You very, VERY, clever smoochie! Hug
We both agree here that M@X makes very little revenue on PA and that collabs are eager to help out this site, to develop and carry on, it's all for the love of moozik and this is priceless. One thing we all have to agree is that M@X was a pioneer before  (and after to be honest) there was nothing quite like P.A.
Beyond the database PA has become a major prestigious site to join or be part of inc. for bands. 
I salute M@X very much, however I also know that google pays very little thus income is almost none unless we get more traffic through here because being prestigious means nothing, they don't care all they see is numbers,  if one cannot get the numbers, we best get sponsors and that is a pop up adverts etc nightmare really..
A massive big hug to you, my sweet hot clever Lazland Big smileHug 
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earlyprog View Drop Down
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Points: 2085 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 30 2015 at 03:54
Originally posted by driftingsun driftingsun wrote:

What do you see, earlyprog? You sound angry :)

Errrrr, didn't see that coming. I thought I could just sit back, relax and read the new posts without further interaction. I have long forgotten the contents of past posts. However, I do seem to remember mentioning Drifting Sun, driftingsun Wink

I may also have missed if anyone has proposed that eligibility to post an album review should require a minimum of say 25 yearned points on PA in which case you, driftingsun (24 points at the time of posting this), would still not be able to post an advertisement for an album, which probably was the first you did upon arrival at this site. But thanks for contributing beyond that. 


Edited by earlyprog - March 30 2015 at 14:12
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Kati View Drop Down
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Points: 6253 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 30 2015 at 04:15
Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by Angelo Angelo wrote:

Dean, as much as I technically follow your explanations - the real problem is a lot closer to what Iain expresses: someone is making money from this, others are having fun and considering themselves master of the universe in their own isolated prog rock related sand box and meanwhile none of them seems to care that others are abusing site features for less than applaudable reasons. That's not the PA I joined 10 years ago, if I may say so...
Far be it for me to defend M@X, but this site costs money to operate and maintain. While I haven't seen the actual figures anyone with a little knowledge of how much things cost and how much a site can earn from web-traffic can do a quick calculation in the back of an envelope to see that he isn't lining his pockets with truck-loads of cash. I suspect the site mostly breaks-even and if there is profit then it is small-change. We don't pay a bean to enjoy its contents so have to tolerate the advertisements and the revenue they produce.

Abusers are not making money either - I suspect that, as we've seen with "maxfax", they probably think they are doing the artist a favour in trying to boost an albums chart position. 
 
I second all you said, Dean, in defense about M@X and PA (besides that M@X looks like Harvey Spector from SUITS, aka hotBig smile) all this said he was the pioneer and to date no site is parallel to PA.
Hugs Hug
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Kati View Drop Down
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Points: 6253 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 30 2015 at 04:22
Originally posted by Kati Kati wrote:

Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by Angelo Angelo wrote:

Dean, as much as I technically follow your explanations - the real problem is a lot closer to what Iain expresses: someone is making money from this, others are having fun and considering themselves master of the universe in their own isolated prog rock related sand box and meanwhile none of them seems to care that others are abusing site features for less than applaudable reasons. That's not the PA I joined 10 years ago, if I may say so...
Far be it for me to defend M@X, but this site costs money to operate and maintain. While I haven't seen the actual figures anyone with a little knowledge of how much things cost and how much a site can earn from web-traffic can do a quick calculation in the back of an envelope to see that he isn't lining his pockets with truck-loads of cash. I suspect the site mostly breaks-even and if there is profit then it is small-change. We don't pay a bean to enjoy its contents so have to tolerate the advertisements and the revenue they produce.

Abusers are not making money either - I suspect that, as we've seen with "maxfax", they probably think they are doing the artist a favour in trying to boost an albums chart position. 
 
I second all you said, Dean, in defense about M@X and PA (besides that M@X looks like Harvey Spector from SUITS, aka hotBig smile) all this said he was the pioneer and to date no site is parallel to PA.
Hugs Hug
 
Cooee! No Maxfax is not helping quite the contrary, imagine if you would get a msg saying "review my album, give me your email address, with the audacity not to leave their contact or real name" ConfusedOuch It's rude obnoxious and spam pure and simple clearly and not related to the band.
LOL this band has had so much going against them hahaha sorry for laughing but really lol Big smile
hugs
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Kati View Drop Down
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Points: 6253 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 30 2015 at 16:05
errmmm Ermm in term of fan boys reviews "girl here" I do not think anyone would disagree that mine are most sincere, also mainly due to my reviews being so long, I doubt anyone would critique it considering that they probably would have fallen asleep halfway reading it anyway hehehe Evil Smile evil grin hihihi
Hugs Hug


Edited by Kati - March 30 2015 at 16:11
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driftingsun View Drop Down
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Points: 28 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: April 02 2015 at 11:51
Hi earlyprog

I didn't post reviews of my albums actually, but hey :)
Pat
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