I think that they ONLY effective way to handle the abuse of a rating system is to add a "review rating" feature. I will do that on my website - each user will be able to rate reviews, and the system will compile a "karma" value for each user. Users with "bad karma" will have an reduced effect on the overall average, users with "good karma" will have an increased effect on the overall average.

This essentially means that individual persons which try to abuse the system by submitting irrational ratings can be punished by the community. In theory, provided that the better part of the community is not abusive, the abusers will receive plenty of bad votes - even from other abusers.

That's a great idea

How hard would it be to work out an algorithm for that?

Lindsay Lohan wrote: Like that system where you can vote for what review that was most helpful?

Yes ... either a simple yes/no vote, or this system:

-- - 0 + ++

The Miracle wrote: That's a great idea How hard would it be to work out an algorithm for that?

I will do it on my website - I don't know how difficult it would be to implement it here. There are two different strategies:

1. The rating for a review affects that review only
2. The rating for a review affects all ratings/reviews by that user

On my website I will use the second approach ...

MikeEnRegalia wrote: The Miracle wrote: That's a great idea How hard would it be to work out an algorithm for that? I will do it on my website - I don't know how difficult it would be to implement it here. There are two different strategies: The rating for a review affects that review only The rating for a review affects all ratings/reviews by that user On my website I will use the second approach ...

Yeah, the second is more effective...

BUT even if you do it here, I really don't think it will affect the amount of inappropriate reviews. It may get those who try to do a good job to try harder but the abusers just don't care

And this thing doesn't go with ratings w/out reviews (another good reason to just turn them off) If there's no review, there's nothing to rate.

I think it is extremely bad idea, as it would lead PA members towards rating and reviewing each other's opinions, instead of albums. Stupid enough.

And, just imagine following:  you keep coming across 5 stars reviews of Heaven's Cry, Kamelot, Tool, Evergrey, Devin Townsend, Shadow Gallery, Symphony X, Opeth "Still life", DT "Train of thought", Gathering, Adagio "Underworld", Porcupine tree "Deadwing". All above five stars ratings are given by the same person A.

Imagine also that you know all the albums reviewed, and in your own opinion the best from above -"Underground" by Adagio deserves 3,5 stras as the best, and all others are way below 3.

One may call this situation "abuse of rating system", one also can call it "lobbying of metal".   

I think that if you were in this situation you would give person A an extremely "bad karma", so would I, but, wait a minute, the person A is no one else but famous ratingfreak - Mr. MikeEnRegalia. Oh no, we sould not give him that, as he might get very upset and distracted from his important job of inventing names for sub-sub-sub-genres and puting labels on every song of every album of every artist in prog and non prog and whatever 

Frankly, I would rather abstain from giving ''bad karma'' to all those poor b*****ds who are unlucky enough to have their tastes different to mines.

And do not take above as offense - you asked for opinions - here's mine.

What about the issue of Collaborators?

If Collaborators start getting bad karma for past bad reviews or something, would there be a consequence?

A resolution: Since Collabs are selected based on the quantity and quality of their reviews, let Collabs and higher-ups be exempt from the algorithm, if this at all possible...

....assuming it comes to pass.

Hierophant wrote: I don't agree with you on this. People are no doubt going to rate reviews not in line with their own opinions "bad karma" and reviews most like theirs "good karma". For example if an album has 50 five star reviews and 3 zero star reviews - the overwhelming majority of 5 star voters are going to vote the zero star reviews with "bad karma" and their influence will be greatly reduced which just isn't fair. It winds up having nothing to do with whether their reviews were helpful or not and pivots more on "i just don't agree with this guy" or "this guy sounds stupid". In effect this is "mob rule" to the second power. I think reviews in question should be debated in the forums and the admins left with the decision to delete them or not based on the debates. Ratings should not be "rated". One person's opinion is just as important as the next person's regardless of how stupid it sounds to the rest of us. This system may be useful for "ordering" reviews - as in which reviews are seen first by users but other than that I don't think the majority opinion should wind up determining your own individual opinion. I hope I'm understanding you here?

I agree with you here.  Does it really matter where your favorite prog album lies on a list or in someone else's opinion?  My two favs are Jethro Tull and ELP. JT has already been discounted and is no longer counted in among the top 'five.' ELP has often taken a licking in the mainstream of rock scholarship. They are slowly being written out of progressive rock relevance, since at one time they were as popular as the Stones and The Who.  Recently, somebody wrote a review of Sgt. Peppers and trashed it.  You know, I am not really sure how this album does hold up. It has several really mediocre songs. It is interesting to hear how other people hear this music.

just do it like they do it at amazon , Ive been saying this for awhile now .. the system at amazon works , also you need to scrap all the current one and five star reviews  and start again with the new system , so we can pick out the biased ones and five star reviews, and mark Yes or No

I don't agree, this last days have shown us that this is impossible, do you imagine Bivine Comedy.....GentIe Giant or any of the other trolls rating the reviews?????

It would be a mess.

BTW: I don't believe anybody is entitled to rate a review, it's a personal work, some of us put heart and soul on it, as I said before stealing time from our job and family, just to see a bunch of rolls (THAT WILL APPEAR) daring to rate us.

All the people that hate Genesis, will vote against reviews of this bands with high ratings, the same will happen with Yes, King Crimson, ELP, etc.

Imagine what will happen with reviews from bands like ELO, STYX, ASIA, this would turn into a joke.

Iván

s1ipp3ry wrote:  many people who love or hate a band will vote 1 star or 5 stars for the album (half the time not even hearing or knowing it) just because they hate or love that band,  thats the trouble Ivan  so there needs to be a way the people can police the peoples reviews otherwise the system will (and has in some ways) turned into a joke

Three questions:

1. How do you think Progger would rate the reviews about Genesis albums with high number of stars when he has publicly said ad nauseam that all Genesis allbums suck and those who rate them high are corrupt bast*rds????????
2. How do you hink that Gentletull will qualify the reviews about albums as Crest of the Knave or Dot Com that give two stars (Which is the macimum they deserve in my honest and humble opinion????
3. How do you believe all the trolls kicked out will qualify all the reviews??????

Starting from thois point we know the system wouldn't work.

It works in A,azon because AMAZON edits the reviews and manipulate the ratings of te reviewers, they supress what they want and add what they believe, because their business ois selling albums.

That's why no person with a minimum of musical knowledge cares for Amazon reviews.

Iván

ivan_2068 wrote: s1ipp3ry wrote:  many people who love or hate a band will vote 1 star or 5 stars for the album (half the time not even hearing or knowing it) just because they hate or love that band,  thats the trouble Ivan  so there needs to be a way the people can police the peoples reviews otherwise the system will (and has in some ways) turned into a joke Three questions: How do you think Progger would rate the reviews about Genesis albums with high number of stars when he has publicly said ad nauseam that all Genesis allbums suck and those who rate them high are corrupt bast*rds???????? How do you hink that Gentletull will qualify the reviews about albums as Crest of the Knave or Dot Com that give two stars (Which is the macimum they deserve in my honest and humble opinion???? How do you believe all the trolls kicked out will qualify all the reviews?????? Starting from thois point we know the system wouldn't work. It works in A,azon because AMAZON edits the reviews and manipulate the ratings of te reviewers, they supress what they want and add what they believe, because their business ois selling albums. That's why no person with a minimum of musical knowledge cares for Amazon reviews. Iván

Also as you say Amazon probably isn`t the best place to go and research music but I have contributed many reviews to them and not once has there been any funny business by them, not once !!!  and not all my reviews were positive many were negative so I haven't experienced the marketing manipulation you are mentioning by Amazon (I`m very sensitive to that kind of stuff I would have noticed)

I know first hand that Amazon have the best system in place and this site (Prog Archives) deserves the very best ! 

I don`t feel threatened by my favorite bands biggest CD ... say "Leftoverture" slipping out the top 200 if thats what is meant to be,  due to an accurate review system, in fact I`d much prefer to live in reality instead of a false reality ! 

its time to shake the Tree  !   lets see what happens

s1ipp3ry wrote: its time to shake the Tree  !   lets see what happens

Yes it's always time to shake trees, but this must be done by gardeners with desire to keep this tree alive.

I'm sure that a well known Genesis hate who has denounced corruption without a single argument will take the time to throw down every review that gives Genesis albums more than one star.

I know a couple of ELP bashers and a lot of Prog Metal haters, this guys will attacjk everything they don't like.

Honestly I wouldn't dare to consider bad any review about a Yes, ELP or King Crimson (Despite I don't like any King Crimson album except ITCOTCK and Red) album (Well except for 5 stars reviews for In the Hot Seat or Brain Salad Perjury aka Re-Works).

Some of us love this place, I love Genesis much more han any other band, but I rated a lot of albums higher and made more comlimentary reviews about albums by other bands than for example SEBTP or The Lamb.

You know why? Because I love Prog' and I love this site. If i get angry when somebody adds a non Prog band or says that Close to Edge is crap is because I want to keep the genre and Prog Archives alive. I'm sure most of the members will do it, but there are fanboys, flamers and trolls (Not few).

The faboys will do anything to take their favorite band to N° 1, the flamers will start problem ecverywhere and the trolls will use the new system to destroy Prog Archives.

I believe that at least 20 or 30 guys have been kicked out since I'm here, I'm sure this guys will manage to ruin the place, they will not only rate every reviewer low, but will use 5 or 6 nicks to do it over and over.

So lets shake the tree, but trying not to take the roots from the floor because the tree will fall.

Iván

BTW: Before I came here I made three reviews in Amazon about albums which I felt were horrendous, one of them was ABACAB, the other was Genesis (Shapes) and can't remember the third. In the first two cases I reccomended the people not to waste their money in those aberrations.

The three reviews were deleted, so I can't trust that place.

Wow ... thanks guys for the sheer quantity of feedback. Obviously most of you are in some way against this, so I will try to explain why I think that it would work, and how exactly I would implement it in order for it to work.

Generally, the point of why I really want this feature is that in order to make good recommendations based on ratings submitted by a community of users, the system needs to know which users you trust.

It's probably a good idea to not show the avg rating of users with every review - it might be considered offensive by those reviewers which receive many negative votes. But receiving many negative votes is not a bad thing in itself - and I shouldn't have called it "bad karma" in my previous posts. It merely indicates that the user's ratings and reviews are not as helpful to the MAJORITY of the community than those of others.

The Miracle wrote: And this thing doesn't go with ratings w/out reviews (another good reason to just turn them off) If there's no review, there's nothing to rate.

hierophant wrote: I don't agree with you on this. People are no doubt going to rate reviews not in line with their own opinions "bad karma" and reviews most like theirs "good karma".

D.Noisserger wrote: I think about it and I turn against this idea after all.  Simply because people who gave 5 stars to an album will put bad karma to these who give 1 or 2 stars.

No - you can also rate a rating w/o review, The Miracle. Rating a rating is basically you giving a feedback whether you think that this rating is appropriate or not. That's not the same as simply comparing the rating with the rating that you yourself would submit. It boils down to whether you think that the album is controversial, meaning that the album has a high bandwidth of acceptable ratings. Personally I know some albums that are very controversial and basically any rating is acceptable. Then there are albums which I consider to be objectively bad and don't deserve a good rating, and those that I consider to be objectively good and don't deserve a bad rating.

D.Noisserger wrote: I don't think it will be very usefull to us, progfans, to judge our neighbor and what he think.

I think that it will be useful. One of the most useful hints about how to find good recommendations that I have read (and posted myself) in this forum is this:

• Find out which reviewers have a similar taste to your own (meaning: their ratings for your favorite/least favorite albums are similar to yours) and then see which albums that you don't know yet are also rated highly by them.

I will build a system which tries to automate that process.

eugene wrote: I think it is extremely bad idea, as it would lead PA members towards rating and reviewing each other's opinions, instead of albums. Stupid enough.

Fair enough ... as I said above, the system has to be simple and effective, so that it doesn't distract people from their main "function" (to provide ratings and reviews).

eugene wrote: And, just imagine following:  you keep coming across 5 stars reviews of Heaven's Cry, Kamelot, Tool, Evergrey, Devin Townsend, Shadow Gallery, Symphony X, Opeth "Still life", DT "Train of thought", Gathering, Adagio "Underworld", Porcupine tree "Deadwing". All above five stars ratings are given by the same person A. Imagine also that you know all the albums reviewed, and in your own opinion the best from above -"Underground" by Adagio deserves 3,5 stras as the best, and all others are way below 3. One may call this situation "abuse of rating system", one also can call it "lobbying of metal".

I found this post very amusing ... I read the list of bands and immediately knew that you were referring to me, mostly because of Heaven's Cry, a band which I hold very high but is virtually unkown to the rest of the prog world. Discussions about the bands you mentioned would be off topic here, I'll only say this:

1. Porcupine Tree and The Gathering are not prog metal, at least not on the albums in question
2. When you examine the whole list of my reviews you'll find many other non-metal albums.

eugene wrote: I think that if you were in this situation you would give person A an extremely "bad karma", so would I, but, wait a minute, the person A is no one else but famous ratingfreak - Mr. MikeEnRegalia. Oh no, we sould not give him that, as he might get very upset and distracted from his important job of inventing names for sub-sub-sub-genres and puting labels on every song of every album of every artist in prog and non prog and whatever

I wouldn't mind others giving me "bad" karma. I would simply hope that overall more people would give me good karma than bad karma.

ken4musiq wrote: I agree with you here.  Does it really matter where your favorite prog album lies on a list or in someone else's opinion?  My two favs are Jethro Tull and ELP.

Your two favs are Jethro Tull and ELP. Now wouldn't it be great if there was a way for you to get a top 100 list of albums compiled from ratings by reviewers who have a similar taste?

ivan_2068 wrote: I don't agree, this last days have shown us that this is impossible, do you imagine Bivine Comedy.....GentIe Giant or any of the other trolls rating the reviews????? It would be a mess. BTW: I don't believe anybody is entitled to rate a review, it's a personal work, some of us put heart and soul on it, as I said before stealing time from our job and family, just to see a bunch of rolls (THAT WILL APPEAR) daring to rate us. All the people that hate Genesis, will vote against reviews of this bands with high ratings, the same will happen with Yes, King Crimson, ELP, etc. Imagine what will happen with reviews from bands like ELO, STYX, ASIA, this would turn into a joke. Iván

The ratings for reviews would not be shown. Either I will add a button to rate the reviewer ... or I will simply add a controversiality rating for the albums (an idea that I had while writing this post, I'll explain it in more detail later). But in either case the "karma" of a user would not be shown to the general public, at least not in a demeaning way.

Ok guys, here's what I will do:

For each album each user will be able to rate the "controversiality" of an album (as a percentage).

From that the system can calculate the average controversiality of each album. From the ratings the system also knows the average general rating for the album, and the average user rating for the album (the average compiled from the ratings of the user for the tracks of the album).

Now the system can determine the "karma" of each user review on the basis of this user's deviation from the average rating combined with the average controversiality of the album:

deviation = abs(avg_general - avg_user)

karma = 5 - abs (deviation / max(0.2, avg_controversiality_pct)*14)

The deviation ranges from 0 to 14. A high deviation will decrease the karma value, but a high controversiality percentage will lower that effect.  For the maximum deviation of 14 (avg: 15 points, user rating: 1 point) the karma will range from 0 (20% controversiality and below) to 4 (100% controversiality). For the minimum deviation (0) the karma is 5.

If we do this for every album review, we can compute the user karma as the average of all the reviews of the user.

So now we have a karma number from 0 to 5 for each user. We can now use that number as a weight for each track rating of the user. But is it fair to apply karma to each track rating?  

Hurray,

Does this mean that the top ten will no longer be clogged up with *** star Genesis albums!!!

Progger wrote: Hurray, Does this mean that the top ten will no longer be clogged up with *** star Genesis albums!!!

I will do this on my website ... mailto:M@x - M@x will decide what happens in the archives.

glass house wrote: Mike : I don't know if your idea will work, we will see. I hope her on Pa the collaborators will rate a review before it is posted. If they think it is allright then post it. There are many skillful people here that can do that and who I trust.

That's another topic ... I like the idea, but it sounds a bit like cencorship.

MikeEnRegalia wrote: glass house wrote: Mike : I don't know if your idea will work, we will see. I hope her on Pa the collaborators will rate a review before it is posted. If they think it is allright then post it. There are many skillful people here that can do that and who I trust. That's another topic ... I like the idea, but it sounds a bit like cencorship.

No, it sounds like a terrible bloody censorship in full force!!!

You guys sound like you must have been brought up in totalitarian system, and now, being too scared about too much freedom of speach, want your "good old days" back.

I am aware that there are always certain individuals who are ready to smoothly provide their censorship, and there always will be crowds "trusting" their beloved leaders (quite skillful by the way) and allowing them to act as they want, no matter what.

Funny and quite unbelievable that this is being discussed nowadays on international site devoted to progressive music.

Ah, never mind, go ahead, it's interesting to see what happens next...

eugene wrote: MikeEnRegalia wrote: glass house wrote: Mike : I don't know if your idea will work, we will see. I hope her on Pa the collaborators will rate a review before it is posted. If they think it is allright then post it. There are many skillful people here that can do that and who I trust. That's another topic ... I like the idea, but it sounds a bit like cencorship. No, it sounds like a terrible bloody censorship in full force!!! You guys sound like you must have been brought up in totalitarian system, and now, being too scared about too much freedom of speach, want your "good old days" back. I am aware that there are always certain individuals who are ready to smoothly provide their censorship, and there always will be crowds "trusting" their beloved leaders (quite skillful by the way) and allowing them to act as they want, no matter what. Funny and quite unbelievable that this is being discussed nowadays on international site devoted to progressive music. Ah, never mind, go ahead, it's interesting to see what happens next...

I would like that idea if (and only if) the cencorship is limited to abuse. From time to time the front page suffers from a few members who post offensive reviews - and this situation could be helped if new reviews would have to be approved of by a collab (or admin) before they become visible.

But of course this would seem like cencorship even if we would approve of 100% of all the reviews, because visitors - knowing how the system works - could never be sure of what's going on behind the scenes.

To Eugene : Your explanation of my words are not at all what I mean. You just twisted them around.

You also said,

You guys sound like you must have been brought up in totalitarian system, and now, being too scared about too much freedom of speach, want your "good old days" back.

Please, if you don't like the idea just say so without the rubbish.

By the way, Thanks Snowdog.

glass house wrote: To Eugene : Your explanation of my words are not at all what I mean. You just twisted them around. You also said, You guys sound like you must have been brought up in totalitarian system, and now, being too scared about too much freedom of speach, want your "good old days" back. Please, if you don't like the idea just say so without the rubbish. By the way, Thanks Snowdog.

What you said in your own words means "censorship". There is nothing to explain further or to twist around.

I do not like this idea, and I said so and explained why.

Moreover, I do not like what YOU particularly said, and I explained why, giving you my impression of how it sounded to me.

You might not like what I said and you do not have to like it, but to call it rubbish is a bit unpolite from you (to say the least), and might cause unnecessary aggression. So please watch your mouth.

Hope everything is clear for you this time.

Mike, Slipp3ry I rest my case with this statement:

Progger wrote: Hurray, Does this mean that the top ten will no longer be clogged up with *** star Genesis albums!!!

Guys like this one will only vote to destroy what has been achieved for all of us since 2004.

We have grown a very bushy tree, healthy and big, it's ok to shake it to let the rotten leaves and fruits fall, but with guys like this that declare they will shake it to destroy the roots, and this is not acceptable.

Iván

I now implemented a really simple solution - it occurred to me while I was preparing the algorithm that I explained above. While I may still implement that later, I think that the following solution might suffice:

1. For each track compute the average rating.
2. For each rating, determine a weight using this formula: 1/(1+d), where d=distance between the individual rating and the average rating.
3. For each track compute a weighted average rating using the weights computed in the previous step.

This is really simple, and it minimizes the effect of odd votes. And it's perfectly fair - the algorithm makes no preferences or anything.

What all this means is that the more a rating deviates from the average, the less it's weight will be. So if someone comes along and rates an established 5 star album 1 star, the effect on the average will be negligible. But if more people follow that example and at some point there is a substantial amount of 1 star reviews, the weight will adjust itself.

To put it even simpler: The more stable an average is, the less is the impact of new ratings which differ much from that average.

MikeEnRegalia wrote: Ok guys, here's what I will do: For each album each user will be able to rate the "controversiality" of an album (as a percentage). From that the system can calculate the average controversiality of each album. From the ratings the system also knows the average general rating for the album, and the average user rating for the album (the average compiled from the ratings of the user for the tracks of the album). Now the system can determine the "karma" of each user review on the basis of this user's deviation from the average rating combined with the average controversiality of the album: deviation = abs(avg_general - avg_user) karma = 5 - abs (deviation / max(0.2, avg_controversiality_pct)*14) The deviation ranges from 0 to 14. A high deviation will decrease the karma value, but a high controversiality percentage will lower that effect.  For the maximum deviation of 14 (avg: 15 points, user rating: 1 point) the karma will range from 0 (20% controversiality and below) to 4 (100% controversiality). For the minimum deviation (0) the karma is 5. If we do this for every album review, we can compute the user karma as the average of all the reviews of the user. So now we have a karma number from 0 to 5 for each user. We can now use that number as a weight for each track rating of the user. But is it fair to apply karma to each track rating?

I find your system interesting except the rating track by track, this a waste of time, I believe albums are an entity not a mathematical formula, so I agree patially, because if I want to rate aln album with 5 stars, who is the majority to decide my rating is unfair??? If I rate an album with 1 or 5 stars i want them to be counted as that.

Still believe is too complex and doesn't cover all aspects of what we shoud try:

• We know nobody can manipulate top 20 albums, because of the large number of reviews.
• People review too many top 10 or 20 albums and ignore the rest.
• 99% of complains come from trolls and/or flamers claiming that our top 20 list is crap, almost nobody cares for the rest or at least I dion't see too many complains.

So the solution is easier to implement.

• Albums with 19 or less reviews require a minimum of 200 characters for the review and the rating to be counted.
• Albums with 20 to 49 reviews require a minimum of 400 characters for the review and the rating to be counted.
• Albums with 50 to 99  reviews require a minimum of 800 characters for the review and the rating to be counted.
• Albums with 100 or more reviews require a minimum of 1, 600 characters for the review and the rating to be counted.
• Definitely and absolutely banned ratings without reviews, they don't count or better don't exist.

This system will give two advantages.

1. Any fanboy or troll who wants to manipulate ratings will have to do a hell of a job, and would make almost impossible any attempt
2. We will encourage people to review lesser known albums with shorter reviews. 1,600 characters is a lot of work, and I doubt many people would want to rate SEBTP or Close to the Edge.

This system requires.

1. A larger number of review content adms, who will read at least 10 reviews daily.
2. If two of this adms agree, the review is deleted without further questioning (To avoid claims of hate from one person against a determined Adm).

Iván

[QUOTE=Snow Dog]For what its worth, I think its quite a good idea. There are a lot of reviewers who deliberately overrate and underrate albums by either their favourite bands or baNDS THEY HATE.[/QUOTE]

Agreed with you, this is one of the vicissitude of our system

I with my some 1500 reviews am not really concerned about someone challenging my views. I have been attacked/badmouthed (for even putting a three stars review) many times and always managed to defend succesfully what I have written if I am aware someone is attacking me but this means you have to check back on your previous reviews.

If you post some 50 reviews, one can actually monitor the reviews attacking your reviews but once you get to spme 300 you lack the time to do so or even worse in my case the will or wish to do so. I must say that if there was not Bob (now with Atkingi) monitoring the reviews, I would have stopped a while ago to review, simply because you do not want your name being plastered over a toilet wall of hate simply because you do not think Snow Goose is not a 5* and someone is hating you for it.

I take great pride to review under my name, which is not a majority of members who "hide" (not meant to be cowardly but rather prudent , because of abusers)  under a nickname . Writing under your real name (how to make sure it is your real name is a different matter altoghether) is proof that you do so with a real honesty (who knows , one day Latimer will one day tell me:" oh you are this guy who wrote that not-so-good review about Snow Goose, care to tell me more?"  and then he knives up in the belly if I ever get to meet him and have a chance to tell me my name.) and I even spend money to rent the albums, so I can write reviews. I love to give you an idea what Interference Sardine sounds like. look'em up if you do not believe me

But having haters, fanboys and trolls already abusing the system , why give them another opportunity to trash reviewers (for the haters), skew the ratings (for the fanboys) and spread unrest (for the trolls). If this guy hates my guts for having given Snow Goose three stars, he might just be tempted to give me a bad profile just to discredit me and you will not trust my reviews on Interference Sardine or Art Bears

Not that I care so much about my name being trashed (I am fairly thick skinned) , but this rating ther reviews may stop some people from discovering new bands

And unlike Amazon (which is about selling records and therefore will retrieve any reviews not favorable as Ivan stated, since it will not sell the record - and probably retrieve any bad rating of positive reviews), we are not in the selling business here. We want newly found fans of prog to be directed to the better bands (not to the third division of also-ran) whether they are known or not. Amazon will never propose you to sell a record it cannot easilty get or is widely available , therefore AMAZON has no interest in objectivity (which is what a worthy reviewer tries to reach beyond his particular tastes)

Amazong, uh?

I take great pride to review under my name, which is not a majority of members who "hide" (not meant to be cowardly but rather prudent , because of abusers)  under a nickname . Writing under your real name (how to make sure it is your real name is a different matter altoghether) is proof that you do so with a real honesty (who knows , one day Latimer will one day tell me:" oh you are this guy who wrote that not-so-good review about Snow Goose, care to tell me more?"  and then he knives up in the belly if I ever get to meet him and have a chance to tell me my name.) and I even spend money to rent the albums, so I can write reviews. I love to give you an idea what Interference Sardine sounds like. look'em up if you do not believe me

That's exactly my case Sean, if you remember I started making reviews under my real and complete name (Iván Melgar Morey), recently my nick has been added because of the site's rules but I asked not do delete my name, because I love what I do.

I also made reviews for GEPR and Rick Wakeman's Communication center plus other places like Magenta Web site, and my real email address can be found in some of those places.

Thanks to this reviews (before Prog Archives) I got connected with Magenta and a group of Israel bands that had the kindness to send me exclusive material for clinics to my real home address.

Until today I mostly recieved positive mails (A lot of Spam) and one or two Phil Collins fans insulting me (One called me stinking negro latin who dared to talk against a white icon of Brithish Rock , something not too exact because my Mom is Scottish/Italian ands my dad is Spanish/English/Native Peruvian but I'm proud of my Latin inheritance, probably 12.5% of native Peruvian Indian from my father's father who was the most intelligent man I ever knew, MD, who learned 5 languages including ancient Greek and Latin by his own) 

So if I recieve negarive messages or ratings, I give a damn, most of my reviews are very large (Over 800 words except the first 5 or 6 first ones) because I take the job seriously, so if anybody wants to send me negative ratings, I honestly don't care and won't stop writting. 

But there are reviewers that could be discouraged, and we can't afford to loose good and hard working  members because a couple of trolls and flamers believe we manipulate the top 100 (As if none of us had a life!!!!) just because they don't see their beloved band oin the list.

I believe the system I explained could make even harder to manipulate ratings, because a good number of content administrators will be ready to delete reviews made with a lot of words but no sense, plus our members who keep sending flawed reviews to be deleted in the abuse section.

Iván

Hi Joolz,

Of course you're not being presumptuous! You're views are considered, valid, and very welcome!

Welcome to the site.