Dubious Ratings

[Melekor]

Since there was no objection, I went ahead and deleted the following reviews: http://projectmagma.net/~melekor/tmp/bogus_reviews.txt . They are backed up in a copy of the reviews table called deleted_reviews. Notice the 'posted at' times on Killery's reviews: most of them are posted incredibly close together in time, which gives weight to the theory that he likely didn't even play most of the maps he was rating.

[Zaknafein]

After this latest example of a dubious rating, I think we need to revisit this topic.

Actually, I think dubious is entirely the wrong word to describe these ratings. There's nothing dubious about them, instead they are what I would call "indubitably bogus".

Now, there were a lot of good ideas in this thread for how to fix the system, but the reality is that takes work to implement. If that means that nothing will be done in practice, I would be in favor of just manually going into the DB to delete the "indubitably bogus" ratings, vs doing nothing at all.

Julio's rating was fair, and I felt the same way after playing this plugin.

[Pyro]

Ha, I don't think you want to get yourself in trouble Zak. I just spotted your review. Perhaps the reason julio's review was seen as dubious is because he said it was good and yet rated it 1 star. Which sounds like a mistake. You however rated it 1 star on purpose just to stir things.

[Melekor]

Zak: Your mild mannered trolling will only be tolerated up to a point, don't push it too far by adding any more intentionally bogus reviews.

[Zaknafein]

Because you guys like this map you are defending it by deleting legitimate ratings. The legitimacy of tain rankings has gone down the toilet, considering this is how you moderate your website.

[Melekor]

Right, a netmap not being single player is a "legitimate" reason for giving the lowest possible rating. </Sarcasm>

Sorry dude, I know you're trying to be humorous or something, but it isn't really funny when you're denigrating someone else's work in the process.

[Zaknafein]

Who are you to decide what reviews are worthy of keeping and which ones need to be removed? Should this not be left up to a council made up of community members?

[vinylrake]

Who are you to decide what reviews are worthy of keeping and which ones need to be removed? Should this not be left up to a council made up of community members?

1. He's one of the people who runs the site, so he kind of gets to decide what gets to stay on the site.

2. ProjectMagma is a privately owned/maintained site, policies should be set by the site owners/maintainers. If they want to solicit opinions from the community that's cool, if they don't that's their right.

If you feel so strongly that there are important points of view being suppressed, I urge you to start your own site and open it up to the community to set the policies.




ps. Although I answered this as if you were sincere, I just wanted to let you know I appreciate the humor. This is by far the funniest post you've made in months.

[Khadrelt]

The problem with a 'council' is that it's another word for 'committee,' and the definition of committee is 'a group of people that ensures nothing ever gets done.'

But if we do make a council, I get to be Elrond.

[Melekor]

Zak, don't try to make it sound like I am going around willy-nilly deleting stuff that I don't like. The ratings that were deleted were 1) those of a systematic abuser, 2) an obvious mistake and 3) your troll rating in response to this thread. Furthermore I was completely transparent about it. Stop trying to stir up a controversy where there isn't one.

[Zaknafein]

Quit trying to stifle all opposition by declaring them trolls or claim they are attempting to "stir up controversy". This is a discussion forum and I will state my opinions.

Killery was not a systematic abuser, he was a myther who looked at each map before he rated it. I'm sorry if some of you did not appreciate his reviews, since they were short, but as someone who has to steal a lot of materials from this site, Killery reviews have saved me a lot of trouble. Killery was a competitive myth player, who mainly participated in MWC's, his idea of what is fun is certainly different than yours. That and the language barrier contributed to what you call "systematic abuse". Killery did not make plugins, there was no incentive for him to give plugins an abnormally low rating. He was merely stating his opinion, which is the purpose of allowing ANYONE to write any review they want.

You can't tell Juliocpaes that he made a mistake on his review, he has to be the one to say that. If he wants to give a plugin a 1 star review, that is his right to do so. It is obvious from reviews done over the years, that the reason behind your rating has no relevance. People have given me 5 stars on a plugin for putting A README IN IT! If you're going to delete a Killery/Juliocpaes review for being too harsh then you have to delete all the reviews that were too soft on plugin authors. And what about those people that just put a star rating without explaining their decision? How could we possibly know the reasoning behind their rating, and whether it is fair? I suppose the mighty Melekor will pick and choose what reviews are fair, and which are unfair.

[punkUser]

Quit trying to stifle all opposition by declaring them trolls or claim they are attempting to "stir up controversy". This is a discussion forum and I will state my opinions.

No one cares man... frankly I don't know why you care about any of this other than to troll.

Let's be realistic: there are so few ratings on the tain that they irrelevant. Even if there were 10x as many reviews as every one ever submitted they would still be statistically meaningless.

The only utility in the reviewing component at the moment is the review text itself. Thus any review that doesn't have enough text to say something meaningful is, by definition, useless in the context of the tain. Thus I don't see how you can bitch about the deletion of stuff with zero value. ("OMG voters paradox!!11!" )

If you want to contribute, write a decent review. Go ahead and attach whatever rating to it that you want, since everyone ignores those for the most part anyways. If you put more than a few seconds of thought and work into a review that adds value, I assure you that it won't be deleted regardless of the rating.

[Pyro]

You are wrong on certain things, Zak.

Julio called the plugin good, so how can something be good and yet be a 1 star? There had been some reviews stating they made a mistake and picked 1 star instead of 5 stars. His is just another one to do it.

Killery did not play every map he reviewed. He said so himself that he was judging based on the color map alone. Zeph had talked to him and said this:

After talking with killery, he told me he didnt even try the map. he rated a 1 just because it was gothic and looked bad.

The reason you got a review giving you 5 stars for having a readme was because it was a joke. You kept spamming the Tain with slightly modified submissions with no readmes and when you finally included a readme, Ozone made a joke review. He later stated he wanted to edit or delete it but could not so it stayed.

Now stop spamming 5-star ratings as they were no different from your 1-star rating you gave to troll.

[GodzFire]

Zaknafein I suggest you quit now while you can.

[Zaknafein]

Zak: You will only be tolerated up to a point, don't push it too far.

Ha, I don't think you want to get yourself in trouble Zak.

Zaknafein I suggest you quit now while you can.

This is how Project Magma handles people that disagree with them. Thinly veiled threats.