BestMaleBlogs.com are cheating

[johnwest]

BestMaleBlogs.com manipulates the votes, see the part of the source code of a voting page:

<p><select id="rate" name="rate" class="text">
<option selected="selected">Select your rating</option>
<option value="3">1 - Terrible, avoid this blog</option>
<option value="3">2 - Bad, not worth visiting</option>
<option value="3">3 - Ok, kind of entertaining</option>
<option value="4">4 - Good, definitely worth visiting</option>
<option value="5">5 - Excellent, don't miss it!</option>
</select></p>

The directory and it's voting system is a farce.

[johnwest]

But this is not tranparent to the visitors, you mislead them. It's silly like at Facebook, you can only like it, all is sooo great, consequently you should give up voting completely. Of course there are also lots of poor sites out there. Because of your voting system it's harder to classify the sites. So even absolut trashy sites get 3 stars.

If you were honest, you would simply only offer "Ok", "Good" and "Excellent", but your way you take all your visitors and also the webmastes for a fool.

"If you don't like it, then don't use the site."
The visitors and webmasters don't know about that cheat and so they cannot like it or not and so they cannot use/visit your site or not.

And at the end of the day your cheat is useless because the poor up to the best sites have 3 stars up to 5 stars instead 1 up to 5 stars. What have you won?

[rawTOP]

The point of Bjorn's site to feature the BEST male blogs, not the worst. All he's doing is putting all the "not best" into one category. I say thumbs up for doing it in a way that defeats the efforts "mean boy" crowd.

My forum site has a tread rating system built in. Generally guys don't rate things unless they like them. I've been thinking of changing it into a like system and show the number of likes instead of a rating system because what's happening is that every thread that's rated is showing 4 or 5 stars. I assume that's similar to what Bjorn is encountering - the natural distribution of ratings is not a bell-curve - so he's made it closer to a bell curve so the atypical low scores don't have too much weight.

I would suggest one change though - don't do 1=>3 in HTML - do it on the server where it's more bullet-proof and not visible to users.

[abostonboy]

The point of Bjorn's site to feature the BEST male blogs, not the worst. All he's doing is putting all the "not best" into one category. I say thumbs up for doing it in a way that defeats the efforts "mean boy" crowd.

Agreed.

Bjorn is not cheating he just decided on a certain way to do his algorithm. It's as simple as that.

I see nothing wrong in lumping all the crappy blogs into one rating.

[johnwest]

Agreed.

Bjorn is not cheating he just decided on a certain way to do his algorithm. It's as simple as that.

I see nothing wrong in lumping all the crappy blogs into one rating.

Well, he offers his visitors a voting from '1' to '5' but the votes '1' and '2' are a '3' in real, that isn't a cheat?

And rawTOP advises to hide the cheat, so that it cannot be seen in source code, so at least he is honest and admits that it is a cheat. And another point, this cheat helps not in regard to get better results, I already wrote: it's useless because the poor up to the best sites just have 3 stars up to 5 stars instead 1 up to 5 stars, it's just another scale, but the problem stays the same.

[Bec]

I have to admit to being curious as to why you felt you had to create a new user name on this forum to post about the code instead of posting on Bjorn's webmaster forum at www.gaydemon.biz?

[rawTOP]

Well, he offers his visitors a voting from '1' to '5' but the votes '1' and '2' are a '3' in real, that isn't a cheat?

And rawTOP advises to hide the cheat, so that it cannot be seen in source code, so at least he is honest and admits that it is a cheat. And another point, this cheat helps not in regard to get better results, I already wrote: it's useless because the poor up to the best sites just have 3 stars up to 5 stars instead 1 up to 5 stars, it's just another scale, but the problem stays the same.

Exactly how are users harmed by this alleged "deception"? All it means is that the bad blogs have higher rankings than they should and the effect of some irrational angry queen is muted.