Hi all,

To me, something is wrong with the ranking of top albums:

http://metalstorm.net/bands/albums_top.php?album_style=Thrash

Epidemic Of Violence better than Master Of Puppets? Come on guys, there's no way you can compare an album with 25 votes to another one with 1596 votes! The rating must be somehow weighted to get a meaningful ranking.

Why not follow IMDB example? Take a look at the bottom of this page:

http://www.imdb.com/chart/top

That's the way to do a real ranking.

Although i was skeptical first, this is probably a nice idea...

"somehow weighted"


Ok. Trust me, the idea to have weighted scores has been suggested many times before and rejected manytimes before too. For many different reasons (which I don't all remember right now).

And truth is, beginning your post with 'album x is above album y and that is not fair' is not exactly a smart thing to do...

Many people on here think like that and because of that, there's plenty of vote abuse. We try to hunt everyone down that's guilty of it, but we have more important things to focus on, you know? I'm not saying the idea is bad (in fact, i would like to have the voting system 'fixed') but suggesting to have the ratings 'somehow weighted' isn't exactly helpful.

If you'd read carefully, he is suggesting exact formula used on IMDB:

Quote:
The formula for calculating the Top Rated 250 Titles gives a true Bayesian estimate:

weighted rating (WR) = (v ÷ (v+m)) × R + (m ÷ (v+m)) × C

where:

* R = average for the movie (mean) = (Rating)
* v = number of votes for the movie = (votes)
* m = minimum votes required to be listed in the Top 250 (currently 3000)
* C = the mean vote across the whole report (currently 6.9)


for the Top 250, only votes from regular voters are considered.

Whoops. My bad.

It still doesn't really solve that much, though. Regular voters? Let's say that's someone with 100+ votes. Many, MANY vote abusers have 100+ votes, so they'd still have all the opportunity to dish out 1's or 10's to complete discographies.

But he is not complaining about vote abusers - they can be dealt, hard job but possible...he says that rating consist of 25 votes should be less important than rating of 1000 votes (also vote abuser is more likely to ruin rating of few votes) while MS doesnt take care about this at all...which i personally find quite reasonable and the suggested formula seems to kinda solve the problem, although i obviously didnt make complex analysis of it

Written by Ellrohir on 26.09.2010 at 13:49

But he is not complaining about vote abusers - they can be dealt, hard job but possible...he says that rating consist of 25 votes should be less important than rating of 1000 votes (also vote abuser is more likely to ruin rating of few votes) while MS doesnt take care about this at all...which i personally find quite reasonable and the suggested formula seems to kinda solve the problem, although i obviously didnt make complex analysis of it

Well, why would someone with less vote necessarily have a less valid opinion? I can rate 1000+ albums with bullshit rates, just to give my 10 on Metallica's St. Anger plenty of value? Maybe I'm missing the point of all of this, I actually should be studying at the moment, but I do know this has been discussed many times before. I suggest searching through the 'Ideas And Suggestions' topic (maybe even the 'Quick Questions Topic' and the website development subboards).

Written by Lucas on 26.09.2010 at 13:56

Well, why would someone with less vote necessarily have a less valid opinion?

The "regular voter" thing is not crucial in the weighting system, and I agree with you: A vote is a vote, not matter how many other votes the voter has done before. My point is rather that there's no way you can directly compare albums with a two orders of magnitude difference in the number of votes.

I don't know exactly what you call a vote abuser, but with a correct weighting system (like the one IMDB is using), I can't see how a bad album could end up in a top ranking without being easily noticed.

The more subjects you have, the more is the statistical result close to "reality"...that's fact

There is some weighting in place....

top all time require a minimum 100 voters, whereas any given year require less.

as for voting itself, as someone who was dubbed "Duke Nukem" for blowing up vote abusers, virtually every single one has complained that they were unjustly targeted and had a right to vote as they did. This is for people who dole out almost straight 10's, people who hand out tons of low scores, and people who cast 100 votes with 80 10's and 19 1's and just one somewhere in the middle. (and more than 2/3 of the OP's votes are 9+... does that seem even keeled?)

ultimately no system will work perfectly because even though MS has a decent scale of 1-10 (utter shit through perfect) people have different opinions as to what constitutes what. just read reviews and see how many people whine/bitch/kick/scream that when a reviewer says nice things about an album, scoring it an "8" is too low and not "on as high as what you said in the review." too many people are completely incapable of being subjective.

just take the overall scores with a grain of salt.

and too bad so sad if peoples opinions on music differ from yours.

But top of all time by genre needs only 25 votes...which is almost nothing to make fair and objective view

but it is true that the voting on MS is strange anyway...i have average rating 7.7 and still doubting if i am not too generous (although it is also true i am rating only those albums i own in physical form of CD/DVD and therefore is obvious i am more likely purchasing albums i like than disappointments and craps)

Top 200 albums of all times requires 100 votes.

But maybe it isn't a bad idea to, as the user base grows and grows, to increase the required number of votes... ?

Written by Lucas on 01.10.2010 at 23:29

Top 200 albums of all times requires 100 votes.

description says so...

Written by Ellrohir on 01.10.2010 at 23:46

Written by Lucas on 01.10.2010 at 23:29

Top 200 albums of all times requires 100 votes.

description says so...

Oh sorry, once again I misread...

I missed the 'by genre'.

I also think a weighted system would be good, not depending only on the rate, but also on number of votes an album has. How many albums a voter has rated is irrelevant. I think the system on imdb is good.