To be honest I think the best way to avoid troll votes would be to require a certain amount of +rep in order to vote. Make it low obviously, such as 3 or more +rep or maybe even just +1 required. The point being that I'm sure many troll votes are made by people with competing guides who make a new account in order to avoid exposing their real account of trolling.
Deleted.
Robo Ninja Monky wrote:
To be honest I think the best way to avoid troll votes would be to require a certain amount of +rep in order to vote. Make it low obviously, such as 3 or more +rep or maybe even just +1 required. The point being that I'm sure many troll votes are made by people with competing guides who make a new account in order to avoid exposing their real account of trolling.
Yet the trolls are, as scrax said, a part of the community. You can't just go around banning people's opinions because you disagree with why they have those opinions. You just have to deal with it, and be happy that you have helped at least some people to become better (seeing as that's why guides were started in the first place).
thanks Hogopogo for the banner :D
No, no, no, no. We've been through this a hundred times before, all these things have been suggested. Spin through old pages of this forum and you will see just how many times we've had this argument.
Limitings votes through any artificial means is a mistake. Those that are out on a mission to down vote you, will take the time to get around any and all protective measures to do it. Those that just wandered through and thought your guide was cool, will not bother, and will probably stop voting altogether if they feel it's a pain in the *** due to protective measures. Publicized votes purely cause fear and backlash, leading to artificially inflated, inaccurate scores, fighting and a moderator nightmare. You can't force someone to give feedback. You can't judge what the reasons are that someone voted the way they did. A vote is a vote, like any election.
If anything, I'd be curious to experiment with guest voting based purely on IP address, to massively pad our vote counts. In fact I have been tempted many times to try it out. The system can easily be tweaked to track public votes for the sake of experiment, without actually including them in your score (scores would not reflect guest voting, but I could still see them in the back-end, to see what the results actually are).
The people looking to troll you will take the effort to register and do it, go the extra mile. The casual reader who landed on your guide and thought it was cool but couldn't be bothered to register? That +vote is forever lost to you.
The only reason it could fail is that it does make it easier to use proxies to vote multiple times but, if I'm right and the vote volume increases dramatically, you should also get way more +votes to more than offset it. Plus, those trouble proxy IPs will become immediately obvious in the database due to their abnormal voting patterns, which means I can weed them out. Click, click, votes gone and IP permanently disallowed from voting. As it is now, this happens so little that the patterns aren't clear enough. Plus, everyone is in the same boat, so it should even out regardless. I could also require guests to fill out a human-verifying "captcha" each time they vote, making it a pretty massive pain in the *** to try and abuse it.
But, I'm pretty sure you guys would stalk and murder me.
Limitings votes through any artificial means is a mistake. Those that are out on a mission to down vote you, will take the time to get around any and all protective measures to do it. Those that just wandered through and thought your guide was cool, will not bother, and will probably stop voting altogether if they feel it's a pain in the *** due to protective measures. Publicized votes purely cause fear and backlash, leading to artificially inflated, inaccurate scores, fighting and a moderator nightmare. You can't force someone to give feedback. You can't judge what the reasons are that someone voted the way they did. A vote is a vote, like any election.
If anything, I'd be curious to experiment with guest voting based purely on IP address, to massively pad our vote counts. In fact I have been tempted many times to try it out. The system can easily be tweaked to track public votes for the sake of experiment, without actually including them in your score (scores would not reflect guest voting, but I could still see them in the back-end, to see what the results actually are).
The people looking to troll you will take the effort to register and do it, go the extra mile. The casual reader who landed on your guide and thought it was cool but couldn't be bothered to register? That +vote is forever lost to you.
The only reason it could fail is that it does make it easier to use proxies to vote multiple times but, if I'm right and the vote volume increases dramatically, you should also get way more +votes to more than offset it. Plus, those trouble proxy IPs will become immediately obvious in the database due to their abnormal voting patterns, which means I can weed them out. Click, click, votes gone and IP permanently disallowed from voting. As it is now, this happens so little that the patterns aren't clear enough. Plus, everyone is in the same boat, so it should even out regardless. I could also require guests to fill out a human-verifying "captcha" each time they vote, making it a pretty massive pain in the *** to try and abuse it.
But, I'm pretty sure you guys would stalk and murder me.
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It's only here because authors demand it rather violently :P
Rage!!!11111 D:<
Like that I'm assuming?
I'm quite pleased to have 20 first C2V. That way, people can actually help to improve your guide. Getting a downvote with reason instead of getting a downvote without reason is better.
You can't please everybody though. ;o