Calling PHP My SQL developers

[PeterJ]

I'm still interested in having a scoring system for logged in members of the community (An idea originally from [mention]Ivanzx[/mention]), but we are looking for a developer to help out and build it for us. Let me know if you have time to contribute and we can discuss the options.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

At last!

*clap*clap*clap*

[PeterJ]

Don't start clapping yet [mention]Juan F. Ramirez[/mention]

[Alessandro]

After WOS, the plague of voting will contaminate SC as well.

What's the point of voting, I ask?

We all know it's a highly subjective matter. Relying on a average of votes to make the "best" games stand out is pure abstraction. Even if restricted to forum members, there is always a risk of rigged votes in order to artificially inflate or damage a developer's reputation, or of comparisons made out of decimal points, like it happened with WOS. Linking it to SC is even more dangerous, since SC is the most representative Spectrum-related website today.

I think SC is going to lose its innocence, so to speak.

[PeterJ]

That's a very interesting viewpoint [mention]Alessandro[/mention]. I'm just trying to keep everyone happy and perhaps include a bit of interactive content. We won't rush into anything. Promise.

Certainly you would need a lot of votes to create any interesting data.

Maybe it's as simple as having a link to Spectrum20, although I know that site seems down a lot and needs an update.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

There are many webs containing this kind of scores. For example, imdb.com, which includes scores for every film and then they publish the top 100 films of all time according to their members' votes.

Is that list reliable? It is for anyone who wants to consider it reliable.

But if any game has its own average score, it can be helpful to anyone who never played it.

We must not be afraid of rigged votes as if a game has lots of votes, that artificial moves won't get their aim.

The only problem is if a game gets very few votes the average score is not representative.

Just my opinion.

And I don't think SC will lose its 'essence' if it keeps supporting new games, preserving stuff and maintain ZXDB as the best and most complete Spectrum DB.

PS: I swear I'll give La Abadia del Crimen only a 7!

[PeterJ]

I do share some concerns that [mention]Alessandro[/mention] has. If you look at the excellent polls that [mention]PeteProdge[/mention] does, he often gets around 30 votes. Whilst we have 700+ members there are probably as with most similar Spectrum (and probably most retro computing ones) forums only about 50 regular members. For some years people have moved to social media to a certain degree.

You can't make any decent statistical decisions based on a small number of contributers. One or two votes could make a huge difference in scores. We would need to record the number of votes along with the score and do some sort of adjustment.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Other idea would be the number of visits for each entry (or number of downloads), as I've seen in some sites.

[PeterJ]

Yes I looked at that and whilst we get a lot of hits on the main site, when you break it down by game it gets small. Also you have the risk there of possible cheating. All worth considering though. Thanks for your input and suggestions.

[Ivanzx]

I think having a score it is very useful to discover games, to check for ones that you don´t know and also to have them "sorted".

In SC the system would have 2 big differences with WoS and are: Only registered users will be able to vote and in WoS a single person would be able to vote by using different IP. In SC that will be quite different.

Plus, in WoS, 90-95 % of the ratings of the games were fair and a good way, as stated before, to discover new games (I did that many times).

[mention]Alessandro[/mention] if scores are such a terrible thing, why did you have them in your Spectrum annual?

[Alessandro]

@Alessandro if scores are such a terrible thing, why did you have them in your Spectrum annual?

Initially there wouldn't have been any score. Then I felt the need to introduce them, but on a completely different basis than the usual 1 = garbage / 10 = masterpiece scale.

I already wrote it elsewhere, but again: I recommend to play every game I reviewed in the Annual; there are no "turkeys" at all among them. However, I wanted to differentiate between them. Think about it like the Michelin guide. If a restaurant is mentioned there, it is considered by the guide's authors as a recommended place where to eat, but there are differences in quality and in the global experience between restaurants which get three stars and those which get two or one. Not to mention the fact that all of the games are reviewed; ratings are thoroughly explained.

It's a very different thing from just anonymously placing a number beneath a title.

Moreover, I don't think the scores in the WOS were fair all of the time, especially for newer games. Cases of people receiving 1's or 10's to all of their titles just because the author encouraged people to vote for them (something that I never did, and do not wish to do) or, on the opposite, was the subject of a sort of trolling were far from being rare.

If ratings could be nominal, like they are, say, in ZX-Art, it would be better, although it does not protect from people creating bogus accounts to be able to vote more times.

Maybe I sound excessively concerned about this issue, and probably I am. But past experiences make me feel so. I am glad that Peter has taken my points into consideration.

[PeterJ]

Just to let you know that this won't be happening. No developers have stepped forward to help. When I have time I will look if I can write a script which counts game page visits to a text file, which would give a simple way of counting popular titles.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

It might have been discussed before. Another option I've been thinking about is something similar to Google's Play Store: for every app, users rate it and comment it.

Just imagine any game entry, with its reviews section, where users comments (not only simple rates) are shown. That would avoid any troll to spoil or rigger the game rate, as there's not only a quantity component (the simple rate), but a quality one(comments). And you must be a forums user to vote. As far as I know, if any user want to create any other account in this forum the admins would know it as both accounts would have the same IP. And the admins know every user IP... am I right?

Obviously, as I have no idea of coding, I don't know if this would be hard to implement but, anyway, including the old WoS score makes no sense in this site.

Other option would be 'integrating' spectrum20.org into SC under the same idea above if it is technically possible.

It is true that there's a link to spectrum20.org in every game entry, but what I mean is creating a new expanding section (like 'magazine reviews', for example) where all the reviews and their authors are shown.