I’ve noticed that in some cases, ideas that eventually end up successful in forumbuildr can get destroyed depending on what time of the week they’re submitted. For example, in AskThieves there were three submissions in the Enemy category playing off of the “I am not a crook” line of his. Two of the submissions were submitted early in the week and went through something like five days worth of voting before the other Enemy was submitted. At the end, the third entry had a much higher score than either of the two earlier entries.

From what I’ve been told the voting is done by simple totals, i.e. the highest vote count at the end wins. This means that ideas submitted earlier in the week and have to go through rigorous review are at a disadvantage to those submitted later…and those votes submitted later don’t reflect a the general opinion of the Forumwarz community.

For example, lets say a topic description was submitted early in the week and it gets 23 upvotes and 16 downvotes, for a score of 8. Another entry gets 8 upvotes and has a score of 9. The one that has the score of 9 wins, but the entry it beat was voted on 30 more times.

This is clearly biased and very unfair to people who submit early (or even during midweek), so I have a proposal. Instead of simple totals, we use weighted voting.

The weighted voting takes into consideration the number of votes, not just the final score. Take the earlier example.

The formula would be: (raw score)*(total votes) = weighted score

So for Sub A,

(8)*(39) = 312

For Sub B,

(8)*(9) = 72

As you can see with these weighted values, it’s not a simple cut-and-dry win. Even if there was a sudden voting spam at the end, with six downvotes for Sub A and six upvotes for Sub B, Sub A would still win by a total of 90-42 (Sub A: Score of 2, 45 total votes; Sub B: Score of 7, 6 total votes).

I feel this is a better solution that removing downvoting altogether, and helps to protect older entries from the influence of newer ones. It doesn’t make it impossible for newer entries to win because downvoting still exists for those older entries, it just makes it harder for scammers to win because they have to overcome a far larger number of votes submitted. And if that vote threshold is large enough, it’ll attract moderator attention.

Such a plan could have spared us of Fran is Fat, and I noticed Outside (which was leading in the 30’s last I checked this morning) was downvoted to HECK not too long ago. Organized crime has too much influence in forumbuildr right now.