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.

To my mind it’s earlier-submitted entries that have the advantage – if a sub is good enough for the voting to, on net, be positive then the longer it can be seen for the more of a lead it’ll build up over what comes later. But that only applies for normal entries, not the ones with the backing of a group of co-ordinated voters.

In the case of exploitative voting, slipping it in at the last moment and quickly all voting it up is the best strategy, but only because you’ve got that dedicated group of voters behind it.

Separate the submission period from the voting period imo. Eliminates bandwagon effects, blocks last minute rushes and ensures that everything is available for voting for the same amount of time.

I think that if your idea is good, it should acgreat timesulate enough votes by submitting earlier in the week to give you a good advantage over the last-minutes submitters. If you do have to change it, however, I would say this is the best idea.

man-man Posted:

Separate the submission period from the voting period imo. Eliminates bandwagon effects, blocks last minute rushes and ensures that everything is available for voting for the same amount of time.

The only problem is the Style voting, which could be eliminated by letting the people who submit the logo’s pick the style to go with it, but idk.

I don’t think this is a good idea. I doubt if we have people who vote are good enough to judge submissions, represent the opinion of the crowd, and vote fairly every week.