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Update to Ratings System Rules: Requirement to comment first 10 ratings

WebsiteUpdates

Article information
Published on:
02.07.2020, 21:54 
Series:
CAGEMATCH Website Updates (All entries of this article series)
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A couple of years ago we did a small change to the requirements for the ratings system, which include the change that the first five ratings for a database entry no longer needed to be commented on. This worked well for some time, but in the past year we have noticed an increasing trend where the first rating for an entry gets multiplied by a significant number of lazy copycat ratings. It usually follows this pattern:

1st rating: good comment and reason for giving a rating
2nd rating: same rating as 1st, no comment
3rd rating: same rating as 1st, no comment
4th rating: same rating as 1st, no comment
5th rating: same rating as 1st, no comment
6th rating: same rating as 1st, no comment
...

At some point those users who tend to always give a comment populate the entry with more ratings, at which point the diversity of the ratings being used increases. However, at that point the problem has already occurred, which is that the 1st rating massively influenced the overall rating as subsequent users just reused the same number of points to avoid having to give their own opinion. There are a number of users who have used this approach to boost their own number of ratings.

So we are now going to try to reverse this trend by requiring the first 10 (!) ratings of each database entry to be accompanied with a comment, with the usual requirements for comments needing to be applied. We do not completely want to alienate those users who do not want to comment, but we at least want to discourage this trend of the first rating being significantly more important to an entry's total rating than e.g. the 10th rating.

Will it work? You and us will have to wait and see. We will continue to monitor the ratings system and adjust the rules as necessary to make sure that we can ensure the highest possible quality.