DeutschEnglish
Not logged in or registered. | Log In | Register | Password lost?

Changes to the Ratings System: 7-day Introductory Period

WebsiteUpdates

Article information
Published on:
10.09.2021, 21:00 
Series:
CAGEMATCH Website Updates (All entries of this article series)
Author(s):
Update on 10 Sep 2021

The 7-day introductory period is now active for both new inmates as well as inmates who have lost all of their ratings due to violations against the ratings system. The 7-day introductory period starts with the first comment anywhere and stops, logically, seven days later. During the introductory period you are allowed to make comments about anything, but you are not yet able to rate items (for the reasons described below, in the original post). After the seven days are over, you can rate items, including those you previously were only able to comment on. I know this is asking new users for exceptional patience in times where instant gratification and access is the norm, but I hope that you understand that the decision was made to improve and uphold the quality of our community. Please be patient and you will be rewarded. :-)


Original Post on 08 Sep 2021

Good day everyone.

Following one of the greatest pro wrestling pay per views of all time, I was once again forced to spend hours of my personal time removing trolls, miserable people, hate mongers but also arrogant bandwagoners from the ratings system. Although the feedback from "the 80%" to the re-post about tribalism on Saturday was very positive to me, the message surely was lost on the other 20%, so I have decided to do something about it to maybe ease the tension in the internet wrestling community without giving myself or the rest of the volunteers at CAGEMATCH another round of work and headaches.

Many of your suggestions were very constructive and there were a couple of good ideas. There were also a number of ideas that meant well, but would--in my opinion--not have the desired effect and/or result in a lot of extra work on the administration side. Reviewing every comment before it goes online is not possible. Requiring comments to exist for all ratings or have a long length only induces frustration for those who play by the rules, but do not have time or the will to spend half an hour after a show to write an essay about every match they have seen. I know, I have been there myself a couple of times. A Reddit-like up/down voting system for ratings or comments would cause a further divide in the community, resulting in ratings/comments being downvoted or upvoted not because of their content, but because it promotes "choosing a side". It is the biggest and the worst feature of Reddit and social media in general, where every opinion is categorized into good-or-bad categories. Aside from the coding effort to code such a system, I feel that it is pushing us too much in the direction of social media, which I want to avoid.

CAGEMATCH is not meant as social media or for interaction between fans. There are bigger, more professional and more (or less, depending on what you want) moderated alternatives out there for that purpose. CAGEMATCH is meant to be a database and an archive above everything else, where the ratings system and its individual opinions offer a flavour of context, information and relative comparability for the database items. This is one of the reasons why these childish flame wars and the rampant tribalism these days are punished so severely. Adding more user interactivity is not the answer. That includes also a "report" button, which would be abused to death and just put more pressure on the site administration to react publicly and react quickly. I do not want to put that pressure on the team and myself. We are wrestling fans first, dedicated editors of the database second and we'd rather not have to deal with the idiocy of a minority at all, so any non-automated system that results in us having to spend more time on idiots and less time on what is fun (wrestling and database editing, in this case) will ultimately only cause frustration in the team or worse, departures because "it just ain't fun anymore".

What do we want? Long-term and balanced engagement in the ratings system, so that the community benefits from having more, reasonable voices and opinions that shape and improve the ratings system and our little internet wrestling archive over time.

What do we not want? Short-term biased comments up to the level of trolling or hate mongering.

Based on that thought process, I have decided (99% surely) to make the following changes in the upcoming weeks (I cannot give a definitive date because of my private life):

1. Every new inmate will have to wait 7 days before they can rate. They can comment, but they cannot rate. Surely we are losing some ratings with this approach, but everyone who truly has an interest in staying with the site long-term will get over it and adapt. But it will deter those that only want register quickly and cause havoc after a pay per view or while a topic is "in the news". Seven days is a long time to have to wait to manipulate the top listings in either direction.

2. The 7-day waiting period will start with the first comment that an inmate makes. It does not start upon registration. Yes, that will demand an even higher level of commitment by the user, but I feel that it will serve the long-term quality of our community by restricting access to those who have a certain level of maturity and patience. This waiting period certainly needs to be communicated properly, which is where most of my coding and testing work will go to over the next few weeks.

3. Users, who have essentially given 95% of their ratings in only about a one-month span with the last rating being over six months ago, will lose their ratings. The comments will remain, but the ratings will be removed. This is an even stricter application of the rule that "hit-and-run ratings" are not allowed. Personally I would rather have 100 long-term users than 10000 fleeting engagements. I see value in the comments, as often those can be entertaining or informative, but unless you show an interest in the ratings system long-term, there is not much value in the ratings themselves from a community perspective. Unfortunately from a technical side it is not possible to only "disable" the ratings and "re-enable" them when there is activity again, as that would need a level of dynamic in the ratings system backend that simply does not exist and would take months to develop even in times where I had the time to do it.

Please note the particular conditions on #3: It will affect existing users (other than #1 and #2), but only a very small subset of you. It will affect a few hundred one-time-only ratings, but honestly I do not think the community is losing much with that. We still have the comments to read.

I wanted to tell you ahead of time so that you can prepare for #3, if you think you need to, but also to give you the chance for feedback. I am 99% positive about making these changes, but maybe there is a really, really, really compelling argument against it that can swing my opinion. Keep in mind that I do not care about having a huge amount of users or social media-levels of user interaction. I care about a quality database for posterity with quality and enjoyable comments and a little comparability via a decent amount of reasonably (un)biased ratings.