Hello all.. can anyone think of a formula/system that makes it difficult for people and their friends to influence the rankings by giving other writers bad scores?  

I know it wont matter when we have tens of thousands of views every day (and I promise fellow writers, that it will happen.. give me 1 year), but until then.. thinking caps on!

 

It is a bit annoying at the moment ha!  Someone gives you a generous 6 or 7 because they actually spent the time reading your work, and then someone who 10 seconds later, not having had time to read it gives it a 1 to just get it out the way.  Its funny but slightly infuriating as good stories then get down in the mire and don't get the number of hits to be read and voted on. When I posted Daffodils my last story (which incidently has been published and therefore I presume is slightly worthy of a score higer than 1...!) within 30 seconds I had been given a 1!  But hey ho I guess WAR was the right name for this website!  Maybe only registered users could vote? or the names and score people give you are actually shown?  Maybe would deter people just giving out 1s without reading stuff.  Would be an incentive if you thought that person might retaliate and give you a 1 in return?! Just a thought.  Its a great website, though and you must be tearing your hair out at the pettiness it has thrown up.  Keep going it will shake down in the end I am sure!

Hmmm.. I think showing the name of the voter may discourage some people from voting honestly, or even at all. Only allowing registered users to vote could work, depending upon the extent of voters that are un-registered, but unless you display their names and scores then they could just create accounts and vote all they like, I guess!

I don't really know what the answer is. You could make it so that people can only vote once ever on a story, but then they'd just log out and vote, and if you set the restrictions on IP addresses then there are problems with people sharing internet connections, not to mention dynamic IPs.

Perhaps it'll all blow over... It'll be much less appealling to vote 1 on 10 stories and move yourself from 27,365th to 27,355th than it is to go from 55th to 45th.

Perhaps a combination of these solutions would help.  Only allowing people to vote on a story once, and being allowed to only re-adjust your vote if you feel you over- or under-rated.  Only being able to vote if you are registered would help but to prevent dummy accounts stipulate that voting is only allowed after a peice of work has been submitted.  I doubt people would go thorugh enough trouble of writing something just to have a seperate account to dole out 1s.