I totally sympathise Albert. I don\'t think it\'s so much that I feel bad that a mini ended up lower than I know it should be. It\'s the fact that someone is taking their time to perform a negative act towards me. Whatever their motivations are, it is a negative act. And the question is if this keeps up, why should artists keep posting top work here?
In the past it might get recognition and advancement of the hobby as a LOT of people do see those 9.5+\'s but once you\'re down to 9 the mini sort of ends up below the radar so to speak, and posting other places than here would be better.
I guess the end result is that the artist is then again faced with the question, why post on cmon? Sure it\'s nice to have an online galery (although you can get those 100 places), but now the main thing you end up taking away is the feeling of these negative acts toward you and your work. Sure forum goers seem to enjoy the works and offer support and praise...but then why not just choose a forum to post on that is free of the voting negativity?
You might say that not posting is letting the sniper win...but honestly I don\'t want to fight my own stubborn war against them. The bottom line is I participate where I enjoy participating. The situation of voting on cmon is getting worse and is progressing to the point I can\'t see much any point of posting here over some other forum free of this negativity. I think the idea of cmon is outstanding, however, the exicution of the idea is slipping right now to the point of the negative outweighing the possitive.
As for solutions:
- I don\'t think we can institute something that gives borg more work, as even the smallest thing along these lines, multiplied by 60,000 photos quickly becomes overwhelming, so it has to be built in.
- I don\'t think there should be readily accessable voting logs, as this would cause so many useless voting politics, clicks, and voting wars as to make the site unusable.
- I do think you should have to be logged in to vote, we know the site keeps track of your votes when you\'re logged in...so even the idea of snipers feeling like they\'re been tracked, so to speak, would work as a deterent.
- I do think you should still be able to vote on 1 mini multiple times, HOWEVER, with stronger restrictions than right now. Perhaps you must vote on 25, 50, 100 minis before you can vote again...or have a real life timer...or something!
- There is also statistical sollutions, complex as they may be. Standard deviation may be one of them. I\'m not going to get technical but there are methods of determining essentually what the voting curve should look like, and eliminate votes outside the expectation of the curve. Once you get to about 100 observations, there are methods to eliminate smart sniping with a smarter program. (of course someone with a dynamic IP could potentially create enough observations to throw this off as well)
Anyway, I say ignoring it is not the solution. Saying to not pay attention to it means the snipers win I say. That takes away from the enjoyment of this site, and losing that means artists leave as other sites become more enjoyable to participate in than here. Albert is justified in his feelings I think, many have them. It\'s getting worse and no amount of trying to talk away the problem changes things. Artists on the site will start to (continue to?) leave, I know I\'m getting closer.