Voting System Explained

What do we want from such a system?

This is a difficult question, maybe: "What do we not want?" is a better question. We don't wan't to have a system where new artworks go straight to the number one position in the top 10. We also don't wan't a system where the same artworks are in the top 10 all the time.

In the past we've had 2 systems. The system on the first GFXartist (2 years back) was pretty simple. Everybody could vote on an artwork once a day. there where 2 top 10's. One top 10 of the last week, and one overall top 10. For the first top 10 only the amount of votes of the last 7 days counted. For the second top 10 the total amount of votes would count.

The second GFXartist (2001) had a different system. There we could give votes from 0 to 5. An avarage of votes was kept for each artwork. This meant that if someone voted a 5 for an artwork it would go straight to the number 1 position of the top 10 since it would take the average, wich in this case would be 5 (the highest score). And also votes would not be counted anymore when they are more than a week old.

The current system

We wanted the current system to be the best of both. So we dismissed the averages, so no-one goes to the top immediately. The success of an artwork is now a combination of the amount of votes, and the grade of the votes. Because we don't have an average anymore it was not possible anymore to vote an artwork down. For example; if do dislike an artwork in the top 10 you could give a 1 or a 0 and the avarage vote of the artwork would decrease. and thus the place in the top 10. To solve this we added the negative votes. If you don't like an artwork, or you think it is too high in the top 10 in combination with other artworks you can vote it down.

With this system everybody has an equal share, and everybody can add up to 5 points or substract 1 from the total amount of points of an artwork. To make sure the top 10 is not always the same, we chose to let only the votes of the last week count for the top 10. This system is a bit like the top 40 (billboard top 100) in the music industry. They count the amount of times a CD is sold over a week, and then publish the most sold CD's ordered by the amount of sales that week. The thing is: we don't want a top 40 each week, this is the Internet! 2002! We want a top 10 each day. So every day @000 we run a script which calculates the amount of votes of the past 7 days and set the recent votes of each item in the gallery.

This way it could happen an artwork suddenly disappears from the top 10, because it has got most of it's votes on the day which just became more than a week ago and so those votes don't count anymore. At least not for the recent votes. The total amount of votes is also saved and you can still view the top 10 whenever you sort a category on 'Total votes' and 'descending'. Note that the total amount of votes will count for who to be nominated as an Elite Member. Hence nobody has to worry about disappearing votes or something.

Now what?

Franky: I don't know. There have been some comments on this system, as well as the previous two. None of them seems to be perfect. What I do want to hear from you is how you think about it. Should we change the voting system? How should we build it? Please use the comments below to discuss what you think of it and how you think it could be changed. Since you make up the members of this site we want you to have a vote in this, and come up with a system we can all agree with.