Site Trophies and Top Blogging

October '08's even worse -- almost all of the Awards went to Will_Smith, who has since had his account disabled.

I think that the vote lobbying problems could be addressed if the awards were given a higher profile.  If more people participated lobbied votes would be drowned out by legitimate voting, but I've heard a number of times, including from high profile members, that people aren't even aware that the awards exist which is why the results are so easy to manipulate.

An article each month highlighting the month's winners (Plus an annual one), preceded by a one-time publicity campaign to ensure that the winners are legitimate for the first month the article is published might do the trick....

I completely agree with batgirl and TheGrobe that the site awards were a joke. I don't agree that they should go away. The problem, as discussed by TheGrobe, was a lack of participation. How can "Best Author" be determined by getting 50 votes when one blog entry of one of our good bloggers typically gets 500-1000 reads?

Clearly there are more people appreciating the authors here than are voting for the site awards. I thought if all the top bloggers just put a link to the site awards page on their blog with a short message along the lines of "if you like reading the blogs, vote for someone!" it might increase the exposure enough to change the voting trends.

A bit tangent to this. I would still like to see the ability of readers to just click a button on an article/blog/forum that says "I like this". Then the site would have data on which to base promoting popular material. "Like" could even be expanded to "this was useful/funny/interesting".

Unfortunately, this is not a simple thing to just tack on to the site and there are certainly other things that will get attention first (live chess, etc.). But in case the powers that be decide to dedicate some resources to this part of the site, I think they should consider these kinds of ideas.

I like where you're going with that Loomis, but I think it would be even better to have standing links within each of the relevant categories right to the voting page so the opportunity to get voted for is spread equitably, not just among those that self-promote.

On the Blogs:  "Like this blogger?  Vote them for this month's top blogger!"

In the Game Showcase forum "Like this game?  Vote for it as game of the month!"

and so on....

I totally agree with this. That's exactly where the links to vote for top blogger, game of the month etc. should be. Maybe Chess.com should not even allow nominating new players for the awards, but only allow voting for certain articles and games. Why would one want to vote for someone who hasn't posted any blog posts anyway?

Just looking through the forums, I'd throw out following as the starting point for a proposed new suite of monthly trophies:

• Mentor of the Month -- a vote option on each comment in the "Game Analysis" category to place a vote for the person making the comment
• Game of the Month -- a vote option on each thread in the "Game Showcase" category to vote for that game provided the game was played within the current voting month (see the additional enhancements below for how this could work).
• Puzzle of the Month -- a vote option on each thread in the "More Puzzles" category
• Endgame Expert of the Month -- a vote option on each comment in the "Endgame Study" category to place a vote for the person making the comment
• Article of the Month -- a vote option on each Article
• Blogger of the Month -- a vote option on each Blog
• Contributor of the Month -- no voting, but rather the individual with the highest average comment rating (again, see additional enhancements below)

In order to facilitate some of these I'd dredged up a few various enhancement requests I've seen (OK, requested....):

• The ability to post games both to the showcase and the analysis thread simply via a hyperlink from the game itself.
  
  Not only will this allow users to far more easily post these games, but may also increase the use of these two forums.  (As an alternative, or addition to this, posting a game the old way, the ability to reference a game played on chess.com by pasting the link in would also help).  This would be required in order to validate that the game being voted on was a game played on chess.com, and also that it was from the current month.  (If neither of these were true, the vote option wouldn't appear)
  
  
• The ability to annotate games in progress
  
  (so that the posted games have some annotation when done via the hyperlink)
  
  
• The ability to rate comments for relevance/appropriateness
  
  This was discussed earlier in this thread and I think had tremendous value.  As an added bonus, it could be used to automatically select the Contributor of the Month -- perhaps most comments over a particular ranking, or some similar measure.

Scrapping the entire concept was never my implication. Scrapping the current system was.  It's well intentioned but fails to take into consideration the sillier side of human nature.   As it stands now, the awarded trophy system is nothing short of a mockery, and, as such, should be terminated immediately.  A new system, maybe in the vein that TheGrobe has thoughtfully outlined for us, or maybe something of equal intuitiveness, could be instituted eventually.  But to maintain the current system is to possibly alienate even more potential authenic voters (one of Loomis' concerns) and lose even more credibility, making any new system an even harder sell with more dismal prospects.

why do you want to be recognised as top blogger surely like the site trophies the award is worth your confederate dollars, i read a few blogs now and actively follow certain people, i suppose if you keep posting they will come

I got thinking again about the possibility of a rating system for forum topics/posts, and it occurred to me that 1-5 stars is not the way to go for this site.  If it ever is implemented, I'd like to suggest the following:

• ??
• ?
• ?!
• !?
• !
• !!
  

This is a brilliant idea, except... how do you go about showing the average vote for a post? As the system you are suggesting is categoric, and we would need a discrete variable to obtain an average.

Yes -- good point, perhaps you could assign them values and average them:

• ?? = -3
• ? = -2
• ?! = -1
• -- = 0
• !? = 1
  
• ! = 2
  
• !! = 3

(I added "--" to address any rounding issues, and also so that people can have an unbiased starting category)

I love this idea. That old chess convention could be brought in to serve as the rating system in modern online chess-related blogs. That's a really unique flash, and would be one of those things that would help to make chess.com the place it is.

To respond to the averaging question that Nytik raised, well, for one I don't really think that *anyone* is informed by the averaging of votes; just from personal experience that's never informed my decision as whether to click or not. So if this were implemented, maybe the current standing is whatever the most votes run towards?

??

Haha.

So is it

?? - this is ridiculous, a real blunder of a blog

? - uhhh, what? Sortof dumb, waste of time

?! -
       } these two always confused me. The one is like, a bad idea that could have some merit, the other is a good idea that's questionable? Maybe someone way more skilled in this terminology could use this opportunity to explain?
!? -

! - Sweet!

!! - Whoa, you should be a top blogger, if you aren't already

?! means dubious whereas !? means interesting.  I think it's a subtle distinction between ideas that are likely to fail, and those that are likely to succeed.

Adding 3 to each, and removing the "--", that gives a range from 0 to 5. Hardly any different from using stars from 1 star to 5 stars...

But 1-5 doesn't allow for a neutral value because the categorical system can't account for "half-a-star" -- the values are all relative, so it doesn't matter what scale you use -- -3 to +3 is the same as 0-6 if it's masked by the symbols anyway.

To me it seems a bit pointless to have a neutral vote. Why would anyone vote for that? It's like voting without an opinion, just for the sake of having voted. If you want to vote, it's because you like it or because you don't like it, not because you just want to vote.

And, well, the values are always just relative. A score of "4 stars" or "!?" is meaningless without comparison. If the average of votes is 5 stars, then 4 stars is bad, while if the average is 3 stars, then 4 stars is good. Sure, you could try to interpret "!?" as interesting and "!!" as brilliant, but if the average rating is somewhere between "!" and "!!", then "!?" is not interesting but just bad. You can't assign absolute meanings to relative values, without information about the average vote or the standard deviation of the votes.

The neutral value is required more so that new members can have a neutral starting rank than it is for voting, although I don't see why you'd restrict the ability to vote for it.

I just noticed this post which is over four years old now, and am curious - has much changed?  I've tried a few times over the last year to write articles with little success (though the admittedly tiny feedback has been overwhelmingly positive) and am wondering if there's any point in continuing this summer (when I generally have more free time for such things).