Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I am not sure editors should be treated different than others. I am an editor, and Jean-Louis is not, and yet I see no reason why my opinion would carry higher weight than his.

I also don't think it is a good idea to 'penalize' self-voters by reducing the weight of their vote on other people's games (which is basically an unrelated issue). If we don't want self voting, we can just forbid it; that is more effective than merely discouraging it through some arbitrary penalty. But self voting can be useful, because inventors presumably know their own inventions better than anyone else, and can indicate to others what they feel are their best designs that way. But that purpose would be completely defeated if inventors are encouraged to vote for all their inventions. So we should not encourage that by making it a good way to get those closer to the top of the list. A modest amount of self votes is very helpful, voting for all is as useless as voting for none. There should not be any penalty for the desired behavior.

Anyway, the trial page I made already does the dual scoring. But it always sorts by the weighted total. I guess the easiest way to make this user-selectable is just have two versions of the script, where clicking a link or button would navigate you from one to the other. (It could be the same script with a different CGI argument, which then decides what to use as sort key.) Only slight adaptations would be necessary to alter the weighting formula.

I find Fergus's principle quite interesting. I like these threshold effects that lower the value for those who like everything. Looks fair to me.

Concerning own's vote, I wouldn't be upset if they were simply made impossible. To compensate, as I said earlier, let the author having the possibility of declaring that this variant is among his ones he prefers. If he puts this "badge" on all of his variant, then, he will simply spoil his chance to make a distinction.

To illustrate with my own case. I will ok to say that my vote on Shako, Metamachy, TerachessII is removed because I am the author. But I would put a "badge" on them, and not on Perfect 12, Exchess or Teramachy which are not my preferred game. It is an interesting information I can give to the reader.

If we don't want self voting, we can just forbid it

I never said anything against self-voting. My issue is with mass self-voting, and forbidding self-voting is not the solution to that. That's why I suggested penalizing excessive self-voting.

But self voting can be useful, because inventors presumably know their own inventions better than anyone else, and can indicate to others what they feel are their best designs that way.

Indeed. That's why I allow it.

But that purpose would be completely defeated if inventors are encouraged to vote for all their inventions. So we should not encourage that by making it a good way to get those closer to the top of the list. A modest amount of self votes is very helpful, voting for all is as useless as voting for none.

Yes, exactly.

There should not be any penalty for the desired behavior.

I'm now thinking that the value of a self-vote should be influenced by how many self-votes someone has cast compared to how many games he has. If someone favorites all his games, his self-votes should count for nothing. If he favorites only a few, and he has invented many more games, each may count as a full vote. In between, there could be some attenuation for excessive self-voting. It's a matter of deciding what the limits should be and creating a formula.

@Jean-Louis, where would this self-favorited badge go? Just on this page, or everywhere on every index page, or on the game page itself? You could just list such on your About page, but that wouldn't be very visible. I think it would need to be restricted, or we have the same issue as now: self-favoriting all your games doesn't hurt the ranking or visibility, and the reader has to look over a lot of games to notice what's happening and decide they don't care about badges given by a self-congratulatory author.

I discovered the problem with no-information Favorites on this page: their ItemID's are incorrect, generally for containing a hyphen between words where the actual ItemID has just concatenated the words. I remember there was some issue around that, but don't remember the details. I can just remove hyphens in the ItemID field of the Favorites table, but I'm not sure if there's an underlying problem that would need to be fixed to prevent future issues.

(For other editors or me later: I found these by querying Favorites left join Item using(ItemID) where Item.ItemID is null.)

One more thing I think we should attenuate is the worth of a single vote. Some people may have gotten their friends to come here to vote for their game, and these friends may not stick around and take an interest in other games. Voting for more than one game demonstrates an awareness of multiple games, whereas voting for only one does not. Perhaps a single vote could count for half of a regular vote, or even not count at all when calculating the attenuated score.

where would this self-favorited badge go? Just on this page, or everywhere on every index page, or on the game page itself?

The game page already mentions when it is a favorite of its inventor. For the Favorites page, I could change the heart color for a game favorited by its inventor. Adding it to the index page could be relevant if we're looking at the games of a particular inventor, but it probably doesn't need to be included otherwise.

I could change the heart color

For the color-blind or for someone using an e-ink device, I should probably use a separate image. The lightbulb would work on the Favorites page.

I'm now thinking that the value of a self-vote should be influenced by how many self-votes someone has cast compared to how many games he has. If someone favorites all his games, his self-votes should count for nothing. If he favorites only a few, and he has invented many more games, each may count as a full vote. In between, there could be some attenuation for excessive self-voting. It's a matter of deciding what the limits should be and creating a formula.

I think self-voting should not count for anything as far as ranking is concerned. Counting it, even slightly, and with an unrelated penalty, would still encourage undesired behavior for some. It should solely be used for indicating to the user what the inventor considers the best games amongst his own.

Ideally the number of self votes should be a fraction like 25-33% of the inventor's games. But it would probably be also acceptable to ignore games that were not favorited at all, and let the script only consider the set of favorited variants. Perhaps the following should work: there can be two symbols printed with each variant in the favorites list, one meaning "inventor thinks this game is good", the other "inventor thinks this game is bad". If an inventor than self-votes for more than half of his games in the favorites list, the variants he voted for would remain unmarked, and the smaller number he did not vote for get the second marker. That should encourage excessive self-voting.

Indeed casting a single vote is suspect. I already suggested there might be a case for having the weights decrease for very small numbers of votes. Of course it doesn't really help against cheating; inventors could simply ask their friends to cast several votes. I guess no system can be resistent to such 'friendly cheating', for persons that have sufficiently many friends.

It seems much easier to just print an asterisk behind the number of people that voted for it. The info naturally belongs to that number: "5 votes, but note that one of those is from the inventor".

Be careful of not making generalities of things which have a low probability.

• How many people have voted for more than 50 or 60 games? If they are 2 or 3, it should not be difficult to send them an e-mail saying that from now only 50 or 60 votes are possible, so they should re-do their votes if they still want to favor some of the games. Their previous list is simple nulled. They should not complain as they old list was actually meaningless and their new one will make some sense.

• Who can seriously convince many friends to come on CVP, register and then favor one precise game (the same for all of them) and then go? I don't believe that. Maybe it will happen for very few just asking 1 friend to do this. But I doubt. And if it happens, who are we to judge? After all, if that friend really likes his frieds's variant, what's the problem? Who are we to say that this is not sincere? This is making a lot of trouble for a very small issue which is probably not occuring.

About self-vote, I take the point that there are other ways to indicate the author's preferred games. If there is this facility, then there is no need to have the self-vote coming in the same basket than other votes. So, the simplest is probably to forbid self-votes.

I have changed the heart images used on this page. Your own favorites are now indicated by a heart with an arrow through it. An inventor's favorite is indicated by a heart with a star, and this occurs after the name of the inventor who favorited his own game. Positioning it beside the name makes it clearer what this means even if someone ignores the legend, and when a game has two inventors, it lets us know which one favorited the game. For games you did not favorite yourself, an orange heart is used. I tried the one that is red, but it appeared as a small black heart.

It looks great, Fergus, and I wouldn't even have needed the legend to figure it out.

I have now modified the script to calculate an attenuated score for each game. This appears in parentheses, and it is used as a tie-breaker in the sort. The code for calculating this value looks like this:

foreach ($votesbyperson as $key => $val) {
    if ($val > 1)
        $votevalue[$key] = min(1, 60/(50+$val));
    else
        $votevalue[$key] = .5;
}

This attenuates the value of single votes and the value of lots of votes while counting 2-10 votes as 1 vote each.

The heart icons look very nice.

But how about discounting the self votes, and sorting by attenuated score? If the self votes are still counted in the raw vote count, and the latter is used as primary sort key, the incentive to favorite all your own games still exists, and nothing has really changed. A number between parentheses hasbeen added, but no one will really care about what that says if it is not used for sorting.

But how about discounting the self votes, and sorting by attenuated score?

For the time being, I have done these things through query parameters. I have also added a limit parameter, which sets a limit to how many games will be displayed. An alternative, which I haven't done yet, would be to set a threshold value, below which games with a lower score would not be displayed. When you load the page, you will see three details boxes, one of which tells about the query parameters.

I like this implementation. My problem now is I don't see how/where to change the query parameters.

On my MacBook Pro I don't see the page the same with Safari and with Firefox

On Safari, the 3 topics (how to favorite / query parameters / legend) appear in orange boxes with an arrow. Clicking on the arrow expends the orange box.

On Firefox, the 3 topics are just on three lines on the top. Not in boxes, and not separated from the text below. Clicking on the arrow gives the full text, but still with the same bare presentation.

On none of them I see how to change the query parameters.

And this was how I learned that a couple of people had already made Beast Chess a Favorite. There's hope for me yet...  ;)

@Jean-Louis, "query parameter" is being used here in a technical sense, as the part of a URL after the ?. We can certainly add a form as in other places on the site; but for now, you can try e.g.

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/favorites.php?sort=score&limit=10

@Fergus, somewhere in your changes you've hidden those hyphenated-instead-of-concatenated favorited items; but those favorites still exist!

I have now added a min parameter, which sets a minimum value for the count or score, below which it will not display a game. This is an alternative to setting a limit and should not be used in combination with it. Here are some possible ways to use these parameters:

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/favorites.php?limit=100&min=0&selfvote=0&sort=score

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/favorites.php?limit=0&min=2&selfvote=0&sort=score

On Safari, the 3 topics (how to favorite / query parameters / legend) appear in orange boxes with an arrow. Clicking on the arrow expands the orange box.

That's how it should be, though the color is technically Navajo White. But it's an orangish white with more red than green and more green than blue.

On Firefox, the 3 topics are just on three lines on the top. Not in boxes, and not separated from the text below. Clicking on the arrow gives the full text, but still with the same bare presentation.

Since I'm using Firefox on Windows, I expect you need to refresh your cache or update Firefox.

On none of them I see how to change the query parameters.

I have added some instructions on that. Maybe I'll add a form later.

I have added an inventor parameter. When given the PersonID for an inventor, it will list only that inventor's games. And when empty, it will list anyone's games. Here's an example:

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/favorites.php?limit=0&min=0&selfvote=0&sort=score&inventor=FergusDuniho

I have just added a member parameter for viewing the favorites of a particular member. But I am not going to take the time to add information about it to the script tonight, as I am shutting the computer down now.

I made a modification to how scores are calculated when selfvote is 0. Since this means that votes for one's own games should not be counted, I also removed votes for one's own games from the total number of games favorited by a person. The effect is that this will slightly increase the value of votes for other games when someone has favorited lots of games, though if someone has favorited only one other game besides any of his own, it will decrease the value of his vote to 1/2.

I have added another parameter called reviewbonus. With this set, someone's vote may count for more if he has given a game a 5 star written review, though it still doesn't count more than 1. This is mainly to give more weight to votes that have been diminished in worth by someone favoriting lots of games.