Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

This is what I feared. Although I am on CVP for decades, I didn't even know that it is possible to review a game and to rank it with stars! And this would have an effect on the weight of my vote?

Why do we need something so complex?

@Jean-Louis: When you post a comment on an article there appears a 'Rating' selector above the edit window, by default set for 'none'. You can also select 'poor', 'good' or 'excellent'. I always thought that this was determining the number of stars that would appear in the top-right of the comment. (But is a mistery to me how 0-5 stars could be derived from just 4 chocies...)

I agree that it is probably not a good thing to make this too complex. But if we want to involve the rating system in the favorites scoring, the logical way to do it would be this:

We now attach a weight of 60/(N+50) to a member with N (>= 10) votes. So the total weight of the votes (60*N/(N+50)) saturates at 60 when N approaches infinity. The rationalization for the discount is that there is no indication that any of the favorites indicated by this person are really close to the top of his list. But if that person would have rated, say, 15 of the games he favorited with 5 stars, and the rest with fewer, we do know that these 15 are the top 15 of his list, and there would be no reason to discount their weight more than those for a person that has 15 favorites in total, and never rated any of those. So these games should get weight 50/(15+50) = 0.923. If in total that person voted for (say) 70 games, which would have given him a total weight of 70*0.5 = 35, the 15*0.923 for his 5-star games could be taken out of this total budget, to leave a 35 - 15*0.923 = 21.15 for the other 70 - 15 = 55 games he favorited, which means a weight 0.384 for each of those.

This system could be applied 'bottom to top', where you would first divide up the total budget (35 here) between the unrated favorites and those with 1-5 stars, to see how much budget he should get for the rated group based on the 60/(N+50) formula and the number of rated favorites, and what that would leave (of the 35) for dividing over the unrated favorites. This would then be repeated for the 2-5 star group for determining how much would go to the 1-star favorites, etc.

This would be complex, but there should never be any reason for the users of the website to understand how the scoring works. If they use the rating system and favoriting in the intended way, the page would calculate a fair 'figure of merit' from this, which they should simply trust as a measure of how much the crowd here appreciates the variant. Detailed knowledge of how the scoring is calculated is only useful for those who are looking for flaws or weaknesses through which they could subvert the system to get variants of their choice higher on the list than they should be. And why would we facilitate that?

@Jean-Louis, I once asked you if you can review my 3 games named Grand Apothecary Chess. This is what I was asking. Three reviews with as many stars stars you deem appropriate.

@HG, I like the rating system you propose and I agree that not everyone should understand it.

I have a question though. I consider my apothecary games pretty bad but my grand apothecary games pretty good. How should I differentiate amongst them? Also be aware that the smaller games are pretty well regarded, where the larger games,that I consider better, are not regarded in any way!

I never studied the rating system much, (does it have any other consequences than displaying the rating in the comment with which it was given?), and always considered it 'bad form' to rate your own games. If authors would want to relay the message that they consider a particular invention of them one of the best they ever made, it would have more impact if they would write that in the Notes section of the article, than by commenting on their own articles (where the comment would slowly be pushed out of view as more comments are added).

As to the Apothecary ratings; perhaps there are more people that like smaller games, and is the fact that a game is large a deal-breaker for them, irrespective of how well it is otherwise designed. Rating games is largely a matter of taste. I don't think that an inventor should try to steer public opinion on this. One of the advantages of announcing your own opinion on the game in the Notes section is that you can motify your conclusion.

Thank you H.G. for the explanations. Of course, I knew that poor/good/excellent choice which is available when posting a comment; but I thought it was a way to transmit some reaction in addition to the comment. I couldn't imagine it was meant as a judgement or a note for a game. For instance a game can be very good, I might find a detail on the page that I dislike (e.g. (I'm joking) using Aanca for Manticore) and then I could post a comment with "poor". It doesn't mean I consider that game is poor! Just a reaction related to my comment.

I think this rating shouldn't be taken a rating of the game itself.

Also, like you, I don't see the correspondance between poor/good/excellent with a 5 star system.

I hope this will be clarified. If it is confirmed, I will have to return on every variant I have favoured (not mine) to place a rating. I can do it, although this is a bit childish too.

Well, you don't have to do anything; it is just that all your favorites then will benefit equally from your voting, as there is no way for the system to know that you liked some better than others. This might be what you want anyway, as you prefer the 'one-man-one-vote' system.

BTW, I selected a rating 'good' when posting this Comment, just to see what happens.

[Edit] Well, it displays 4 stars.

Alright. I haven't many things to say. So I select "poor". Hope I'm not getting my votes down by some centivotes. :=)

The ratings are averaged together (I believe only using the last rating per user), and that "average rating" can be used to sort in the database query. The average rating is also visible at the bottom of the comments section on each page, e.g. right now on this page it says:

Number of ratings: 3, Average rating: Average, Number of comments: 84

The ratings used to have an "Average" option; not sure when that got lost in the dropdown menu. But then Poor=1, Average=3?, Good=4, Excellent=5...was there another one for the remaining number of stars?

I think ratings (and the attached comments as a "Review") are a great more-granular-than-"favorite" scoring system, but aren't used enough (and apparently not clear enough). I would actually prefer more granularity, maybe a score out of 10; for one thing, there are more than 500 game pages with the Excellent average, so the database query doesn't show them all:
https://www.chessvariants.com/index/mainquery.php?type=Game&language=English&orderby=AvgRating&sortdescending=on

EDIT: there's a more recent rendition of the average ratings listing at
https://www.chessvariants.com/index/avgratings.php
and its comments mention the other missing rating, "BelowAverage"=2 stars.

I corrected a bug in the code for reviewbonus. In searching for a review, I had left out the ItemID, without which it would find any 5 star review the person had written for any page, which inflated the scores. With the ItemID now part of the search, it will find reviews only for the game in question. In comparing the results with and without reviewbonus set, it is giving many games slightly higher scores, and some are rising in rank. The first game to rise in rank from it being set is Pocket Mutation Chess.

How to change reviewbonus?

How to change reviewbonus?

It's on or off. By default, it is off. Assign it a non-empty value, such as 1 or true, to turn it on.

Ranks are now shown. Since the whole list was a definition list, I changed each entry into a separate definition list and made each one a list item in an ordered list. Since the bold, sans-serif formatting is only for the DT tag, the rank number does not get the same formatting.

Thanks Fergus. I found it and saw how it affects.

Favoriting is now reserved for published games, and I have deleted any favorites recorded for unpublished pages. Although it records the ItemIDs of pages, the favoriting system is for games, not pages. Since new submissions normally start out as Game pages even if they are later changed to something else, this closes a loophole for allowing the favoriting of what are not games. It may also close loopholes for automatically displaying the link of a page before it has been approved for public display.

There is something wrong with the rating of Fischer Random Chess: In this list it is the favorite of 12, but on its page I count only 11 having it as a favorite.

It has also an extraordinary high score even it it was favorited by 12.