Number of ratings reported do not match no of people.

Whoa, Guy! I just checked out your portfolio. What a great body of work! I'm fading fast now, but I intend to do some serious browsing in there when I get the time.

 

You have just refuted Kelly's Law with a single counterexample. Sigh~.

I have been distant for months from this feedback forum ... may be I should continue this way... may be I am getting too old for those endless and quite puerile discussions <p>obviously more interesting things to do while on earth.. dont you think so ?!<p> :o((

yep! agree with u Peter... TRP is not the Shangri-La!

Mike, if you want to know why the Critique Circles died, go through the archives and you'll find that there is one person who has discussed them from the standpoint of future revival and why they failed the first go round.

 

I have posted to W/NW a few times, but you obviously haven't looked at my portfolio or you wouldn't suggest wedding, street, Leica, People, etc. as a regular alternative.

 

You suggested picking one image and posting it in the general forum for discussion. We already have the POW, and the whole point is to give people a choice, but still concentrate the number so most critics will be guaranteed a discussion and most photographers will get their work looked at in depth occasionally, if not daily or even weekly.

 

You can join Picture This if you want to shoot assignments. (you probably don't even know about them.)

 

There are 129 posts to this question, so you can stop blaming me for sustaining the debate. Mostly I feel compelled to post to these questions to correct misconceptions from people like you.

I was shocked this morning to find that a group of demonstrators had gathered in front of my house. They were chanting, Rate This..Rate This?Rate This.

This thread is dead. You can tell when a thread dies when even its originator has forgotten why it was started.<p>

For the record, hoewever, I would like to address the comment regarding the use of surnames. I don't think The Brian gives two hoots in hell if I say Mottershead one time and the next I say Brian. I use both forms interchangeably, sometimes just to avoid confusion when other Brians or Bryans are posting. I won't deify him but I will say that anyone who has taken over the work of Greenspun rates pretty high in my book. For those of you who may not have heard of Doctor Philip, may I direct your attention to this URL: philip.greenspun.com and also here: philip.greenspun.com/panda . It is a good read but well over my head. It gives an indication of what is behind a site like this, and what kind of person it takes to run it. Not to mention having to put up with us. End of thread.

I have wondered about some ways that might give a little more parity and control in the ratings system. I have often wondered if maybe ratings of 1,2, and 7 should be required to enter a critique as well defending their opinion of the image. This would allow the artist as well as others to understand what makes an image fantastic in the eyes of the viewer, or explain and defend their horrible ranking of someone else's work. I have no problem with people rating images badly if they feel that need, but they should be required to explain what element of the work makes the image so poor. Poor ratings without criticism or accountability does little to uphold the idea of what posting here at photo.net is about.

I think that's a good idea. Surely if you feel so strongly about a photo where you feel it merits a 1,2 or a 7, then it shouldn't be that hard to write a few lines explaining why.

So how many hours per day are you guys volunteering to spend to delete all the "critiques" (and associated extreme ratings) that say, "Great!" "sucks," "7/7," "1/1," "boring," "awesome," "..," etc. (which are exactly the kind of comments that were generated when photo.net used to require comments with the highest and lowest rating choices)?

We had precisely that system for several months, and what Mike says is exactly what happened. That isn't just speculation. Of course, you could say (and some people have), well you could require a minimum length comment. What prevents people from cutting and pasting? Well you could require that it be different from every other photo comment they've written. How many different ways are there to say he doesn't like the over-saturated colors? Well, you could require that he not use the same comment more than once per day, Etc, etc. Instruction creep.

 

If people want to comment they will comment; if they don't want to comment, they won't comment. If you try to force them to, people will either get pissed off and stop rating, or if they are trolls, they will figure out how to circumvent your set of rules. Except for the trolls, if people don't want to comment, the site still wants their rating, in order to help rank the photos. If a photographer can't abide ratings without comments, there is an easy solution: don't submit photos for rating. Personally, I think this particular complaint is disingenuous. Nobody ever complains about a 6 or 7 rating without a comment. "He gave the photo an excellent rating, but the jerk didn't have the courtesy to tell me why he thought it was excellent." For some strange reason, we never get that complaint.

I just read this thread and went and checked some of my recent images. It seems that the few and far between sevens that I received are not counted on certain images. They are listed in the detail but not in the thumbnail total. At least the numbers don't add up. If my understanding of this situation is correct, I am being penalized for a global problem in which I am an unwilling player. Furthermore, the unspoken accusation is that I have been doing something wrong. I thought I have been a loyal paying customer of Photo.net. This situation is confusing. Here is another point, if you check my numbers you will see that I always comment no matter what the rating, at least in the last 6 months or so. I do not feel appreciated as a customer by site management. I care about my work and care deeply about the friends I have made in Photo.net over the last 18 months. With that said, the site has become too political where the rules change in the middle of the game and were winning is more important than having integrity. Perhaps it is time for me to take a long vacation from Photo.net. Since that is a serious decision to make, I'd like to hear your thoughts?

aaaaaaaaaaagh ... what a great discussion again ... it resonates so well with my favorite pre-school memories ... yeah, Howard you poor bas*ard you've been victimized and nobody gives sh** about you ... that must hurt so friggin' much ... Brian do something for this man, I am cryin' here. ok, sorry ... you may nuke my comment now.

There is no unspoken accusation. Ratings are disqualified for a variety of reasons, and it does not mean that the recipient was dishonest, or even necessarily that the rater was dishonest.

 

If a rating is disqualified, it just means that it fit some set of criteria that I decided reduced the value of the rating in determining the overall score of the photo and its rank in the TRP. For all you know, disqualifying the rating made your average score go up. Or it could have been that you received too many ratings from someone who looked like he concentrated his ratings on your photos. You might have been the first person he rated, and then he got bored and never came back. This looks like a sock-puppet to my software, and I disqualify the rating. I don't actually care whether it is a sock-puppet or not, because even if it isn't, it probably is still not a rating that is worth much. I might decide to disqualify the first 50 ratings that everyone gives when they join the site because (a) new raters are more likely to be trolls; and, anyway, (b) their ratings tend to be all over the map until they kind of calibrate themselves to the site norms. I don't say I have done this, but I might. Or you might have a friend that doesn't usually rate photos, and you asked him to rate a folder. The ratings might have been totally honest, maybe even hard on you. They still might be disqualified, because a rater who has only rated one person is not very helpful in determining the ranking of photographs across multiple photographers. And so forth. So far I have disqualified about 2% of the ratings for a variety of reasons, and people shouldn't take it personally. Correction: not everyone should take it personally.

With respect Brian, is that heuristic still running or is it periodical? The reason I ask is that there are several, but one person in particular, who has had a lot of exposure recently and exchanges a large number of 7's. All of their ratings tally up, whereas several of the more honest raters have seen ratings disappear. I know you've said that it can be for different reasons, but surely 7 exchanging should be the main priority as it does more to skew the TRP?

Calvin ball, Mark, Calvin ball. It only works if you don't know the rules. Brian knows but he ain't tellin.' As far as I can tell, nobody has gotten seriously burned on the ratings by these actions. Since I virtually never get sevens, I just sit back and enjoy Calvin ball. It's a hoot.

 

It seems to me that there is one guiding rule behind this particular version of Calvin ball: irresponsible ratings are constantly in danger of being zapped by whatever method Brian can devise. For some reason I find that comforting,.

Howard, Please do not take a vacation without inviting your devoted followers (you may not even realize how many so called mates like your work). Note after all rates I'd given were deleted (due to one low rate and a feeble minded member report of abuse), I have no desire to play BrianBall unless Rajeev gives me a BigBat to strike back using my rules.

 

I truly enjoy reading Howard's plentiful prose.

 

Oh gosh maybe it wasn?t just one members complaint, perhaps some 7s and 6s I gave returned some 6s or 5s and we were declared mates by undeclared rules. If so I am sorry for calling one member feeble minded ? however my comment on his photo was deleted at the same time all my rates disappeared.

Arghhh, Forgot that you can't cut and paste from Word without getting question marks instead of other normally valid punctuation.<p>

While it's on my mind did anyone like my pictures of Question Mark from "? and the Mysterians" at Detroit Winter Blast? He long ago changed his real name to the single character ?! How's that for valid punctuation? 96 Tears was their big hit in the 60s. And after that I must ask did anyone read my tearful comment on RE's Tiger Swallowtail?<p>

The following excerpt from that famous song might or might not describe viewpoint of some PN administrators:<br>

You're gonna cry cry, cry, cry<br>

Ninety-six tears c'mon and lemme hear you cry, now<br>

Ninety-six tears (whoo!) I wanna hear you cry<br>

Night and day, yeah, all night long

What intrigues me is the total number of 7s that is given. Surely, there can't be that many outstanding images... When I first came to this site I might have been too generous, but because of my own growth as a photographer I have gotten more selective with my ratings. In the end, commenting is really what triggers my own learning and growth as well of that of others. A good (or a professional quality) image isn't neccisarily an excellent one. Most of us know how to saturate a photo ( - tongue in cheek warning -), few know how to create impact, emotional response and afterthought beoynd the obvious with their images.

Well guys, its official. I'm outta the critique forum. I know, don't let the door hit me where the dawg shoulda bit me, but the quality and level of comments/ratings has gone far beyond absurd commedy (errr, I know what a 1 or 2 shot is, I also know what a 6 or 7 shot is, its the 3,4,5 area that gets a little gray for me).....as I looked at the comical "Great Leveling" that seems to go on here, I realized that I want no part of a system which inherently seems to generate the amount of bad will that this one does. At one time, there were good comments given, but I see that a couple of people who had given me great critiques (errr, on and off p.net) have had their accounts cancelled, and with them gone, it seems that NO ONE comments (errr, that must be the mate rating thing, well...I guess mate critiquing must be bad too, eh?). This is the second time I've deleted everything here, and I figured I ought to re-post and give p.net more time. Well, I have given it more time, and it is going nowhere but downhill....the forums are excellent, and I will continue to participate, but the "critique" (errr, ratings farm) forum is in my opinion as usefull as milk-producing-mamary glands on a bull :-)...

As a German PN-member who learned English 50 years ago I am not able to read all notes above. But IMHO I would say the best way of rating and commenting is that only members who have uploaded min. 1 picture per 3 months can rate or comment other pics. Users without own pics in the forum should not be able to do it. The rating should not be anonymous so each can see what rating is from which user. I think it is the fairest manner to rate. All ratings must be counted for the top ranking.

I think it is the best way to continue the high level of PN and stops the stay away of some top photographers like Baldur Birgis and others.

 

Please excuse my "bumpy" English

Greetings Otto