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This is getting ridiculous!


johnmyers

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It's simply ridiculous what lengths some people will go to to ruin

other people's ratings and what not on this site. Is there anything

that the admin can even do? Even if they ban IP's, that doesn't

prevent the moron from using a proxy. I suppose a script could be

written that requires a comment for ratings of 3 and below. I feel

sorry for you admin, it must get frustrating for you too fighting all

the idiots that somehow figured out how to use a computer.

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John,

 

You probably know already but most of those people who rated your recent photograph are works of fiction.

 

It's been said before, but only Subscribers should be allowed to comment or rate photos - the abuse has gone too far this time.

 

The benefits of membership between Subscribers and non-Subscribers is too slim to justify signing up for many.

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Yes, yes, yes. I guess the right attitude would be to ignore the rating and just rely on the constructive critiques and comments. However, since the rating is such an important fundamental of photo.net my ego is getting upset by this embarresment to photo.net ... Or I just post some porn on my album to boost my ratings again.

 

Phil G: If you are reading this: More than two people have complaint, more will come, please address this issue.

 

Some constructive ideas:

 

I don't like the idea of paying members only, this is against free speech and the open idea of photo.net.

 

However, an alternative would be to require every new member to give 5-10 constructive feedback comments on some pictures. The comment can then be evaluated by others already aproved (something like amazon's "was this review helpful" sort of thing) and if they added X many useful comments they can be trusted to rate and critique other people. With the amount of users photo.net has getting trusted if you can write a decent comment should take no time at all, so it is not a real hazzle to new people, but would be a relief to the rest of us.

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I can appreciate your frustration John Myers. I've only been on here a short time. I love the opportunity this site offers to view so many wonderful photographic images from all over the globe. It's nice to see what other people, throughout the world are doing in the craft. Here's my take, (doesn't mean that I'm right, but this is how I feel.) There are some EXTREMELY talented photographers on this site. Then there are some EXTREMELY talented artists on this site. It's wonderful when Art and Photography come together. But it's not necessary for a great photograph to be also a great work of art. I'm a professional photographer who earns his living in photography. I also teach photography, both film and digital. I've noticed the low scores also on some work that is technically excellent, from a photographic stand point. My FEELING is: there are many on this site that have NO idea about the technical aspect of a good photograph and focus on THEIR own ideas of what THEY like. Most of THESE type people are novices and what I call wannabees. However, they are still entitled to their opinions. I've also noticed after some investigation into this subject, that there are four individuals on this site who "sabatoge" new postings on this site. That leads me to believe that these individuals probably are buddies and do this collectively. In other words, they may get a low rating from someone, so they email their buddies and tell them WHO gave them the low rating, then they all go and attack that individual with low ratings. That's happened to me. But here's the way I look at it: SO WHAT!! If I like my photo and KNOW it's quality, what do I care? I have put a disclaimer under the comments of all of my entries as such: "Please leave a comment, as ratings are meaningless to me, unless I know your level of expertise." Hope this diatribe helps you to feel better. Best Regards, Michael Harris
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Yes, it is getting ridiculous... <br>I happened to come across <a href="http://www.photo.net/photo/3006967"> a recent upload</a> from Momo Vuyisich, near the bottom of the 24-hour Gallery. Only four of the 12 raters are genuine photo.netters, the rest are all from newly created accounts.<br>I've said it before and will repeat myself one more time. 100Mb of image space for PN subscribers is very generous - i.e. a great incentive to pay your $25. As an additional feature, it should not be too much trouble to stop non-subcribers from rating, imo. <br>In another thread, spaghetti western has pointed out that this recent flood of bogus raters might well be a deliberate attempt at trying to force changes to the current ratings system. That may be so, but whatever is behind this flood of new accounts, something has got to be done about it.<br>I'm currently in 'summer holiday mode' and usually don't take much notice of what's happening at PN during this time, but this is simply ridiculous alright!
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When signing up for email accounts or similar we are often asked to enter a code that is seen in graphic form. This stops (pretty much) automatic sign ups. A similar system 'could' be used for rating a picture. I am not sure of the practicalities of such a system but <b>entering a 3 or 4 digit code to have your rating accepted</b> is something I would be more than happy to do!
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I was a member of P.N for approximately 2 years before becoming a paying member. I found the site very helpful and so decided to subscribe. I do <b>not</b> think that the opinion of a non paying member is any less than a paying member. That said, <b>the present system as is, is ridiculous.</b> How about <b>paying members</b> can rate at will and <b> non paying memebers</b> are required to enter a code to have their rating accepted?<br><br>I do not know how easy this would be to implement but it does sound sensible to me. What does everyone else think?
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What is going on with this place? Someone is good and pissed for sure. Last night I got hit with 3 2/2's and 3 3/3's on one of my images...

 

Brian. Do something please. This place just isn't fun any more. 30 people control the TRP. Really valued members hardly participate. Robot raters. Ghost raters that don't contribute financially.

 

I support all of this with a 3 year subscription?

 

Dave

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Well - I had one guy with 6 accounts give me 2s and he actually has basically a tastless porno shot on the site.

 

Will will bet (and I make a living at poker) that

<list>

Mohan Al-Granhi

Stan Blanford

Candy E

Markus G

Demoutis Ghatun

C Tahalem

Gill Thomas

</list>

are all the same person

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Something has to be done, that's for sure, but I don't agree with limiting the ability to rate to paid subscribers only.

 

I was a member of this site for about 2 1/2 years before I paid up. I had wanted to pay, and indeed had tried, but not being a US citizen, and the hassles/impossibilities of joining Paypal when you're an Australian living in Taiwan made it impossible to do so. It was only with the kind help of one of the mods (thanks Jeremy) that I was able the pay-up by proxy.

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You folks are getting all hot under the collar about 7 people out of the 980 people who rated photos yesterday. The ratings of those 7 will all be deleted automatically this afternoon at around 3:00 PM, without any intervention from me. Two of the seven were a bit more persistent than normal, and gave a total of 400 low ratings between the two of them, out of 4700 photos that were rated in the last 24 hours.

 

This is not a sudden huge onslaught of bogus low raters and we are not under any kind of attack. I think some of you are perhaps overreacting now because of the incident this weekend. This is routine; we have been deleting bogus ratings like this automatically every day for months. We get a few malicious low raters every single day -- and their ratings are deleted automatically in 24 hours.

 

By the way, of the 7 people whose ratings are going to be culled, 4 of them were people who had registered more than a month ago; so the flood of "new" members "attacking" photos amounts to 3 people. To put it in perspective (which seems to be a little lacking), there were about 280 people who registered yesterday.

 

Recently-registered people have always been responsible for the majority of ratings. Didn't you realize that? If you set up obstacles for new people to rate photos, you would reduce the number of ratings dramatically, and increase the influence of mate-raters, etc.

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Regardless of whether things are out of control in statistics or perception alone, I think there have been some valid suggestions for improvement in this thread. I would find it valuable to be able to mark critiques / comments as valuable or bogus.

 

If that were available someone's ratings and comments could be in a "pending" state until they had submitted some number of valuable critiques. This might cut down on some of the static, but more importantly I think it could be an incentive for someone to spend more time thinking about an image than speed-rating.

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C. G. I have no evidence that "speed rating" is bad. Of course, it is bad if the person is a troll and leans on the "1" key. He can create a lot of crud in a short time which doesn't get clearned up for a while. But such behaviour is rare, and we do deal with it. I don't think it is a good thing to slow everybody down just to stop that behaviour -- not when we can fairly easily delete those ratings after the fact.

 

Apart from trolls, it isn't clear to me that the rating that someone gives in 10 or 15 seconds is worse or even, on the average, different, from the ratings that are given after what you might consider a reasonable length of time.

 

Yes, there are some photos that reward a longer look. In the famous Cartier-Bresson photo of the man leaping over the puddle, you might not notice the poster in the background in a quick glance. But how many photos are like that? Besides, how many people never notice the poster no matter how long they look, unless it is pointed out by someone else? The vast majority of photos are not that subtle, and when the photographer thinks otherwise, often the subtleties are only in his or her mind.

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Adding my 2 cents- (It's probably worth less that!) I have to agree with David, Dave and Carl.

 

Brian- bringing things into perspective is interesting, however, I do see the overall effects Dave mentions. I find myself contributing less and less and moving on to other sites. All these same complaints can be seen in thread, after thread, after thread on PN for eons. What to do? I don't know the answer, but I feel it's dragging PN. It's such a shame too, PN really is a wonderful photography site for both professionals and amateurs to communicate and learn without costing you an arm and a leg.

 

I really don't care about the ratings of my personal images, I enjoy looking and learning from others much more. However, I do respect the fact that others do care about ratings. I feel that both rating and commenting on PN is a privilege, not my God given right. I've learned if you give some one something for nothing it becomes worth nothing. However, if it is treated as a privilege and it is earned, it becomes valuable. I admit I don't know what the answer is. The rumor factory flies with rumors that the actual PN staff is behind most of the bogus ratings. Say it ain't so Brian? I flatly refuse to believe this. It's just a darn shame that people like Dave N., who is a wonderful photog., not forgetting to mention David and Carl, have to resort to forum postings to air their frustrations. This should tell you something. Oh well, good luck. I'm off to BetterPhoto.com to take a few paid on-line classes. (Cost me one of my legs, but I was able to keep both arms, propping myself up now with an old Ries wooden tripod leg) I hope sometime soon life settles down to a low roar on PN.

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<i>All these same complaints can be seen in thread, after thread, after thread on PN for eons. What to do? I don't know the answer, but I feel it's dragging PN.</i>

 

<p>Make complaints about the rating system off-topic in this forum. If people don't like how the Gallery is set up, there is nothing that compels them to participate, and giving them a platform to complain about it all the time just makes others dissatisfied.

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One thing common to the robot rates is that the distribution of their responses ALWAYS falls into a non-normal curve. I've run through the ratings of legit raters and, once they have done enough ratings, their distribution ALWAYS is normal. Since the robot raters always hit with a few hundred ratings very quickly, some sort of data-base trigger when a user hits, say, 300 ratings that checks for abnormal distributions should catch the robots within minutes of their appearance.
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<b>Brian, </b>You see the <b>same complaints time after time in thread after thread.</b> Does that not tell you that the paying members are <b>not happy?</b> I really do believe I have suggested the best solution, so far, to ease this problem. Paying members can rate at will and non-paying members are required to enter a code to have their rating accepted. <b>Surely, but surely </b>this keeps the P.N policy as you want it and stops the majority of Robots and Trolls who are upsetting the paying members.
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David,

 

As I posted earlier - what are you getting for your $25 that a non-subscriber isn't? Yours and my opinions are worthless and treated with disdain - "if you don't like it, go away" (or don't bother paying anything at all would seem to be their message).

 

Regrettably, I can only conclude that on a site that has a high percentage of income from advertising, any members are welcome, whether they be bogus mate raters or revenge raters, the administration simply don't care!

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<b>Mark, </b> How right you are. However, <b>what if all the paying members:-<br><br></b>1. Demanded their money back. <br><br>2. Posted messages all over the site discouraging new members from subscribing.<br><br>I do get a lot from the site <b>but</b> I am fast becoming disillusioned and frustrated with it. Maybe we <b>ALL</b> should be asking for our money back unless something is done about it. I really do believe I have come up with a very good solution to this problem in my earlier posting. I would be grateful to know what you think about it.
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