joe604

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A chat while waiting for the parade to start...<p><center><img src="

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Maybe not jazz...<center><img src="

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wish I had my Ipod...</center>

Thanks, Brian, for the clarification.

My opinion hasn't changed, though. My guess is that most users would prefer to be able to choose the interval for new answers, most typically from the last time they looked in a particular forum. --Joe

My experience is that the "New Answers" feature is so bad that it is practically useless. It appears to me that there is only a single time stamp for all forums rather than a separate time stamp for each forum. Consequently, viewing one forum effects the way I can look for new answers in the other forums.

A much better system would be to let the member enter the date from which to search for new answers, each time, regardless of what he may have viewed in the past. --Joe

You are right that this new policy may tend to skew the distribution a little more. But I don't have a problem with that. The skew is perfectly natural with this kind of rating system, where the rater is given the option to skip any image. Bad images get skipped more often than good images.

The system works fine in spite of the skew, and I don't think that Brian's new policy with 1's and 2's is not going to jeopardize this. --Joe

Brian said, <i>In theory, around 5% of photos submitted to the Critique Forum should be rated 1, and about 10% to 15% of photos should be rated 1 or 2. Similar percentages should receive 7 and 6 ratings, by the way. In practice fewer than 3% of ratings are 1 and 2 ratings, and most ratings are in the 4 to 7 range. About 10% of photos are rated 7, and 5 and 6 are the most frequently given ratings.</i><p>

Just incase anyone should infer from Brian's statistics that the system is somehow flawed, I want to point out that there is a built-in bias in our rating system that skews the distribution high. The distribution of ratings is skewed by the option to skip images (which is a good feature, by the way). The ratings naturally should be skewed high because bad images are more likely to be skipped than good images. If it were not possible to skip images, then we would see an average closer to 4 and a more Gaussian distribution. <p>

The fact that relatively few 1's and 2's are give doesn't necessarily mean that raters don't recognize bad images for what they are. Rather, I would guess that raters simply choose to skip over them, which is the proper thing to do. --Joe

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Fresh cheese made today...<p><center><img src="

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