Ratings

On another topic, who classifies the type of genre of a band or album ?

This band has been classified as Crossover Prog ? This is definitely not Crossover, I would qualify it as Neo-Prog, though they have their own personality.

That isn't understanding my point at all. In fact it's missed it by a country mile. The purpose of the weighting is not to encourage reviews or discourage rating-only. It's simply to limit the damage caused by stupid idiots who think they can manipulate the ratings of their favourite artists by creating multiple accounts or by manipulating the chart rankings in the Top 100 charts by maliciously giving 1-star reviews to hundreds of albums they've never listened to. As I said, we'd rather not have to do that but these muppets (of which sadly there are many) give us very little choice in the matter. 

If we differentiated between review-rating average and rating-only average it would actually render the rating-only result as a meaningless number that no one in their right mind would ever believe. 

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Trust me on this, when I was an admin I spent hours on end manually computing averages every which way and can assure you the rating-only values would be completely unrepresentative and misleading because of deliberate rating manipulation. To give you some idea of how bad that can be on one evening I deleted 1000s of ratings from one clown who had used over 150 fake accounts in an attempt to manipulate their favourite band's latest album to the top of that year's album chart.

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Deciding what to buy based in reviews - great. Deciding what to buy based on average ratings without reading a single review - not so great, but frankly what's the difference between 4.16 and 4.67? It's still a 4-star album and this ain't an exact science.

This is primarily a review site (it may not seem like it at first glance, but it is), the ratings are a bit of fun for amusement only and should never be taken too seriously. 

All "rating" sites use weightings but because the samples sizes (i.e. number of ratings per album, book or movie) are generally much higher than anything we get here that isn't so visibly apparent on those sites. This is to prevent deliberate skewing of the results by unscrupulous miscreants who abuse the rating-only system - we would much rather this practice never existed so we could use simple averaging but unfortunately rating abuse is very prevalent across the internet because people are basically arseholes. 

Weighting is a necessary approach to combat unnecessary fraudulent ratings. Other sites (IMDb for example) are even stricter than us and actually ignore all rating only votes and any rating+review votes from people with a low number of reviews completely when computing their averages.

This site has been here since 2004 and this is the fairest method we have found in that time.

To Meltdowner, I posted twice because wasn't sure which was the right place to do it. 

A typical fanboy reaction.