Inappropriate Ratings

Nogbad_The_Bad wrote: Anyone want to have a look at this guy? http://www.progarchives.com/Collaborators.asp?id=35622 13,500 ratings, 99% of them 5 star! Not a single forum post or review.

I've been aware of him for a long time. Without seeing anything obviously malicious or mischievous in his ratings, I wouldn't want to take action.

With some "overraters", I have taken action when I see, say, clear manipulation or people clearly rating albums that they could not have heard yet. If there's any particularly suspicious behaviour/ ratings, then that should be investigated.

Edited by Logan - September 01 2018 at 09:58

I like having the star ratings as a guide to what a particular user likes, but I think that ratings-only should have zero weight on ranking and average rating (not that I personally much care about that). In my early days here, I found those ratings useful to discover albums by looking at particular raters ratings who I found had very similar tastes to mine (I didn't need to read reviews by them, if they gave it a four or five, I was confident that it would appeal to me). I also sometimes find it useful as a forum member so get a feel for what someone likes even if it's just to make better recommendations to them. For some people, rating those albums (rating without reviewing) can be a fun list-making exercise and a way of keeping track of albums even if it's not valuable to anyone else.

Regarding the guide to what the ratings mean, I have wanted to see that changed to merely explicitly reflect personal taste (five stars would just mean that you really love it and need not say anything about any apparent objective merits). I think some people may go a bit far in trying to justify their ratings, that included me in the few reviews that I have written. If making it explicitly purely subjective doesn't fly, I would at least like to change it to something along the lines of "Essential: a masterpiece of its category imo". Hopefully it's a very informed opinion, but tastes are subjective and I would rather it be "Awesome! Love it". I realise that the ratings are meant to reflect progressiveness too, and perhaps there could be a separate rating for that, but it will continue to be quite subjective (and it's bit late for such an overhaul and I wouldn't expect such a change).

And I don't think that one should have to give a rating to review an album. I used to read and write film reviews, and I never favoured the use of star ratings then. I avoided publications that used ratings and never wanted to add them to mine.

Anyway I believe that the site owner wants the ratings-only ability partially because we have an English language policy in reviews, and we get people from around the world (some of which have more limited English than others). That said, google translate and such services are very good now.

One part of me would like to see stars gone from reviews (it should at least be optional), and have an area for personal lists where we can rate albums. That said, the overall ratings can be of interest to people and useful as a guide when there are many ratings or ratings by individuals with tastes similar to oneself. It's a feature that I think benefits the site overall and it gets more hits. I don't care much about album ranking and overall rating often, but some do. It's easy to ignore, but reviews would be better when we don't go on about how we rate it like there's more science to the rating than there is. We are amateurs though, despite there being some excellent reviewers here, and I think that's fine.

EDIT: I should read carefully through my posts before posting as I forgot to specify ratings-only in parts. Maybe it was clear enough already.

Edited by Logan - September 01 2018 at 22:54

Meltdowner wrote: This guy has practically only 5 and 1 stars ratings, it doesn't seem right. http://www.progarchives.com/Collaborators.asp?id=57009

Looking at his profile, I suspect he's actually Steve Hackett operating under an alias...unless he really is Italian, in which case he REALLY hates the prog from his own country!

No need to explain, Sam, I feel the same way, furious to see so many Italian albums dismissed like that...and it's pretty clear looking at the wide range of titles across endless genres that he gave a one star to that he's never listened to any of them.

Hmmm, I'm suspecting he might be a member of the Rome Pro(G)ject or Barock Project, I think they were the only two Italian acts on his list to get five stars from what I can tell!

Edited by Aussie-Byrd-Brother - October 03 2018 at 07:37

^ Nightmare, only your nightmare. 

Edited by siLLy puPPy - March 12 2020 at 20:26

Yeah he hasn't listened to 12 Zoviet France albums and hated them all.

^ All ratings and only two "non-reviewing" reviews have been gone. Thanks.