1 star ratings

W.Chuck wrote: There should be a poll here to decide if they should be removed or at least not counted.

I think many 5 star reviews hurt the website just as bad- they can be very misleading

After writing a few reviews for this site, I can tell a few things. First, english is not my native language so it's not easy to write those reviews but writing at least three lines (yeah, 200 characters is only a couple of lines!) is something I definitely can do. And I think everybody that wants to review an album should be able to write a few words about what they like or not about that album (what time does it take? five minutes? ten?), even about average albums (after all an average album is a mix of good songs and bad songs no?). Second, about those:

Rating by Ricky @ 10:42:33 AM EST, 12/28/2005

Rating by exorcist @ 10:50:12 AM EST, 12/28/2005

When I wrote a review about the album on which those appeared (The Gathering - Mandylion), I was totally shocked by those. I was about to post a 5 star rating, and the 7 other reviews giving 4 or 5 stars to the album conforted me in my choice. So what the hell with those? Looking at the time of the ratings, we can see that they have been submitted at 8 minutes interval, which would indicate that those 2 guys are really the same person submitting a rating from 2 close computers. For me, this is total bullsh*t, this guy show no concern to the community here and I would even say they show no concern to the artists themselves.

So what to do about that? Not counting those reviews in the average calculation would be a minimum. Not accepting ratings without a (short) review would be better of course, but even that wouldn't prevent jerks from posting 50 words of garbage just to fill the requirement (and that would spam the "report abuse" forum section too). The best solution would be a sort of review validation system, but this would require a lot of time from the site maintainers... Probably the best solution would be to hide those ratings from the review page, not count them in the average rating calculation, and add a button "Show ratings without reviews" for people who really want to see them on the review page.