Prohibit voting on a story by a user you ignore on forum

[LongDraw]

I think the premise behind this one should be straight forward. If you are ignoring a user on the forum, then if you are going to that same user's stories on the story part of the site, you aren't at all expected to give them anything other than a 1 star, and in most cases out of spite, not out of honest literary opinion. So can the site admins run a check against the user registration on both sides, or even better collapse the user registration down to a single database?

 

[AlinaX]

If you are ignoring a forum user, surely that's your own personal choice. Why would it affect the story side at all? And no one's expected to vote at all.

 

[Pookie]

I think the premise behind this one should be straight forward. If you are ignoring a user on the forum, then if you are going to that same user's stories on the story part of the site, you aren't at all expected to give them anything other than a 1 star, and in most cases out of spite, not out of honest literary opinion. So can the site admins run a check against the user registration on both sides, or even better collapse the user registration down to a single database?

In my opinion, something like this has the potential to be abused by the author. Certain posters could be known to give legitimately low marks. This is often offset by "friends" giving high scores that may or may not be deserved as well. It would be tempting to use a new ignore feature to block legitimate reviews/scores.

I've always believed that the average score has undeserved high and low scores. It likely balances out over time. If you're a "controversial" poster on the board, I might have a separate user account for posting stories.

Just some thoughts.

 

[LongDraw]

In my opinion, something like this has the potential to be abused by the author. Certain posters could be known to give legitimately low marks. This is often offset by "friends" giving high scores that may or may not be deserved as well. It would be tempting to use a new ignore feature to block legitimate reviews/scores.

I've always believed that the average score has undeserved high and low scores. It likely balances out over time. If you're a "controversial" poster on the board, I might have a separate user account for posting stories.

Just some thoughts.

Your points are valid, but I think I may not have communicated my thoughts on this clearly enough. The intent is to prohibit intentionally harmful voting by a user who has blocked the author on the forum, and then proceeds to search out all of their stories to bomb them with 1 star votes for the sole purpose of sabotaging their score. This is vindictive, and could be considered a violation of the Terms of Service of the forum as well as the site as a whole since this would undoubtedly fall under harrassment.

I would suggest something like:

Forum user A blocks Forum user B (author) --> Forum user A attempts to bomb user B's stories --> site logic automatically removes the invalid/harrassment score from calculations
Forum user A votes on user B's stories with 1 star votes in multiple stories in 7 day period, then proceeds to block user B within 30 days --> same result on calculations as above
Forum user A attempts to use alt account to bomb user B's stories in fashion detailed in first 2 scenarios --> same result on calculations as above and potential ban of user A account for vote manipulation

What do you all think?

 

[windar]

The site allows voting by non-members, so all a person would have to do is log out and go vote as a visitor. Even if IP addresses were tracked, there are many ways to disguise them. So that would have no effect.

 

[ag2507]

The voting system is at best flawed but, it will be difficult for a single bad score to seriously impact a large sample average. Out of curiosity I have tracked scores of stories I have voted on, and my humble vote has seldom made any difference to the overall score. I am curious to know whether null votes are taken into consideration: if a story really really sucks I seldom drag my sorry arse to the last page to give it a coruscating vote. If lots of folk do that the story will get an artificially high score.
Right now, the only way I know I have read a story is to give it a score but that involves going to the end first. It also means stories i wouldn't otherwise vote on get a bad score.

 

[MadeleineSinha]

This sounds like a lot of work for an admin and I can think of several ways to circumvent the OP's original idea.
It comes across as both petty and petulant, not sure if that was the plan.

 

[cranegurl]

If you're enough of an arsehole that enough people are 1 bombing your works that it makes a difference to the overall score maybe you should reconsider your engagement with the board, although there may be another reason your scores are quite low and maybe you aren't as good as you think you are.

 

[jaF0]

What do you all think?

I think I quit going to the AH because fo all the pissing and moaning about ratings and comments and I'm not thrilled with it spilling out of there.

 

[vietnamvet14]

I no longer allow voting or comments about my stories. A clown who goes by the name whackadoodle (which is very fitting) has never given anyone a good rating that I've seen so I decided I don't want to read what he says. Besides, the stories I write are MY stories and I don't really care what he or anyone thinks about them. In other words they're fantasies of mine and I really am not interested in others' opinions.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

And when they find they can't vote they will just create another ID so they can one bomb you.