[TYPO3-typo3org] Abuse of "Sites made with TYPO3"

[Daniel Hinderink]

Hi Christian,
> 
> I've been keeping an eye on the new Beta Sites made with TYPO3 feature 
> over the last days. It seems that somebody tried to cheat by rating all 
> the sites that were displayed on the first page of the list view at that
> point with only 1 star. Likewise I am pretty sure that one person rated 
> his/her own page with 6 stars.

Yes, I have been thinking that since the beginning too. It was also qute 
obvious how some sites were entered and a few minutes later current 
leaders were voted down.

I toyed around with the data looking at new entries vs. ratings in the 
beginning and the behavioural pattern is hard to overlook:
When new entries have been entered, those same get 6 star ratings in the 
first few minutes after that, while a few others (I did not make the 
effort to check their position on the tops list at the time of rating) 
get very low ratings right after that.

> This will obviously become less important with more people rating a 
> particular site. So I don't know if trying to make cheating harder would
> be worth the effort. Still, it somewhat bothers me that some clowns are 
> bashing other people's good and hard work.

First of all, I was really looking forward to find out how this would 
work. To put it nicely: the only motivation we can count on is amibition.

I have doubts that a bigger number of ratings will even out something, 
for two reasons:
- some people will always rate based on personal gripe against their 
competitors
- other people will follow the trend by giving as many stars as the 
average has given.

so any unjustified bad mark would need a number of people that rate it 
"too" good to restore a justified average. A really large number of 
average marks is not very likely.

In practice that means the existing data in the ratings is not worth 
anything, so let's delete it.

Since the playing around with the "deactivation" link has stopped since 
it requires a login, I think doing the same to ratings and flushing the 
ratings table in the process would be the best solution.

At the same time the ratings should be improved, if we can come to a 
conclusion in the other thread.

cheers,

Daniel