Thursday, November 24, 2011

Re: rating manipulations on www.vim.org have taken place

On Fri, 25 Nov 2011, Marc Weber wrote:

> Excerpts from Bram Moolenaar's message of Thu Nov 24 21:42:27 +0100 2011:
>> I do think that a negative rating is useful.
> It is - but not in the current shape.
> If you give a negative rating its ok - but you should
> - allow the author to remedy the issue
> - force users dowvoting scripts to leave a message

If you want inaccurate ratings, sure, do that.

That's what you could do if you're assuming that the ratings are for the
benefit of the plugin authors. I'd rather the ratings be useful for
users.

Anything that makes leaving a rating take more effort will artificially
inflate the ratings, which is bad for people trying to choose between
two or more plugins that do the same thing. If someone who actually
cares enough to go back and submit a rating isn't allowed to do so
without leaving a comment, they'll likely not leave a rating. But, I
don't see why not caring enough to help a plugin author fix the problem
would invalidate the user's opinion.


> Its ok to downvote for a reason such as "contains executable".
> But its bad to have people provide negative rating and not knowing why!
> The website should allow some minimal feedback.

Allow? Yes, great idea. Force? No.


>> I have manually deleted the sequence of -1 ratings for script 2905.
>> Not a thing that we should need to do often.
> You're right: In open source malicious downvoting does not happen
> often or should not. I've checked it: I can no longer access HTTP
> access logs.
>
> Bram: do you still know when you changed the voting system using POST?

He wrote a message stating it was fixed on Sept. 2.


> Then we can confirm what happened to Dr Charles Campbell's scripts.

Either it was what I explained (Google crawled a link that caused bad
ratings when clicked) or it was malicious. Since it hasn't happened
since the change to POST (to either Manpageview or your script), seems
like evidence of the former.

--
Best,
Ben

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