Thursday, November 24, 2011

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

Marc Weber wrote:

> It happened to a plugin of tpope and to one of mine:
>
> 31 down ratings in sequence on 2011-08-06 between 18:234 and 22:05
> 310 down ratings in sequence on 2011-08-08 between 10:39 and 22:25
> 509 down ratings in sequence on 2011-08-08 between 01:39 and 18:30
>
> In between no neutral or positive voting for VAM.
> Ratings before and after those 3 periiods have been both: live changing
> and unfullfilling. Given that the first section in docs is "contact me
> if you have trouble" its hard to believe that those are honest ratings.
>
> community: What do you suggest? I don't like the negative rating because
> you are not forced to pass a note about why you downrate a plugin which
> would be very helpful. I've written about this earlier.
> Now that manipulation clearly takes place I'd like to emphasize that
> eventually irc and mailinglists are more important then ever to get
> valuable advice based on experience rather than arbitrary down votings.
>
> I'm not sure what can be done against it because down voters can adopt
> easily. Some protction could be done by disallowing down votings - eg
> there is a reason that google and faecbook only accept "I like it / plus
> one" rather than "I dislike it/ minus one".
>
> Thus we could remove all negative votings and continue - people can only
> upvote their own plugins then which would hurt other projects less.
>
> I personally don't care: VAM surely has many happy and active users who
> help me debug issues fast and I'm thankful for their support.
> github and other arbitrary queries about any of the plugins I maintain
> including snipmate etc. are usually processed within a couple of days
> and the first reply is very likely to happen within 24 hours.
>
> So don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining here. I'm telling those who
> don't know it yet what I'm observing.
>
> Sorry for this noise - but I think people should know about it.
> If you want me to take action tell me to do so.

I do think that a negative rating is useful. Especially if a script
doesn't work well or there is another script that is much better.

What we don't want is a single user repeatedly giving negative ratings.
Since only one rating can be given per IP address, this should not
happen. But the "-1" ratings in sequence are coming from various IP
addresses. How can this happen? I can only think of the URL appearing
in a place where many people would click on it. Or a botnet that has
been setup to do this, which would be really weird. After the main
stream of -1's there are a few more the following day. That would
suggest it's a link that users click on.

I have manually deleted the sequence of -1 ratings for script 2905.
Not a thing that we should need to do often.

--
Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes.

/// Bram Moolenaar -- Bram@Moolenaar.net -- http://www.Moolenaar.net \\\
/// sponsor Vim, vote for features -- http://www.Vim.org/sponsor/ \\\
\\\ an exciting new programming language -- http://www.Zimbu.org ///
\\\ help me help AIDS victims -- http://ICCF-Holland.org ///

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