Hi - I'm not r'sity staff, but I think this is how it works. It was easier to understand when the ranking system used to be 10 - 1 instead of Excellent etc, and the rankings were also visible on the page next to the comment, so people could see exactly who had posted what.

The overall ranking an image has is an average of all the rankings it has been given when people post their comments, excluding the "No ranking". When the rankings were numbers it was obvious if the average was less than 10.

In order to be at the top of the ranking page the image must have "all" its rankings as excellent, and so on. For example, all of Deagol's 28 rankings for the image "Last one for tree" must have been "Excellent" to hold the top position.

This also means that an image that has 4 Excellent rankings will still be above an image which has 4 Excellent rankings and 2 Good rankings on the Best rankings pages, as its "average" ranking will still be higher.

The real purpose of the ranking is to allow some kind of constructive criticism to the artist concerned, but in reality it's used more for saying how much people like certain images - I guess most people are polite enough simply to say nothing if they don't like an image. I think admin changed the numbering system in order to encourage people to be more constructive in their criticism, and avoid giving everything a 10 for everything. Maybe the individual rankings are no longer visible on the page for the same reason - for example many people would not necessarily feel comfortable saying an image was "Almost there" for an image publicly, but may in reality feel that that that is how they would rank an image privately.

It's probably not a good idea to pay too much attention too the ranking system though, as it's open to abuse, and indeed has been abused by a renderosity member in the past.

That person actually tried to impersonate someone else in the fractal community by using their ususal internet nickname, and down-ranked many of the images which were on the first few "Best ranking" pages, thereby reducing their average ranking and deliberately knocking them out of the charts, so to speak. Fortunately it was obvious what was happening, and those rankings and comments were all deleted by admin.

The Comments and Top 20 are completely separate from the Ranking system.

I hope that if I've got any of this wrong someone from admin will correct me, but that is my understanding of how it works :-)

Tina

aartika! fractal art by Tina Oloyede :  http://www.aartika.co.uk