Can anyone clarify to me how does the Ranking system work? I don't understand it at all.

I have one image, currently with 4 rankings and 9 comments (Strange Moss), but I don't see it in the "best rankings" list, where it should be, I mean, near others with same number of rankings/comments. Not that I would die because of that, but I would like to understand how does it work.

In the page #20 (viewing 18 images per page) of the "best rankings" page, there are images with 4 rankings and 4 comments, so I thought that mine would probably be "higher" since it has more rankings and comments. Until the page #14, it didn't appear (maybe it's higher, who knows?). In this same page, there are images with also 4 rankings, but different number of comments, some bigger than mine, some smaller. In the very first line for example (I'm supposing that the "best ranked" are those who are listed first in the page), there is one image with 4 rankings/7 comments, followed by other that has 4 rankings/7 comments (with more views than the previous!), and another that has 4 rankings and 9 comments.

If my image is in higher pages than this one (it's not), why it is ranked better than the image with 9 rankings and 10 comments then? Strange.

I thought it should had some kind of order, like, images with 10 rankings and 10 comments should appear before images with 10 rankings and 9 comments for example (isn't it a bit obvious?), more or less like when it gets a comment, it would get one "point" or "credit", and the ranking would be based on the total number of "points" of an image. But this is not what happens. In the event of a tie, the number of viewings could be used, or something else.

I understand that the voting system is a different thing, if one image doesn't get voted, even having lots of viewings and/or comments, it won't appear in the "best voted" ranking (it's also very obvious).

I am not criticizing any image in particular, neither saying "mine are better", I just don't understand how the ranking system works, it's not as logical as it should be.

Hi Marcusbacus, good question! The Best Ranked is it purely "best ranked" without taking into consideration the comments, views etc. That's because there are viewing categories for "most viewed" and "most commented". Doing it this way I imagine keeps the sort/download time to as much a minimum as can be managed. If all the criteria were to be parsed together, the person requesting it would be twiddling their thumbs for a very long time :) Hope this helped!?

Not really, I'm still confused. It should be that simple, the higher the number of votes/rankings/comments/etc, the better you are in that specific listing. Taking my image as an example, why it wasn't listed along others with the same number of rankings then, right after it was posted and the rankings were placed? It would appear in the last position as soon as it was posted (simple as that), and would appear higher as one visits the ranking pages after comments/rankings were placed or after a certain time of the day where the ranking pages would be updated. I would understand it a little better if the rankings were supposed to be updated once/twice a day (an evident delay would occur), but it's not what happens. Freshly posted images appear as fast as they're posted in these rankings sometimes, while others don't... Perhaps anyone from the R' staff could explain this? For sure processing all these large number of images requires a lot of effort, but it wouldn't be technnically as slower than uploading an image or verifying its size, I think (I'm probably a little wrong). Mostly if there was this sort of "credits" thing I was talking about: an "excellent" ranking could give you 5 points/credits, a "great" 4 and so on, and each view or comment could give you one point, I think wouldn't stress the servers that much to make us wait for the rankings to show up... plus, these scores would appear just when the ranking page was requested, not in the viewing galleries. And I can assure you that to calculate this mess that the ranking looks like now, it takes much more CPU cycles than a single javascript/asp/cgi or whatever they use...

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

Hi, For all these reasons many peoples choose to not allow ranking of there image and because I choose that I never rank other's image. Personnally I think ranking could do more harm than good, Cheers, Luc

Nice. I wrote another reply to Tina's message, but it seems that the moderators didn't like what I said and the message was fully deleted. I don't remember being offensive (was I? Ever?), I was just saying that the system still remains confusing to me. And that the system seems a little unfair. Ah I remember now. I said something about how easy it is to fraud the voting/ranking system. It is, if you want to do it. I don't. I also remember saying that I don't care much about the rankings (I just want to understand how it works!), and that I prefer much more to have a single comment of one of the "masters" than a thousand votes. Being criticized isn't for everyone. Not everyone likes that. Even R.

Hey ya Marcusbacus :) I can assure you that at no time have you been offensive here!! No One has deleted any messages you put up in this forum. Not sure what may have happened while you were posting. Tina's msg was spot-on to btw. Thanks Tina! And Luc is also correct in that there are sufficient problems with the ranking systems that each person who uses it does so with these things in mind. When/if someone leaves me a ranking I take it in contest to what they are saying :) If people seem to like the image then something in that image is done correctly or more correctly and pleasingly than another image. I use the words and rankings folks are kind enough to leave me and do my own comparative studies within my art to determine what it is I'm doing right or wrong or how I can do something differently. So, in that vein I find the info left for me to be quite helpful and encouraging!