Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I think it need option to watch, who has faved certain game.
It's not hidden information - you can watch favourites on users' pages, but quickly watching, who has faved certain game, may also be interesting.

Yeah, 84 space contest was great. I've faved one game, wich is not it's participant, but variant of participant.

Daniil, I've actually been working on that.  I think it would be more useful if the favorite dropdown from the menu listed the people who have favorited a game (when on that game's page).

If I can get that working, is that preferable to listing your own favorites?  (I think so, as your favorites are already available from your user profile page.)  What should be listed on non-game or non-favorited pages?  (Maybe nothing?)

You could display both, in submenus.

I have added the "liked by" list to the menu.

Something is strange today: When I visit this site without logging in, "Tandem Chess" is listed under "Your Favorites". (It is the only favorite for an anonymous visitor of this site)

The favorites list of Tandem Chess displays only two names, the favorites count is 3 (under the entry Bughouse Chess).

Looks like a bug to me.

The Favorites database had a listing for TandemChess without anything for the PersonID. I was able to remove it by unfavoriting Tandem Chess while logged off. I will take a look at the scripts for favoriting and unfavoriting.

I'd like to favourite Three check Chess (/play/erf/ThreeChk.html), but it seems not possible, because there is no game description page for it :/

After Indian chaturanga, Chess was deeply changed in Persian and Arab world. I do not see any mention about that game which rules are very close to the one we all know. In Spain, Arabs -where remained 8 centuries, the new rules were set !. It has been added:

- pawns first move can "jump" two cells,

- the 2 Rocks,

- and the prise-en-passant.

The Arab/Persian chess is called Old Chess.

Also, there is a variant game famous in Ethiopia, a very old country of Chess called Senterej (see wikipedia).

....

I have removed the restriction on how many games you can favorite. You can now favorite as many of our games as you like.

Thanks Fergus. I've now got about 45 favourite games, and the website didn't seem to have any problem with such a large number of them being selected by one CVP member.

Probably an independent issue, but looking from my best machine (my laptop), I've noticed that I do seem to have a problem with all the diagrams now being empty of pieces in almost all the submissions of my 17 invented games (including most of the 10 of my own that were also given as presets). The diagrams are showing as their normal arrays of coloured cells, it's just they are empty of pieces. That's in spite of not trying to edit them myself, at least since the formatting for CVP website submissions was altered, well after I made my submissions. If you've got the time to do a quick fix for me Fergus, please do so. I forgot what you did in quick fashion the last time this sort of thing happened. In any case, if I need to do it myself, it may take a long time as I'm fairly busy this week.

Kevin

I cannot seem to edit my previous comment, as I get a message when I hit preview. I meant to add that I'm all thumbs when it comes to computers.

The drawdiagram.php script is now fixed. I have been combing through error logs for things to fix, and sometimes fixes might inadvertently break other things. So I rely on the users to be my eyes and tell me what is wrong with things I might not be looking at right away. Thanks for mentioning this.

A quick check revealed that all my submissions (including presets) seem to look okay now, including the diagrams. Thank you, Fergus.

I am thinking about how to use the favorites data for making recommendations. This might be broken down into different things to calculate. One is similarity between the favorites of two members.

The simplest way is to just count up how many games they have favorited in common. But this doesn't take into account the favorites they don't have in common, and it allows somone to become someone else's most similar neighbor by favoriting lots of games. So I want a method that takes into account both the number they have both favorited and the total number of games favorited by either of them.

One simple way to calculate this would be as the total number of games they have in common divided by the total number of games they have each favorited. This would count each game only once, giving a percentage of how similar two lists of favorites are.

A variation on this method is to count a game each time it is favorited. This would double the numerator and increase the denominator. In this case, the denominator would be twice as large only if they favorited all the same games. This would count games they have favorited more than games only one has favorited.

Another option that would do this even more is to square the games they have in common for the numerator and use the total number of games they have each favorited in the numerator. This would amplify the significance of having favorite games in common.

What do the mathematicians here think?

Another idea came to me while I was running in place, listening to Rush. I could take the average of two percentages. For two members, A and B, these would be Shared Favorites / Total number of A's favorites and Shared Favorites over / Total number of B's favorites.

There are three main things to calculate.

1. Similarity between two members
2. A ranking of games derived from the favorites of members who like the same game
3. A ranking of games derived from the favorites of members with a non-zero similarity to another member.

Hi Fergus

My first impression is that your ideas thus far for change related to the topic of games to recommend to viewers might be too complicated for most folks to appreciate, at least at not much more than a glance (which seems desirable to me, as far as assessing a given game's popularity or potential goes, given that there's so many of them).

One thing you might change is the way the 'Our Favorites' CVP list of games is handled, if you're all concerned members will begin to favourite too many games, making that CVP list perhaps undesirably long (such as the Game Courier list of All Games presently definitely is, in terms of going through all of it thoroughly). Right now there's something like 70+ games chosen by 2 or more members, which is a nice list length IMHO.

Games favourited by just 1 member (a huge number right now, too) might not be shown on the 'Our Favorites' CVP list a) until they are favourited by more members, or b) until games favourited only by the inventor are favourited by more members, or c) unless they are favourited only once, but by someone other than the inventor (this last option may not prune the CVP list enough even right now, though, IMHO). A potential long-term drawback of this recommendation of mine (whichever option of a), b) or c) might be selected) is that eventually the 'Our Favouites' CVP list may grow too long anyway, in which case other way(s) might be considered to prune it.

Something else you might want to consider when making recommendations is the Game Corier Rating(s) of a given member who favourites a particular game(s).

I still am unable to edit any comments I post. Regarding my previous post, I meant to edit it to exclude one of option b) and c) since they would in effect be the same.

This is an edited test comment. Comments can now be edited.

The ideas I have brought up are for scripts I have not yet written. I have mentioned them here, because it is within the subject of the favorites data, not because it will be done on this page. If you look at last.fm, a site that uses data on what music people listen to, it includes neighbors (people who listen to some of the same music), similar artists to a particular artist, and recommendations for a particular user. I want to write scripts that will show closest neighbors (people who share the most favorites with you), games most favorited by people who favorite a particular game, and recommendations based on the favorites of a particular user.

Please note that the comment editor, which was already quite awful to start with, now is close to unbearable. Because it reformats the entire page in reaction to the length of the lines that are displayed in the edit window. So if you scroll through your text and encounter a long line, the page formatting jumps between one where you have a left side bar with advertizement, with the edit window right of it, and formatting where the same advertizement is in a header with only white space to the right of it, and the edit window below it, far out of view. When you then scroll the entire page to get the edit window in view again, to continue scrolling the latter, and you get to a place with short lines, the edit window jumps back to besides the ad at the top of the page, etc.

I'm intrigued by how 'similar artists to a particular artist', re: songs as looked at on last.fm, might be applied to chess variants, if you're thinking along those lines, Fergus.

As far as 'recommendations based on the favorites of a particular user' goes, I'm guessing that could result in something like the hit-or-miss results produced by data mining on behalf of advertisers on the internet (who then flash their recommendations to you while you're online somewhere). As a rule such advertising is for products that don't quite interest me, though these may come close sometimes.

So, as far as 'recommendations based on the favorites of a particular user' goes, it's my guess it may be good enough just to let people pick from straightforward popularity lists on CVP (like the 'Our Favorites'), although I suppose one more list of recommendations, based on data mining, won't confuse too much and may even be helpful at times when one is looking for new variants to play.

As a test, I copied one of your interactive diagram comments into the editor window, and when I scrolled the text, the window did resize. I then capitalized the class name of the textarea to match the class defined in the CSS file, and then copied the same comment to the editor window again. This time, it did not resize as I scrolled up and down.

Similar artists is a misnomer, but that's what they call it. It is based on listening habits, not on comparison of musical styles. For example, t.A.T.u. is, musically speaking, more similar to other Russian pop artists, but because it is the most popular Russian pop group, its similar artists list also includes several western pop stars or groups, while if you pick out some other Russian pop group, the similar artists list will be predominently Russian.

Hello everybody.

Today I had browsed through all the articles on this website choosing my favorite game. For now, as the size of this community is not that impressive it is probably an ok system.

First things first. I don't intend to help with the implementation of all this. But I'd really like the discussion had.

Anyway for the future I'd like to raise some issues.

1. It does not seem to me apropiate that all favorite games share the same level.  There are definitely games among my favorites that I like more than others. A neat propose I think it would be to have gold preferences scoring 4 points, silver preferences scoring 2 points and bronze preferences scoring 1 point.

2. Next, I don't think this system makes the favorites enumerating (the hearts) a valuable commodity. After a certain lowest threshold (in the 4,2,1 system according to my calculations 80 points should be fine, as I have roughly 40 games which in average should worth 2 points, with maybe a distribution of bronze hearts> silver hearts> than gold hearts, by a healthy margin), the number favorites should have a lower impact if you gave an overall score higher than the average score given by all users, and a higher impact if you gave an overall score lower than the average score given by all users. Also the impact of someone "hearting" the games should by influenced by other factors like writing recognized scientific articles on the matter, writing a popular computer program for CV, having a reasonable distribution among your bronze, silver and gold hearts, or even being an older member :)!

Hope to hear from you guys!

Good luck :)!

Regarding the Favorites list, I think some weighting is effectively accomplished by the sheer number of people favouriting a game, and also if one notes if an inventor is favouriting his own game that's in question (if so, this would presumably mean less in the eyes of at least some CVP members or visitors).

There is also another sort of form of weighting done, in effect, by whether people's favourite variant(s) make e.g. the Recognized Chess Variants list, the Top 50 played Game Courier games list, and possibly other lists (as of now, this might include whether a variant is given as a Primary Item, as chosen by editor[s], for the main alphabetical index). All this depends how much people are willing to look at all these other lists outside of the Favorites one, though.

Fwiw, I once suggested to Fergus in a Comment here that for the Favorites list, perhaps favourited games might not be shown on said list until they were favourited at least twice, to keep the Favorites list reasonably short (at least for a while).

First it seems that for some reason I had butchered this thread's title :(! Sorry! Any ideea how to change it?

(I've moved this thread under the Favorites page.)

The vast majority of people favorite only a small handful of games; these are the "gold hearts" games for those users.  For more granularity, there's the rating system in the comments, though we've mostly dropped support for that as a recommendation system due to disuse. (edited; see Kevin's next comment)

The more complicated we make the process, the more there is to quibble about specifics of implementation.  I like the Favorites list (mostly) as it stands.  I would consider developing a more complicated system, but would want it to be separate from this page.

A bit of information: at present, here's a table of how many favorites people have:

The average number of favorites (among those with a positive number) is 7.2.

Fwiw, here's the Average Game Ratings page, as linked to on the CVP main page under 'Which [variants] are the best?' I'm not absolutely sure, but I think this might be a relatively new page as started by Fergus:

http://www.chessvariants.com/index/avgratings.php

Thanks, Ben. Yesterday I have favd 44 games. I don't see myself in the list but thanks :)!

I did see myself in the end :)! Sorry :)!

I've recently made two lists for the Canadian Chess Federation (CFC) Discussion Board website, in a thread I started there about chess variants. The first list had a lot of relatively popular chess variants played in the world at large on it, from shogi to Seirawan Chess (similar to the list I recently gave in another CVP thread, i.e. Ideas for future of chess variants). I also gave a dozen chess variants seperately as examples of distinctive, weird and wonderful CVs, which I thought all seemed fairly playable, yet generally not having too many rules or highly unusual board shapes (as taken from my own long [approx. 130] CVP list of personal favorites). This list of 12 may seem too arbitrary, but I thought I'd share it in case it inspires, or has some value otherwise that I didn't anticipate. Anyway, if I one day could choose to rank some of my favorites as higher than the rest, perhaps this bunch would be close to the top, regardless of whether I currently play all of them well, or at all:

1. Alice Chess;

2. Altair;

3. Backlash;

4. Chaturanga - Four Kings - Double Mate;

5. Chess with Different Armies;

6. Clockwork Orange Chess;

7. Knightmare Chess;

8. Kriegspiel;

9. Maxima;

10. Pocket Mutation Chess;

11. Rococo;

12. Storm the Ivory Tower.

P.S.:

From the Recognized Variants thread, on the topic of Primary Items (from an exchange I had with Fergus that I'd forgotten - may be a good idea to post this in the present thread, too):

Fergus Duniho wrote on 2020-04-03 EDT 'That's something that David Howe instituted so that the most important pages would be at the top of the list when listing search results. I think he largely included the Recognized Variants, though some other things are also included. It might be a good idea to replace Recognized Variants and Primary Items with Featured Games and Featured Pages, the former being a subset of the latter. Featured pages would be ones that we want to draw greater attention to or that we expect users would be looking for more. These could include links to games that enough of us think highly of, links to well-known or popular games, and links to commercially available commercial games. These could be featured at the top of search results, as Primary Items are, but referred to as Featured Pages instead. Also, they could be a bit more dynamic than Recognized Variants, meaning we could drop something from the Featured Pages, such as a commercial game no longer being made, or a game that has been reevaluated.'

Continued from another thread:

Wrt the favouriting threshold, I wonder whether it might be an idea for favourites to be weighted? Such that people with less discriminating tastes who have many ‘favourites’ are weighted less than those who make very selective choices? Seems to me that would incentivise keeping your list short while still allowing the flexibility to show appreciation for many games for those who need(?) it (to which ofc the counterpoint is ꝥ that's what Ratings are for, though those are completely lacking in discoverability and are vulnerable to the same issues). Ofc how to determine the right weighting (obviously(?) it can't just be inverse‐linear) is a potentially subtle question.

the situation where childish inventors would create a massive number of garbage variants just to create voting power

I'd imagine that's what the Editors are there to avoid?

But in general I agree that favouriting your own games is something that really ought to be earned; I'd be tempted to propose that could be factored in to a weighting algorithm too, though at that point it starts becoming really quite complicated

EDIT: looking at this comment thread I see that some form of more complex system has been proposed but at least Ben would prefer it to be a separate system; I'd note two things wrt this suggestion: firstly it would be more complicated, but only on the back end — the user experience (selecting whether or not a game is a ‘favourite’) remains identical; secondly, it seems a little odd to be proliferating systems like this — the Featured Games programme is kinda already on that threshold for me tbh, which is why I haven't really engaged with it (otherwise I probably would have been happy to second Metamachy, f.ex., though I don't disagree with H.G.'s assessment about diversity). Just because it might take a little more than 10s to invent a new discoverability system…

I thought about this too, and also came to the conclusion that inverse linear is not ideal. Furthermore, I would like to avoid fractional scores. A possibility that occurred to me was this: everyone has a 'budget' for favoring variants, and can choose to favor a variant multiple times. To favorite a variant N times would take N squared out of his budget, though. This should be enough to discourage excessively favoring a single variant.

E.g. if we set the budget to 128 (which is enough to accomodate the situation described in a posting lower down in this topic thread), people that would want to favor only a single variant could favor it 11 times; more typical people that favor 8 variants could assign each of those 4 times (giving the 'all on one' attempt not even 3 times as much weight), and less critical people who want to favor 127 would have to do with a single favor for each of those.

This would need enhancement of the interface to also allow users to favor variants multiple times, and 'unfavor' those they favored before, in order to make room for more favored variants. If we feel it is unnecessary for a user to distinguish between variants he favors, the current interface would suffice. But in reporting the score the votes of each user would be weighted by multiplying those with a number N, which is the largest integer that, squared and multiplied by the number of variants favored by the user would not exceed 128.

To implement the latter it would only be necessary to modify the script that prepares the overview page. I don't think we would need a new 'awards program' for that. We can even have this page show both numbers: the weighted sums, (on which the variants are then sorted), as well as the number of users that contributed to this total (as it does now).

The weighted totals could be calculated in two iterations: the first one would discard all self-voting. After that it would be calculated how many weighted votes each user received, and how many self-votes this would earn him. In the second iteration the self-votes of users that did not go 'over budget' in self-voting would be counted in the weighted total.

In my opinion you are making a cathedral. It is too complex, just the maths there give me an headache. OK if we were a community with thousands of voters, but we are few tens. Very soon you will have less people participating than fingers in one hand.

First, I want to say that I hope that you understood that my call for "seconding" Metamachy was a kind of joke. I don't care at all about this Featured Games stuff. It is not my sort of things. Neither Metamachy nor none of my variants need this.

Second, me too I think that, indeed, it would be interesting to shine some light on one "Innovative CV". Proposers would have to say why they propose one when doing so. Of course, no self-proposal.

The other criterias should be removed. If a CV is really interesting because it is innovative, THEN, it will be an incentive for someone to code it to be played somewhere, and for someone else to clean and arrange its web page. Currently, we are just doing the opposite.

Well, the users would not be exposed to the math, so they would not have to know anything about it. It is just a (not so big) one-time effort for the site developers to sort the variants mentioned on this page by a different criterion. Perhaps I should just make a clone of this page, and modify it to use the weighted sorting.

The criteria that the presentation should be in perfect shape are currently counterproductive, but only because we are extremely tardy in selecting a variant. People can propose or second all they like, it will be completely ignored until the last day of the month, and then all proposals will be dismissed because they are not sufficiently represented on this website, and something else will be chosen. If we would pick a variant, say, 1 month in advance, there would be time to fix the layout, include Interactive Diagrams, create a GC preset, etc. That way it would lead to perpetual improvement of the website.

(Can we please keep these two discussions on their relevant threads: Favorites and proposals for new/additional systems here, and the Featured variants on that page?)

Since the "127 favorites" from my 2018 comment on this thread came up, let me point out the reporting page that generates the table on demand. That user, right now, is up to 147 favorites, but has been overtaken by two users, with 187 and 389 favorites. Another thing to note is there are ~170 users who have favorited something. I'd be interested in seeing something broken down by self-favorites.

I'm pretty sure we used to have a cap on favorites, differentiated into three or so tiers (editors, contributors, members?). I'm in favor of doing something like that again, whether instituted as a points system to further distinguish "how much" someone favors a game or not. Simplicity in the UI is important though. Let's keep discussing.

Another thing I'd like to address: this list is now too long, IMO. I'd suggest dropping the one-favorite games, adding instead a link to a separate page for that list. Also note that there's a bug with favorited pages with no name or description provided here...

Well Ben, I have favorited quite a few games myself. And after asking if that is ok, I did it because I could. I have actually played and enjoyed all of them, though!

My apologies Ben, I had not seen that the conversation had slipped to a different thread in the Comment page. My comments were for the Featured list, not the Favorite list, again I'm sorry, I misunderstood.

Since the "127 favorites" from my 2018 comment on this thread came up, let me point out the reporting page that generates the table on demand. That user, right now, is up to 147 favorites, but has been overtaken by two users, with 187 and 389 favorites. Another thing to note is there are ~170 users who have favorited something. I'd be interested in seeing something broken down by self-favorites.

Well, it doesn't really matter what the maximum is. The score calculation can determine it. It could just scale up the weights of users that favored less than N-squared times fewer games by a factor N.

I had a go at improving the ranking of favorites by weighting the votes, approximately as 1 over the square root of the number of votes cast by the user, normalized to the most-voting user getting weight 1, and rounded down for the others. This mainly as an exercise for testing whether I understand enough of how the PHP scripts work here to implement such a change. There is no correction for self-voting yet.

The modified page is here. It displays both the total of the weighted votes (on which the list is sorted) and the number of people voting for it (the old sort key, which is now used as primary tie breaker).

That is cool, but maybe you could include a display of the rank!

I am not sure what you mean.

I now modified it to discard inventor votes in the calculation of the weighted total. Self-votes are still counted for determinig the weight a voter should get, though. (But because of rounding having a few extra self-votes usually would not decrease your weight for the other votes.) At the moment it displays the weighted total including the self votes, and the number of people voting for it (including self votes) in parentheses, just to judge how large the effect of these refinements is.

An interesting consequence is that there now also appear some games with a zero total at the bottom, where only the inventor favorited those. By comparing with the total including self votes it can be seen that weights run up to 19! (Presumably for persons that only favorited a single game.)

I'm not sure to well understand. With the weighting factor, someone who has favorised many games has a voice which counts less than someone who has favorised only one game. Is that correct or wrong?

Indeed, that is correct. If you have favorited 4 times as many games, your votes get 2 times lower weight. To avoid fractions, the person that casted the most votes is given weight 1. Currently that is someone who casted slightly less than 400 votes. That means that people that casted 100 - 400 all get weight 1, people that casted 44 - 100 votes get weight 2, casting 25 - 44 votes you get weight 3. If someone casted only a single vote that vote gets weight 19. So the weight increases with fewer votes, but it is not that everyone gets 400 votes and can give all of those to a single variant.

The general formula here is weight = sqrt(max_given_votes / given_votes), rounded down to an integer. Max_given_votes currently is 389, and sqrt(389) = 19.72 -> 19. Giving 2 votes the weight already drops to 13.93 -> 13, and for 3 votes to 11.39 -> 11. So another way of looking at this is that you get more votes to give if you distribute those over more variants.

This is still open for discussion. (E.g. we could also use a cube root instead of a square root, in which case the weight for a single vote would go up to 7, instead of 19.) But considering the large score the top contenders get this way, allowing the weight of a single vote to run up to 19 does not seem too disrupting.

Then, I'm not sure it is fair. Someone who is not fan of CV, or who just wants to please his friend who has made Turlutu chess, will vote for Turlutu chess and his voice will count x times mine who is enthusiast of CV and wanted to reward those I like or admire.

I prefer the system of 1 man 1 vote. Simpler and immediatly meaningful.

I would admit that self-votes are not accounted (but then, it would be nice to have a special sticker indicating "this variant is a preferred one of its author", because I wish to indicate which ones of my creations I prefer).

To avoid people having tons of preferred CV, which is like saying nothing as a matter of fact, I would understand that each user is limited to a maximum, maybe 50. With the possibility of removing a "like" of course, in order to favorise new ones.

The one-man-one-vote system is not so very different from the 1/sqrt(N) weighting. People that have casted 43 votes (close to the maximum of 50 that you propose) already get weight 3. So a weight of 19 does not advantage you as much as it sounds (but still a factor 6). It is mainly those that have casted more than 50 votes, which you don't want to allow at all, that get heavily discounted. With a more typical 10 votes the weight is still only 6.

With a cube root someone casting 48 votes would get weight 2, and those with more would be 50% discarded rather than being forbidden / ignored. While casting a single vote would give a weight of 7, only 3.5 times larger. With 10 votes the weight would be 3, only 50% more than with 48 votes.

The problem is that people giving 270 and 389 votes are already in the database, so what should we do with them? Completely ignoring all their votes seems a bit harsh, requiring them to 'unfavorite' several hundreds of variants a bit inhumane. It is like you say: if someone favorites tons of variants, it doesn't mean much. So it seems reasonable to reduce the weight of those votes, but a bit inflexible to reduce it by 100% always.

Perhaps the weight should be made to saturate at twice what you get for ~50 votes. Or even decrease if you favorite too few variants. That would thwart attempts to 'pump up' a single variant as a favor to a friend by people who otherwise do not care.

A special symbol could be added for variants preferred by its inventor. Like an asterisk behind the number of people that voted for it. This raises the question of how to put bounds on that, preventing inventors to automatically favor all their variants. Writing such a symbol is an all-or-nothing action, so you could do little else than omitting the symbol on all variants for an author who favorited, say, more than 25% of his submissions. This would then raise the technical problem that you would have to figure out how many games each author submitted, as he could have games that no one favorited. So going through the favorites list would not be enough, you would have to go through the entire database.

An alternative would be to allow one plus the number of his favorited variants divided by 3 (rounded down). Then inventors that never got any votes from others can only vote for one of their games (to vote for two you would need three favorited games). With 10 games favorited by others you could either vote for 4 of those, or 6 different ones.

I am not convinced by the fairness of one-man-one-vote. A variant that gets a vote from someone that voted 50 times can very well, even in the eyes of that person, rank below 49 other variants. While getting the vote from a person that only casted 10 votes means he thinks it belongs to the 10 best. So why should they get equal reward?

I'm now caught up on this discussion. I would propose having the script calculate two scores. One would be the raw score it calculates now, and the other would be an attenuated score that factors in how many games someone has marked as a favorite game. The formula I propose using for determining the value of someone's vote in calculating the attenuated score is this: min(1, 60/(n+50)) where n is the number of games someone has favorited. This will create fractional scores, which I'm not bothered with, as this would be a supplement to and not a replacement of the raw score. The page would then give two options for sorting the list. Since there is a difference of 10 between 60 and 50, this would allow someone to favorite up to ten games without any attenuation of his vote in the attenuated score. After ten votes, his votes would slowly reduce in value. At 70 votes, each vote would be worth only one half a vote. At 130, each would be worth one third. At 190, each would be worth a quarter. Continuing to add 60 more votes, 250 would be worth one fifth, 310 one sixth, etc. If we decide we want the value of votes to attenuate at a slower or faster rate, we could use different values than 60 and 50.

That's the basic idea. And now I will describe some modifications to address other concerns. If we change 50 to 40 for editors, this will give editors 20 unattenuated votes instead of the default 10. If we add another variable into the calculation, such as min(1, 60/(n+m+50)) where m is the number of one's own games someone has favorited, this would cause a vote's worth to diminish at a higher rate for people who favorite their own games. If we wanted to more strictly penalize the mass favoriting of one's own games, we might replace m with something like min(m^2, m!). For values up to 3, m! would be lower, and for higher values, m^2 would be lower.

I am not sure editors should be treated different than others. I am an editor, and Jean-Louis is not, and yet I see no reason why my opinion would carry higher weight than his.

I also don't think it is a good idea to 'penalize' self-voters by reducing the weight of their vote on other people's games (which is basically an unrelated issue). If we don't want self voting, we can just forbid it; that is more effective than merely discouraging it through some arbitrary penalty. But self voting can be useful, because inventors presumably know their own inventions better than anyone else, and can indicate to others what they feel are their best designs that way. But that purpose would be completely defeated if inventors are encouraged to vote for all their inventions. So we should not encourage that by making it a good way to get those closer to the top of the list. A modest amount of self votes is very helpful, voting for all is as useless as voting for none. There should not be any penalty for the desired behavior.

Anyway, the trial page I made already does the dual scoring. But it always sorts by the weighted total. I guess the easiest way to make this user-selectable is just have two versions of the script, where clicking a link or button would navigate you from one to the other. (It could be the same script with a different CGI argument, which then decides what to use as sort key.) Only slight adaptations would be necessary to alter the weighting formula.

I find Fergus's principle quite interesting. I like these threshold effects that lower the value for those who like everything. Looks fair to me.

Concerning own's vote, I wouldn't be upset if they were simply made impossible. To compensate, as I said earlier, let the author having the possibility of declaring that this variant is among his ones he prefers. If he puts this "badge" on all of his variant, then, he will simply spoil his chance to make a distinction.

To illustrate with my own case. I will ok to say that my vote on Shako, Metamachy, TerachessII is removed because I am the author. But I would put a "badge" on them, and not on Perfect 12, Exchess or Teramachy which are not my preferred game. It is an interesting information I can give to the reader.

If we don't want self voting, we can just forbid it

I never said anything against self-voting. My issue is with mass self-voting, and forbidding self-voting is not the solution to that. That's why I suggested penalizing excessive self-voting.

But self voting can be useful, because inventors presumably know their own inventions better than anyone else, and can indicate to others what they feel are their best designs that way.

Indeed. That's why I allow it.

But that purpose would be completely defeated if inventors are encouraged to vote for all their inventions. So we should not encourage that by making it a good way to get those closer to the top of the list. A modest amount of self votes is very helpful, voting for all is as useless as voting for none.

Yes, exactly.

There should not be any penalty for the desired behavior.

I'm now thinking that the value of a self-vote should be influenced by how many self-votes someone has cast compared to how many games he has. If someone favorites all his games, his self-votes should count for nothing. If he favorites only a few, and he has invented many more games, each may count as a full vote. In between, there could be some attenuation for excessive self-voting. It's a matter of deciding what the limits should be and creating a formula.

@Jean-Louis, where would this self-favorited badge go? Just on this page, or everywhere on every index page, or on the game page itself? You could just list such on your About page, but that wouldn't be very visible. I think it would need to be restricted, or we have the same issue as now: self-favoriting all your games doesn't hurt the ranking or visibility, and the reader has to look over a lot of games to notice what's happening and decide they don't care about badges given by a self-congratulatory author.

I discovered the problem with no-information Favorites on this page: their ItemID's are incorrect, generally for containing a hyphen between words where the actual ItemID has just concatenated the words. I remember there was some issue around that, but don't remember the details. I can just remove hyphens in the ItemID field of the Favorites table, but I'm not sure if there's an underlying problem that would need to be fixed to prevent future issues.

(For other editors or me later: I found these by querying Favorites left join Item using(ItemID) where Item.ItemID is null.)

One more thing I think we should attenuate is the worth of a single vote. Some people may have gotten their friends to come here to vote for their game, and these friends may not stick around and take an interest in other games. Voting for more than one game demonstrates an awareness of multiple games, whereas voting for only one does not. Perhaps a single vote could count for half of a regular vote, or even not count at all when calculating the attenuated score.

where would this self-favorited badge go? Just on this page, or everywhere on every index page, or on the game page itself?

The game page already mentions when it is a favorite of its inventor. For the Favorites page, I could change the heart color for a game favorited by its inventor. Adding it to the index page could be relevant if we're looking at the games of a particular inventor, but it probably doesn't need to be included otherwise.

I could change the heart color

For the color-blind or for someone using an e-ink device, I should probably use a separate image. The lightbulb would work on the Favorites page.

I'm now thinking that the value of a self-vote should be influenced by how many self-votes someone has cast compared to how many games he has. If someone favorites all his games, his self-votes should count for nothing. If he favorites only a few, and he has invented many more games, each may count as a full vote. In between, there could be some attenuation for excessive self-voting. It's a matter of deciding what the limits should be and creating a formula.

I think self-voting should not count for anything as far as ranking is concerned. Counting it, even slightly, and with an unrelated penalty, would still encourage undesired behavior for some. It should solely be used for indicating to the user what the inventor considers the best games amongst his own.

Ideally the number of self votes should be a fraction like 25-33% of the inventor's games. But it would probably be also acceptable to ignore games that were not favorited at all, and let the script only consider the set of favorited variants. Perhaps the following should work: there can be two symbols printed with each variant in the favorites list, one meaning "inventor thinks this game is good", the other "inventor thinks this game is bad". If an inventor than self-votes for more than half of his games in the favorites list, the variants he voted for would remain unmarked, and the smaller number he did not vote for get the second marker. That should encourage excessive self-voting.

Indeed casting a single vote is suspect. I already suggested there might be a case for having the weights decrease for very small numbers of votes. Of course it doesn't really help against cheating; inventors could simply ask their friends to cast several votes. I guess no system can be resistent to such 'friendly cheating', for persons that have sufficiently many friends.

It seems much easier to just print an asterisk behind the number of people that voted for it. The info naturally belongs to that number: "5 votes, but note that one of those is from the inventor".

Be careful of not making generalities of things which have a low probability.

• How many people have voted for more than 50 or 60 games? If they are 2 or 3, it should not be difficult to send them an e-mail saying that from now only 50 or 60 votes are possible, so they should re-do their votes if they still want to favor some of the games. Their previous list is simple nulled. They should not complain as they old list was actually meaningless and their new one will make some sense.

• Who can seriously convince many friends to come on CVP, register and then favor one precise game (the same for all of them) and then go? I don't believe that. Maybe it will happen for very few just asking 1 friend to do this. But I doubt. And if it happens, who are we to judge? After all, if that friend really likes his frieds's variant, what's the problem? Who are we to say that this is not sincere? This is making a lot of trouble for a very small issue which is probably not occuring.

About self-vote, I take the point that there are other ways to indicate the author's preferred games. If there is this facility, then there is no need to have the self-vote coming in the same basket than other votes. So, the simplest is probably to forbid self-votes.

I have changed the heart images used on this page. Your own favorites are now indicated by a heart with an arrow through it. An inventor's favorite is indicated by a heart with a star, and this occurs after the name of the inventor who favorited his own game. Positioning it beside the name makes it clearer what this means even if someone ignores the legend, and when a game has two inventors, it lets us know which one favorited the game. For games you did not favorite yourself, an orange heart is used. I tried the one that is red, but it appeared as a small black heart.

It looks great, Fergus, and I wouldn't even have needed the legend to figure it out.

I have now modified the script to calculate an attenuated score for each game. This appears in parentheses, and it is used as a tie-breaker in the sort. The code for calculating this value looks like this:

foreach ($votesbyperson as $key => $val) {
    if ($val > 1)
        $votevalue[$key] = min(1, 60/(50+$val));
    else
        $votevalue[$key] = .5;
}

This attenuates the value of single votes and the value of lots of votes while counting 2-10 votes as 1 vote each.

The heart icons look very nice.

But how about discounting the self votes, and sorting by attenuated score? If the self votes are still counted in the raw vote count, and the latter is used as primary sort key, the incentive to favorite all your own games still exists, and nothing has really changed. A number between parentheses hasbeen added, but no one will really care about what that says if it is not used for sorting.

But how about discounting the self votes, and sorting by attenuated score?

For the time being, I have done these things through query parameters. I have also added a limit parameter, which sets a limit to how many games will be displayed. An alternative, which I haven't done yet, would be to set a threshold value, below which games with a lower score would not be displayed. When you load the page, you will see three details boxes, one of which tells about the query parameters.