Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Thanks Fergus. I found it and saw how it affects.

Ranks are now shown. Since the whole list was a definition list, I changed each entry into a separate definition list and made each one a list item in an ordered list. Since the bold, sans-serif formatting is only for the DT tag, the rank number does not get the same formatting.

How to change reviewbonus?

It's on or off. By default, it is off. Assign it a non-empty value, such as 1 or true, to turn it on.

How to change reviewbonus?

I corrected a bug in the code for reviewbonus. In searching for a review, I had left out the ItemID, without which it would find any 5 star review the person had written for any page, which inflated the scores. With the ItemID now part of the search, it will find reviews only for the game in question. In comparing the results with and without reviewbonus set, it is giving many games slightly higher scores, and some are rising in rank. The first game to rise in rank from it being set is Pocket Mutation Chess.

The ratings are averaged together (I believe only using the last rating per user), and that "average rating" can be used to sort in the database query. The average rating is also visible at the bottom of the comments section on each page, e.g. right now on this page it says:

Number of ratings: 3, Average rating: Average, Number of comments: 84

The ratings used to have an "Average" option; not sure when that got lost in the dropdown menu. But then Poor=1, Average=3?, Good=4, Excellent=5...was there another one for the remaining number of stars?

I think ratings (and the attached comments as a "Review") are a great more-granular-than-"favorite" scoring system, but aren't used enough (and apparently not clear enough). I would actually prefer more granularity, maybe a score out of 10; for one thing, there are more than 500 game pages with the Excellent average, so the database query doesn't show them all:
https://www.chessvariants.com/index/mainquery.php?type=Game&language=English&orderby=AvgRating&sortdescending=on

EDIT: there's a more recent rendition of the average ratings listing at
https://www.chessvariants.com/index/avgratings.php
and its comments mention the other missing rating, "BelowAverage"=2 stars.

Alright. I haven't many things to say. So I select "poor". Hope I'm not getting my votes down by some centivotes. :=)

Well, you don't have to do anything; it is just that all your favorites then will benefit equally from your voting, as there is no way for the system to know that you liked some better than others. This might be what you want anyway, as you prefer the 'one-man-one-vote' system.

BTW, I selected a rating 'good' when posting this Comment, just to see what happens.

[Edit] Well, it displays 4 stars.

Thank you H.G. for the explanations. Of course, I knew that poor/good/excellent choice which is available when posting a comment; but I thought it was a way to transmit some reaction in addition to the comment. I couldn't imagine it was meant as a judgement or a note for a game. For instance a game can be very good, I might find a detail on the page that I dislike (e.g. (I'm joking) using Aanca for Manticore) and then I could post a comment with "poor". It doesn't mean I consider that game is poor! Just a reaction related to my comment.

I think this rating shouldn't be taken a rating of the game itself.

Also, like you, I don't see the correspondance between poor/good/excellent with a 5 star system.

I hope this will be clarified. If it is confirmed, I will have to return on every variant I have favoured (not mine) to place a rating. I can do it, although this is a bit childish too.

I never studied the rating system much, (does it have any other consequences than displaying the rating in the comment with which it was given?), and always considered it 'bad form' to rate your own games. If authors would want to relay the message that they consider a particular invention of them one of the best they ever made, it would have more impact if they would write that in the Notes section of the article, than by commenting on their own articles (where the comment would slowly be pushed out of view as more comments are added).

As to the Apothecary ratings; perhaps there are more people that like smaller games, and is the fact that a game is large a deal-breaker for them, irrespective of how well it is otherwise designed. Rating games is largely a matter of taste. I don't think that an inventor should try to steer public opinion on this. One of the advantages of announcing your own opinion on the game in the Notes section is that you can motify your conclusion.

@HG, I like the rating system you propose and I agree that not everyone should understand it.

I have a question though. I consider my apothecary games pretty bad but my grand apothecary games pretty good. How should I differentiate amongst them? Also be aware that the smaller games are pretty well regarded, where the larger games,that I consider better, are not regarded in any way!

@Jean-Louis, I once asked you if you can review my 3 games named Grand Apothecary Chess. This is what I was asking. Three reviews with as many stars stars you deem appropriate.

@Jean-Louis: When you post a comment on an article there appears a 'Rating' selector above the edit window, by default set for 'none'. You can also select 'poor', 'good' or 'excellent'. I always thought that this was determining the number of stars that would appear in the top-right of the comment. (But is a mistery to me how 0-5 stars could be derived from just 4 chocies...)

I agree that it is probably not a good thing to make this too complex. But if we want to involve the rating system in the favorites scoring, the logical way to do it would be this:

We now attach a weight of 60/(N+50) to a member with N (>= 10) votes. So the total weight of the votes (60*N/(N+50)) saturates at 60 when N approaches infinity. The rationalization for the discount is that there is no indication that any of the favorites indicated by this person are really close to the top of his list. But if that person would have rated, say, 15 of the games he favorited with 5 stars, and the rest with fewer, we do know that these 15 are the top 15 of his list, and there would be no reason to discount their weight more than those for a person that has 15 favorites in total, and never rated any of those. So these games should get weight 50/(15+50) = 0.923. If in total that person voted for (say) 70 games, which would have given him a total weight of 70*0.5 = 35, the 15*0.923 for his 5-star games could be taken out of this total budget, to leave a 35 - 15*0.923 = 21.15 for the other 70 - 15 = 55 games he favorited, which means a weight 0.384 for each of those.

This system could be applied 'bottom to top', where you would first divide up the total budget (35 here) between the unrated favorites and those with 1-5 stars, to see how much budget he should get for the rated group based on the 60/(N+50) formula and the number of rated favorites, and what that would leave (of the 35) for dividing over the unrated favorites. This would then be repeated for the 2-5 star group for determining how much would go to the 1-star favorites, etc.

This would be complex, but there should never be any reason for the users of the website to understand how the scoring works. If they use the rating system and favoriting in the intended way, the page would calculate a fair 'figure of merit' from this, which they should simply trust as a measure of how much the crowd here appreciates the variant. Detailed knowledge of how the scoring is calculated is only useful for those who are looking for flaws or weaknesses through which they could subvert the system to get variants of their choice higher on the list than they should be. And why would we facilitate that?

This is what I feared. Although I am on CVP for decades, I didn't even know that it is possible to review a game and to rank it with stars! And this would have an effect on the weight of my vote?

Why do we need something so complex?

I still think the rank should also be displayed!

I have added another parameter called reviewbonus. With this set, someone's vote may count for more if he has given a game a 5 star written review, though it still doesn't count more than 1. This is mainly to give more weight to votes that have been diminished in worth by someone favoriting lots of games.

I made a modification to how scores are calculated when selfvote is 0. Since this means that votes for one's own games should not be counted, I also removed votes for one's own games from the total number of games favorited by a person. The effect is that this will slightly increase the value of votes for other games when someone has favorited lots of games, though if someone has favorited only one other game besides any of his own, it will decrease the value of his vote to 1/2.

I have just added a member parameter for viewing the favorites of a particular member. But I am not going to take the time to add information about it to the script tonight, as I am shutting the computer down now.

I have added an inventor parameter. When given the PersonID for an inventor, it will list only that inventor's games. And when empty, it will list anyone's games. Here's an example:

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/favorites.php?limit=0&min=0&selfvote=0&sort=score&inventor=FergusDuniho

On Safari, the 3 topics (how to favorite / query parameters / legend) appear in orange boxes with an arrow. Clicking on the arrow expands the orange box.

That's how it should be, though the color is technically Navajo White. But it's an orangish white with more red than green and more green than blue.

On Firefox, the 3 topics are just on three lines on the top. Not in boxes, and not separated from the text below. Clicking on the arrow gives the full text, but still with the same bare presentation.

Since I'm using Firefox on Windows, I expect you need to refresh your cache or update Firefox.

On none of them I see how to change the query parameters.

I have added some instructions on that. Maybe I'll add a form later.

I have now added a min parameter, which sets a minimum value for the count or score, below which it will not display a game. This is an alternative to setting a limit and should not be used in combination with it. Here are some possible ways to use these parameters:

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/favorites.php?limit=100&min=0&selfvote=0&sort=score

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/favorites.php?limit=0&min=2&selfvote=0&sort=score

@Jean-Louis, "query parameter" is being used here in a technical sense, as the part of a URL after the ?. We can certainly add a form as in other places on the site; but for now, you can try e.g.

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/favorites.php?sort=score&limit=10

@Fergus, somewhere in your changes you've hidden those hyphenated-instead-of-concatenated favorited items; but those favorites still exist!

And this was how I learned that a couple of people had already made Beast Chess a Favorite. There's hope for me yet...  ;)

I like this implementation. My problem now is I don't see how/where to change the query parameters.

On my MacBook Pro I don't see the page the same with Safari and with Firefox

On Safari, the 3 topics (how to favorite / query parameters / legend) appear in orange boxes with an arrow. Clicking on the arrow expends the orange box.

On Firefox, the 3 topics are just on three lines on the top. Not in boxes, and not separated from the text below. Clicking on the arrow gives the full text, but still with the same bare presentation.

On none of them I see how to change the query parameters.