Creating a fair voting system
Over the last 6 months we’ve learnt a lot about how the voting system works. We’ve studied the stats, looked at trends, and discovered that there needs to be some changes!
The idea of 101 Best Websites was always to create a fair representation of how good a websites is, based on it’s design, functionality and usability.
Some users would submit their site, we’d authorise it, then invariably they user would come back, vote their site high (understandibly) and then every body else the lowest. One case in particular, the user voted over 200 sites down over a two hour period! This pattern then continued with various different IP addresses for a few weeks.
The other issue we’ve encountered is Spam Bots. I’m not sure how they work, but they manage to spoof a different ip address and create unfair statistics.
Using all this information, we’ve managed to upgrade the voting system to create a new, fairier reflection of users votes. It will take a few weeks before the old votes are outdated (we feel it would be unfair to remove old votes), but you should start noticing some differences very soon. With at least 2,500 page impressions a day now, we have the traffic to get things sorted 
We would love to tell you how it works in detail, but then this might offer the people out their trying to fool the system a way to do just that, again. Basically though, if your voting average is very low for a period of time, your votes won’t be registered.
Happy voting
Tags: 101bestwebsites.com, spam, spam bots, votes, voting, voting spam bots, voting system
May 30th, 2009 at 12:12 am
Hi, I run a site similar to yours and I’m experiencing issues with the voting system I use on site. I was wondering what plugin you are referring to here. Many thanks..
June 24th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Hi Craig, We don’t use WordPress for our main site, just this blog. The voting system we use is built by us (or more specifically by our PHP/JS guru).
We’re still working on improvements for the next version of the voting, if anyone has any ideas on how to make it spam proof and as fair as possible we’d love to hear them!
October 6th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
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