Different way to vote

[songguy]

Hi there. I wanted to recommend a different voting method.

Continue to allow a single vote per podcast, but don't allow the votes to be submitted more than once. In other words, if user X has voted for podcast 294 then they will not be allowed to vote again for that podcast.

Allow one vote per person per podcast episode. So if user X is a big fan of podcast 294 they can submit a vote for each podcast episode that podcast 294 has released.

This will give new users to the site the ability to view the overall podcasts, much as they do today. But it will also give them the ability to view the most highly rated podcast episodes of the day/week/month. Additionally, if a user wanted to check out a particular podcast they could start with the more highly rated episodes, and not necessarily the most recent.

each podcast would then have
a general rating (as they do today)
an average rating for all episodes
a rating for each individual episode

of course there's a lot of work here in order to identify each individual podcast by parsing through each podcasts rss feed. :--)

Just food for thought, but I thought this may help level the playing field a bit.

[Porkstone]

That is a good idea, if it proves impossible from a coding point of view then how about displaying the number of votes and the number of individuals who voted.

[Illinoise]

Another simple idea, Chris, is to allow local voting only. I know we all have the voting script on our sites (Illinoise! included) and that's likely where most of the votes come from. But I would imagine if our fans had to go to podcast alley to vote, the number of votes would go down. The positive aspect would be that a listener would have to be truly moved (positively or negatively) to go and vote, making the voting more meaningful.

You should be able to limit voting to podcastalley.com visitors pretty easily. I'm willing to take a cut in votes if it means those votes are more meaningful.

[shadowfax]

Personally I think all voting should be removed or at least the "TOP 10 or 50" are not decided via voting.

There will be absolutely NO way for smaller podcasters to compete with more well known podcasts. While I enjoy a lot of the current top podcasts, there are MANY that provide tons of content, solutions, or other information that will have a hard time being found because everyone looks at top 10/50.

I don't know about everyone else but I saw a change. I had some tenacious voters that worked me up to 13 on the Technology listing, yet now I am #150 on the listing.... I updated weekly on my podcast and others haven't done anything for months but they now rank higher than me? How is that fair...

God knows what happened to others rankings with the changes.

I would agree that you should reset all votes to 0. Then make it that a person can only vote ONCE forever per podcast. Then at least we don't have to compete with the frequent voters.