At 8/15/05 08:49 AM, TomFulp wrote:
HAPPY CLOCK DAY everyone!
Today is the FOURTH birthday of the Clock Crew, the most infamous group of artists on Newgrounds!
Please forgive the double-post (I had some typos)....
Mr. Fulp, I know you are quite busy running Newgrounds, but if you could answer a question, it would be much appreciated.
As you must be acutely aware, the Clock Crew is a rather a controversial group. At times the "Clock Genre" and questionable voting techniques have been called into question. I have been quite vocal about this on the BBS.
I know you want to maintain the community feel of Newgrounds and not turn a single flash artist away. However, given the nature of the Clock Crew, I feel that more damage is occurring to Newgrounds than benefit.
When new visitors come to the site and eventually find their way to the Portal - they are quite impressed. The idea of quality control and a voting system is progressive and quite laudable. However, after a short quite it becomes obvious that the score a movie receives has little to do with its actual quality.
In fact, for certain genres, movies have inexplicably high score where the flash itself does not warrant it.
I feel that a large number of flash developers have, upon this realization, not submitted their work or basically become disconnected with the site. In this sense, the Clock Crew costs Newgrounds a large selection of quality movies.
Are you going to take steps to counter this long-stemming problem? You might be able to resolve the problem by increasing the vote threshold to a higher number - perhaps 400. You could allow members to blow the whistle on suspected "cheats". Finally, the system could do some quick statistical analysis on votes to determine if a percentage falls outside the normalized score.
Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts.