That is it!
If anyone has read this bbs post, know this:
Half the people who complain think that Wade and Tom want to rob them of their right to vote or something! What they are after are people who are sitting in front of their computers all day voting 0 on every god damn portal entry, without watching, looking at the file size or even reading the submission's name!!! They are not some kind of frickin' Hitlers!
Voting 0 on everything is dumb and assholish. But zero doesn't mean that it's extremely offensive anymore, that's the whisstle. My rating scale is this:
whisstle: never used it yet. I would blow it on a submission like "dead baby wassup", which displayed horrifying images of bloody dead newborns saying " wassup!"
0: used it a lot. Something that should be blammed in the next 20 minutes. I don't need to give examples.
1: use it sometimes. Deserves turd of the week, made me smile.
2: used it a lot. Normal flash that deserves to stay, but that is not really great in any way.
3. use it sometimes. Deserves daily "top 10"
4. not too often. Deserves daily feature and maybe even front page.
5. not often. Deserves top fifty.
I don't use 0 just to insure maximum blamming probabilities, nor do I use 5 to insure protection. Many users might think I'm harsh. I am. That is why I have chosen a dark aura. Think about it: if all nor bad movies got a 5, what would a really high score mean? On Ng, there are generous and not so generous users, and this balance makes movies get the score they deserve, and it's great!
About that +=- thing: it's pure stupidity! Having a range of one to five equals much fairer accurate votes! Think about it, who would have voted "-" on any of the top 50 movies when they entered the portal? Then all these movies would have a perfect score? Then a bunch of users who would want that movie to go down would just go and vote "-" on it all the time. The voting system should go up to 0-10 if you want fair votes that much. As for me, I think the current voting numbers are perfect.
For all the brainiacs out there who say that blam/ protection points should be dealt with, here's a little story... Once upon a time, in the portal, in a simpler time when blam/protection didn't exist, movies where recieving less than 60 votes/ views before they vanished into the dephts of the portal. The authors where getting little feedback as the voters only voted five times a day, usually on movies titles with a green or blue color bar on them. Even worse, the users had a blam count for every movie they personnaly sent to the grave, so people where holding back their votes until they could be almost sure to be the one to destroy a movie. And even worse than that, the portal was getting swarmed with unblammed / unprotected movies that no one ever watched. Around that time, the portal population was above 20 000!
Then, the Ng gods decided to implant the blam/ protection system, which rewarded users for casting votes. At that time, the great "Gathering of Points" begun, smarter Ng users went in the last pages of the portal and blammed all the extremely crappy movies there. Soon, the portal population dropped by 20%. No more movies where leaving the recent submission page without being blammed of protected and better movies could stay 3-4 days on the list, and so, get a lot more exposure. All the portal problems seemed to be solved...
But then, Ng realised that to much blam/ without vote was going on, so they decided to try new things to make people watch aaaaaaaall the entries they voted on, which brings us to current days.
........And that is why removing the blam/protection system will only create problems or "de-evolve" the site.
If you're wondering what score to give to what movies, here's a little trick. Watch the first three movies on the top fifty. They deserve a "5". Watch the last three movies in the portal ( view all). They deserve "0". Do the same thing for movies with scores of exactly 1.00, 2.00, 3.00. You should get the picture.
Why do some users recklessly vote 0 on everything? Because they know 85% of the entries they vote on will get deleted anyway, so, easy blam points. This indeed is contrary to the portal spirit and sucks.
I don't know the proportion of users who do that nor do I know how much power they wield, but I seriously doubt they could have enough strengh to blam a movie like Beebo of Final task.
Here is something you should think of: A filter that automaticaly enables the non-monitored blamming of movies under 40k, with a title containing "free blam" or "blam please". You should also think about periodicaly banning users every time 10 of their movies get blammed. This will force them to not resubmit crap or to improve or stop spamming.
I would also support the idea of not being able to vote without having submitted anything, but Flash is indeed a very complicated program and perhaps hard to get most people, so it would be a bit unfair. And it would most certainly lower the site traffic quite a bit.
NO MORE WHINNING ABOUT THE PORN ADDS! Unless you personnaly are going to send Tom Fulp a 1000$ check.
Now, for some constructive ideas.
Do something about the movies that are still on the portal but have a score below 1.5. You could delete 15 pages of crap! You could do an annual blamfest where everyone would be invited to vote 0 on these movies so they free up some space for newer stuff! Or you could just delete them ( without awarding any points to any one, of course). Getting rid of these will pose the problem of "What about my turd of the week award!".
How's this: a whole portal section only for Turd of the Week Winning Entries!
And scrap that obituary! Or make it delete all the 2 months or older stuff: the authors had ample time to read the reviews!
Well, I hope at least one person is going to read/ reply to this, because it was a bit long to type.