Vote Now! bonsaiTALK Styling Contest

Treebeard

Will, perhaps I did not explain it fully...

Using your method, I could wait until the very last minute of voting time and pick one tree that had no votes and give it a ten. Its average would be 10, which is 10*1=10, 10/1=10. It would then be top of the pile, or at least equal to every other tree that got straight 10's.

Regards,

Chris.

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-JRR Tolkien, The Two Towers.
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Will_Heath

True, lets hope everyone that votes will vote on every entry, thereby eliminating the "Treebeard Effect."

Will

Ralph

It would seem the vote scoring needs to be fixed. Is it possible as well to put tree species in with the picture?

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Emerging from winter slumber
Bonsai trees burst buds anew
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-Paul S.

Treebeard

Will, I don't wish to be a pain but if I had a tree being voted on I would like the voting to be based on more that "lets hope"

One possible method would be to have voters send a PM to a third party, with 10 votes: 10 points, 9 points etc. down to 2 points and 1 point. The third party would then place the votes for the voter, the voter then checks the third party's placement of points.

Horrendously complicated I know, but any other way is based on every voter being sure to place the same number of votes as every other.

Sorry,

Chris.

__________________
"Do not be hasty, that is my motto"
-JRR Tolkien, The Two Towers.
-----------------------------------
christopherguise.co.uk

Hookeroak

More simple than that, make it so that if you vote, you must vote on every tree. This procedure is common on photography sites when voting for best photographs - if you don't vote for all trees, you vote isn't processed. Treebeard has a huge point that really could jeopardize the validity of the voting procedures, especially if the tree that gets only one '10' is given by the same person who styled it!

Sorry, but another thing to consider is to make sure the other votes on a tree are hidden. By having it in gallery format, and seeing how other rated the tree, is a tremendous bias in how others rate a tree. Sorry, I'm getting my degree is psychology and a huge area of study is the validity of measurements. Conformity is a very powerful influence, and I know this contest is just supposed to be for fun, but with hundreds of dollars in prizes at stake, perhaps in the future these suggestions might be considered. Never the less, thank you Will for all the time you put into the contest and good luck to everyone.

Bart Thomas(deceased)

Doing a quick pass through the entries shows at least 9 trees posted twice.

Has the software led us astray?

This is confusing enough to judge without this complication!

Well at least the ratings also seem to be duplicated as well.

Carl_Bergstrom

Quick and easy if somewhat rough solution to the "Treebeard Problem" (Good catch to notice this, Chris!):

Top 5 trees require n votes to quality (where n=10, for example).

Best regards,
Carl

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Will_Heath

Good call Carl.

Not a pain at all Chris, Valid point and a good catch, once I caught what you were saying.

Hookeroak

Sorry to be a pain, but that doesn't really solve anything. A great tree could get eight '10' votes, while a crappy tree could get twelve '4' votes. Worse yet is if nine people rated one great tree, ten people rated another great tree, the former would get disqualified (if n = 10 to qualify). I have already noticed that some of the entry's have almost a dozen votes, while others have only a couple, and this had nothing to do with the quality of the tree - or at least it shouldn't (as the judgement of the quality of the tree is based on a rating from 1 to 10, not how many people vote for it).
The Best solution is to remind everyone: PLEASE VOTE ON EVERY ENTRY.