I for one am not concerned at all with the poor comment ratings. The whole rating system for comments is a joke that is merely a show of popularity and the public following trends. I also am not bothered by the high star ratings. As Bubby said, it only takes a few to swing the stars in one direction or the other.

KAS, you really need to make sure you have your facts straight before you come in with guns blazing. Do you have any proof? At this point it is all speculation. We can speculate as much as we want, but we may never have any proof that there is anything malevolent going on. I'm more inclined to go along with TK_M and agree that this is a case of some recurring person as opposed to developers. And lastly, you really need to check your conspiracy theories at the door. Bubby is the only mod/admin that has access to both the forums and GOTD. Whiterabbit is the only other person who has any access and his is to the Games side. I'm not sure about the others, but I'm offended on all of our behalves that you would insinuate that we have malicious moderators here in the forums. Next time please take the time to get your facts in order before you start making accusations.

From here on out, any more references to "the GOTD conspiracy" can be found on the original post.

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/6932

Hasn't anyone else noted that this last week or so, the star ratings for postings are just ridiculous? For example, Ashraf having MINUS 139 ratings for his posting at the stage when I looked?

Clearly saomeone has written a script and is now making automated submissions based on their own predjudices.

It might even have been going on for a lot longer than that, although in a more minor form? I stopped posting myself after some suspiciously low ratings for my posts a few months ago - I thought that the ratings were real for my posts at the time and so stopped posting since they did not appear to be wanted. Now Ashraf's postings are always pretty good, so when he started getting worse and worse ratings, that was when I started to doubt the ratings though.

This should be about the quality of the posting, not a popularity contest, or worse still, some sort of pro- and anti- battleground as seems to be happening today, with quite unbelieveable plus and minus scores during the day as one side or another seems to attack the site.

Hi Kas, I agree with you - something definitely looks fishy about the negative votes for people who posted comments for today's giveaway - that said, though, my comments were positive about today's software program, but I still received negative votes - so there seems to be no rhyme or reason for this "mad voting" as you put it.

Anyway, as I've said many times before, it would be in GOTD's best interests (for the sake of accountability and integrity of the voting system) if the GOTD team would implement a voting process that (hopefully) would prevent such flagrant voting manipulation from happening again in the future. Otherwise, why even include a voting system that is nothing but a "silly joke?" This makes no sense at all.

If GOTD staff/execs genuinely care about such matters, they will take positive action to solve this problem to the best of their ability, though it may not be 100% foolproof - but if GOTD staff/execs do not care about this matter, then I guess we will have no choice but to put up with such ongoing shenanigans in the future.

Of course, I'm sure that our good, esteemed friend (Bubby) will not agree with (or like) what we say - but therein lies the beauty of a free forum, in that we can all agree to respect one another's different opinions without convincing one another that we are wrong or right. That's my humble opinion, and I'm sticking with it.

Cheers,
Happy

We had this same problem the previous time they had a giveaway, and lots of prople commented on the votes being completely mad. Ashraf used to get high scores on his reviews back then. He gave their product a fairly critical review and had -30 five minutes after he had posted it. Then his votes started to go up again, many hours later, and after lots of people commented that the voting was rigged, and he ended up on +40 something. Recently his reviews have received very bad votes, but today he got huge + votes because he gave their product a good score. Everyone else got at least -100.

Look at the votes in the non-English pages. They still use the old voting system. Today's program has got only 22% thumb up and 78 % thumb down. In the English pages they got 5 stars in all categories. Noone else gets 5* in all categories. How do you explain that compared to just 22% positive votes in the other voting system. Someone tampered the new voting system. Wake up guys.

I posted several comments, but they have all been removed by the moderator. That has never happened before. I posted critical remarks before also, but today they all disappeared.

GOTD use a group of people as moderators for this forum. Several of them are close friends, or very active users in the forum. The only way all this censorship and vote tampering can take place is if one of those are very close to Simpo Tech., or if GOTD has been hacked.

The vendor doesn't have the ability to moderate or censor user comments.

As for the fact that you claim they are tampering with the votes - at the moment there are approx 35 votes in each category. With such a small voting pool - of course any amount of voting can swing the average scores. It would be a lot harder to affect the averages if 5,000 people had voted.

For what it is worth (the voting) I think there are a few people running around with tinfoil hats on yelling what a huge difference 4 or 5 stars will really make.

If you had developed a new software package - and wanted to release some statistics on what percentage of people found your software easy to use, to have a statistically valid sample of the user population - you would probably need to survey more than 30 or 40 people.

I'll pass on the concerns, but even if someone did manage to get 10 of the friends to vote 5 stars for the giveaway, I really don't think they could consider that they have just succeeded in the crime of the decade.

Hi, KAS!
Where did you see that it is Simpo Technologies who manipulates the ratings?
And even worse, how do you know that they are permitted to censor comments?

Please don't make such statements without any evidence.

That the ratings are rather suspicious sometimes is easy to see. But who does it?
When the ratings for the software are too good in your opinion, and you think that it can only be the developer who made that, who is giving the comment of the GOTD team the bad rating? The GOTD team themselves? Where is the logic in your accusation?
There is another thread to this subject, please read especially what BuBBy has to say about it:
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/6932

graylox

It's a scandal that Simpo Technologies are allowed to temper with the votes for their products every time they're given away here. The same happened at the giveaway of their PDF Creator 2, on Nov 27th 2009: Simpo PDF Creator 2.0

Today they're even permitted to do censoring of the comments. Only 2 comments have been posted the last 3 and a half hour. They are made by the moderator, not by visitors.