Posted by John on June 22, 1999 at 18:21:45:
In Reply to: Re: the george score posted by Chris on June 22, 1999 at 13:42:12:
: I believe Hank's idea of a user is someone who not only comes to the site
: and enters bills, but someone who also distributes the bills and therefore
: gets hits. The ranking system to determine the top users was a tool to
: bring those users who have used and been most successful with the site,
: not just those who spend the most time entering bills.
This is exactly why I think the best scoring system would simply be TOTAL HITS.
After all, that's just bills entered times hit rate. (I realize I'm being a bit
sloppy in the distinction between hits and total hits.) Sounds like the
perfect marriage of the two things we seem to value the most.
It relies on random chance, distribution, conspicuous marking, getting other
people involved, etc. and it will eventually go up as you enter more bills,
without any kind of short-term "penalty" for entries.
Those logs and sqrts must be very demoralizing for the high-volume people
like ADAM and Ms. K. All those functions really accomplish is that they
compress the overall scoring range.
And best thing about Total Hits: it's so darned simple! :-)
(Well, ok, maybe the inactivity factor has a place too.)