I was even thinking of allowing people to upload their own image and it would dynamically create the rank and display it for them.  But a pure text option could be available as well...

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

There should be two categories: votes and ratings. The votes show which are more popular while ratings show how much people like a certain comic. Must have like at least 500 ratings though.

User reviews would be good you could have a list by number of views aswell because alot of people visit webcomics without voting

Sererena wrote:

I would really like to be able to have my current rank displayed dynamically as text instead of using the web banners, so I can make my own banner that matches my site design with my ranking displayed alongside it.  Something like this would probably save on bandwidth and resources on your side, too.

Or if there were a simple white text in a black box image option that said just the #, so I could make my own vote button and work it in using slices, but that's getting a little picky.

The ultimate would be having a top 100 site where the vote button on your site actually triggered the vote, sort of what Sketch Battle did, but legitimately. It would then initiate a pop-up of the actual TWC site or the vote incentive. The key is that an entire step is removed, making TWC the easiest to use webcomic list on the internet.

-Joe

Im not Entirely sure but is VGcats on their?

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May Jesus Bless us all By coming down to earth with his Jamie Thomas Zero Complete Skateboard and doing a 360 flip off the leap of faith just like Jamie Thomas himself only landing it.

Jack wrote:

User reviews would be good you could have a list by number of views aswell because alot of people visit webcomics without voting

The way I see it. There are only a few fair statistics that can be used to determine top 100 lists:

- # of page views (determined with a bit of javascript posted on the webpage)
- score
- votes

Clearly, score would be the mose relevant, since it clearly shows the voter's intention.

These can be separated into three lists, or they can be used together. For example:

votes/pageviews x  avg score = total rank

-Joe

artsangel wrote:

I rather like the Hall of Fame that Buzzcomix has (do they still have it?) where comics that achieve number 1 status a certain number of months get shifted to a hall of fame for a while to give room for other comics to make it onto the top 10.

This idea has a ton of merit.

noneedforbushido wrote:

Jack wrote: User reviews would be good you could have a list by number of views aswell because alot of people visit webcomics without voting The way I see it. There are only a few fair statistics that can be used to determine top 100 lists: - # of page views (determined with a bit of javascript posted on the webpage) - score - votes Clearly, score would be the mose relevant, since it clearly shows the voter's intention. These can be separated into three lists, or they can be used together. For example: votes/pageviews x  avg score = total rank -Joe

I don't like the idea of using page views to generate voting data, because it's way too easy to trick people into coming to your page.  Plus, some people don't even have their comics on their main page.  And really, your web page views don't have a lot to do with a comic's popularity, it just means people are visiting your page.  Someone could spam their URL all over the place may get a lot of pageviews, but few voters (probably because they're spending more effort to get pageviews rather than work on your comic). 

I do like the idea of a scoring/rating system though.  You could have one list for the most votes, and another for the highest-rated.  That way, the high-quality but less-popular comics have a chance.  Likely, though, the votes will be similar. Also, each comic should have a total of 100 or 50 ratings or so to be ranked.

I was thinking only registered members can rank a comic (with an optional review).  What does anyone else think about that idea?  Obviously we don't want someone ranking their webcomic every day from a different IP address, or clearing their cookies and ranking again a thousand times a day, or whatever. Of course I don't want hundreds of registered names in webcomic.net that just belong to some guy ranking a comic over and over....

Any thoughts?

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

 Registered members only makes sense. I don't know how to limit repeat members, though... I suppose you can make it very INCONVENIENT by requiring a unique e-mail account for each member (is that the case already) and checking IPs. I suppose if it were limited to "registered members with a valid e-mail address and currently updating webcomic URL" it would be vert difficult to cheat, since you would track the URLs and look for repeats... not that someone couldn't, say, claim they draw Penny Arcade to make a new account. But it would limit cheating.

I'm curious if there's a reason the vote buttons have jumped from 3 to 5. Was there additional cheating that resulted in the change?

-Joe

Actually there was "potential" cheating, I haven't looked into the logs to verify (it takes a "lot" of work, usually requiring me to potentially aggravate people by port scanning IPs to see if proxys are being used to vote, sometimes easier though because many times non-anonymous proxies are used in which case it actually forwards the original IPs in the headers which TWC tracks), so I just moved it from 3 to 5 to verify.  See if a particular comic is getting 2/3 false votes well if some fan is cheating out there that means that 1/3 of their votes are getting through.  I'd rather not worry if someone is cheating and make it very non-productive for them, right now most people the cheater would get 4/5 wrong votes).

BUT I came up with an alternative while replying to Mossfoot in the most recent news post.  I'm going to reduce it back down to 3 vote buttons, and create 3 random vote templates instead.  Which will push things up to 9 possibilities but be more or less seamless to the fans.  I've got a big client project that I really have to finish off if I'm ever going to get the  time to really work on TWC and my other projects but maybe I'll be able to slip it in sometime this weekend.

Thanks

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

Good idea. I think 3 buttons looks less intimidating.

-Joe

I'm back down to 3, but I have a little something extra built in for the average cheater, looking forward to seeing if it has some effect.  I'll build the other 2 templates later, I'm hoping to do it in such a way that it improves the voting experience, more info later...

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

artsangel wrote:

I rather like the Hall of Fame that Buzzcomix has (do they still have it?) where comics that achieve number 1 status a certain number of months get shifted to a hall of fame for a while to give room for other comics to make it onto the top 10.

The problem with that, is Buzzcomix removes them permenantly.  Maybe we could have it be a little different with us only removing them for 2 months or something.

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"OOOOH, SORREEEE!! I only created THE UNIVERSE!!!" - God

What would people think of a separate list that people would get moved to after a few months on the TWC top 100.  So once you dominate the Top 100 for a while, you move to the TWC Allstars or something corny like that.  That way people continue to battle it out, and I'd redesign the home page to make certain the new list would be very prominent so people would still be able to find it.

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes