I have noticed a continueing trend here lately......... NO ONE VOTES!!!

Does anyone have ideas on how to make this better? I mean we cant make you vote but how do we get more people to vote for songs?
The top songs from last month had like 10 or 11 votes. How can they be considered the top songs if thats all the votes they get. It should be atleast 25 or so. But its like people just dont care about that.
Its not called a contest ao that only the moderators here can vote for a winner. I am out of ideas, just want to know if anyone has anything at all.

Your friendly neighborhood mod
Nunly

that's a really interesting idea... maybe we should just up the number of needed votes before each next post... or heck... say if you listen to a song, you have to vote for that song before you can listen to another one... that'd be interesting...

i find that plenty of people post their opinions... and many times i'll see 20 responses to a song and 3 votes... that's a little dumb... i think maybe we should just make the voting requirements much steeper

u know what, i don't even know what to do to make a vote...that's really strange, cos i've been here for the last couple of months n i don't even figure it out...yet...so, i think that another changes needed to make it more user friendly...ah, that's just my opinion...anyone??? 

Hmm... That is kinda interesting, it never occured to me that it is difficult to submit a vote... Entheon had an idea earlier of doing a more dynamic rating system... kinda like what you see at netflix:

http://www.netflix.com/Top100/

Another idea would be to move the rating field down to where you actually write your review... so it would be more obvious to see... Either of these sound like good ideas?

just thinking...

maybe you can make it mandatory to first rate a song before you can post a reply...

or when you log in, you must rate a song before you can post at all or something...

just athought though

Eh... I think critiques are much more important than rating the songs...

Making it easier for people to rate songs seems like the most logical step forward...

"critiques are much more important than rating the songs..."

ok, fair enough, ...

the netflix idea seems great for songs that are in a battle. a single page with all entries on it, where one can listen and rate sequentially.

and for the regular song pages: maybe a screen wide bar that sits prominently on top of the message edit box, where one can easily select a rating (maybe by check button?), and which lights up in a friendly colour when one has (this to motivate people to rate songs, especially when it's grey and reading "NOT RATED YET" in big unfriendly letters or so at first).

?

I mean its not like you dont see the voting box. Its right next to play on the juke box. But how about a prompt saying "please place your vote" after a song has been played through.

I also agree that critiques are more important, but the rating lets you know on a 1-10 scale of how they feel about the song. So it helps very much IMO.

sure you can see the voting box, but it's just box with "...   " in it and a simple button with the text "RATE!" on it. Honestly doesn't look very inviting to me, visually speaking. Maybe simply side it with the text "Please place your vote here" it doesn't have to be a prompt, that'll get tedious after a while. And in green, bold letters. That'll draw attention.

Here's some of my thoughts:
1) up the required 3 songs to 5 in order to upload
2) give some basic guidelines and principles of voting, i.e. Professional means...they could not have done it any better; Awful means...my musical talent decreased by listening to this song.
3) come up with some extra ratings like 75% Great Performance...but get some new quipment/quit recording in your mom's garage; or 55% Great Sound Guy...but get a new singer

I'm kinda just joking around about these, but not really. I try to vote for every song because I think I should, I think it matters. Not giving myself props, just saying people will be more likely to vote if they believe in the ratings system.
Maybe some people really like a particular artist, but some of the quality could/should be better. They like the song but don't want to give it a 10%, they want to give an opinion about how to make the song/recording better.

I don't think it should be too complicated, for those programming and those voting, but...
what if you could couple some ratings, like:
Bad Performance                coupled with any one of    Bad Mix (Quality or Recording)
Weak Performance                                                       Good Mix, ect.
Okay Performance
Good Performance
Great Performance

And I also have a question about the rankings. I assumed that a song with 1 vote that was a 100% rating would not win the battle, but the rankings also took into account how many people voted. I thought that I was ranked 3rd bc I had 20+ votes with a consistent rating of around 80%, not that I think 80% should be in the top 3. Just would like some clarification.

You guys are doing a great, btw.

I think you should first of all, be able to listen to the song and vote without interupting the song, (the same with when you write your comment) and you should also make it that when you post your comment, like at the bottom of your comment in a weird colour it says like "Chill rated your song "Very Good" or whatever because then people will know what you rated them and i just think that will make people want to vote AND review the song more often.

Yeah, that would be really nice. I would need to learn how to program in AJAX for that to work out though. I think entheon knows AJAX fairly well now, but he's been busy with a bunch of other projects lately, so hasn't had much time for BandAMP.

BTW, do you really think it would be ok to show what other people voted on a song? I guess if they are commenting, they really have nothing to hide. I would just worry about people getting pissed at someone for rating their song a certain number, and taking that anger out of the respective person's song in exchange.

Yes, you need to have more than 20 votes in order to be considered for winning the battle... As of right now things are not too solid in the way of how things are rated. I really need to work on that part of the code. I'm going to have to go through all the old battles and remove any with less than 20 votes. This is all stuff I have on my to do list, and I'm sorry to anyone who thought they won, but really has not. Once everything is working right again, I'm going to mail you all monthly newsletters again.

I'm going to be back in America in about two weeks, and will probably be focusing more on BandAMP then... Not that I have not been doing a lot of work while traveling through Europe, but it's always nicer to be working on a REAL computer (not a laptop).

Yeah its always vacation time for good old Mud.  I swear you take more trips than a courrior. But I will say if I had the chance I would do the same.

Anyways, I think 20 votes is a good average. That way you have enough opinions to make it count. Cause I know I even have a few songs with 30 replies but 10 votes. Its like come on. Then theres a few with 30 votes and 10 replies.

I have no consistency.

I doubt anyone will read this, but anyhow.

Took me a bit to figure out the vote thing.

Well, we'd have to come up with criteria...

For example, if you really HATE that style of music, how well are you likely to rate it even if it's OBJECTIVELY a great song?  Iv'e seen lots of songs up here and at my house, that are great idea/concepts, but clearly have a long way to go.

But again, what are we talking about exactly? Production, music skill, theory content and usage, vocal quality/content/skill and feel. And how much does a fantastic tune get demerited for horrible production quality? Do you wait until it's unlistenable, and then what determines THAT?

If a tiny bit of distortion drives me to insanity, it probably won't bother someone who's had their head shoved in front of a stack of mains for 20 years. But for me, I couldn't get any enjoyment out of that at all.

Plus, I notice that all musicians write music/lyrics differently. Singers write for singers, guitarists write for guitarists...

I'm against the mandatory non-anonymous voting. I don't mind having to vote as long as it's 1) anonymous--it's not fair to rip someone apart like that if you really hate the tune for whatever reason and 2) it's obvious for new people how to do it.

I like that DPMB got over 125 listens, but only 6 votes??? Either it's not as good as I thought, or people are lax about the whole thing...