Me, puppy and basketcase, in the chat a few days ago were talking about the voting system for battles, and I think everyone kind of knows some kind of change needs to be make. Basketcase suggested ranking like songs normally get rated, and I compromised the  two (votings vs. rating) into a ranking equation like this (the "rating" of the song will be calculated like so:)

a = average rating from 0 to 100
b = number of people who rateed the song over 50
rating = a*(1+b/5)

This way the more people who rate the song positively, the higher your rating goes. That way if a song gets one rating of 100, and a song with two ratings of 70 are held just about the same ranking. This makes it where everyone doesn't get beaten by a song with exactly one rating of 100.

That makes alot of sense, more so than the current rating system.
I'm all for it.

That can't happen anyway Zach, as songs only get rated if they get more than 20 votes.  But I like the idea of having a weighting system somehow.

Perhaps it should be that the minimum number of votes for a song to get rated drops down to 10.  Although I personally think it's incredible that with over 1200 people on the site, ALL songs in battles still aren't getting the requisite number of votes to be rated.

This debate will, I expect, rage on for many a day

So? Change the voting system and replace it with this. I don't see why the battle has to have a second teir for "possible winners".

Yes, I quite like your idea Zach, but I think you're missing the point.  The voting system (any of them) is based on the tought of involve the members in the site, as a way to interact with the comunity besides the reviews and other posts.  So I think we need a system that make more people vote, instead of adjusting the current system to the present lack of interest.  Just my opinion

Is there any possibility that somehow some votes are not being counted?  I find it strange that the vote count is always so low and yet so many people comment on this fact. I for one vote on every song in a battle, whatever I think of the song and I know that some others are the same.
Perhaps this has already been discussed/ discounted and I missed it but something definitely doesn't seem right about the maths of this.

Sorry, I've been slacking. The votes were not being updated. I put it on a cronjob, so they will be updated every night now. Also, I've put some stars no the top + bottom now (so you can vote if you are posting, or just on the top of the page for some reason).

I'm working on an AJAX player with an integrated voting system. This way people will be able to vote on songs while they are listening to the AMP (on the top) while browsing the website. So that should help with votes as well.

As far as the algorhythm, it would be nice to have sort of compensation for more votes in the "score" as it would not really be called the average anymore...

BTW, I tried out the formula: a*(1+b/5)  --  100*(1+50/5) = 1,020 -- Was the formula supposed to max out at 100? Or were you just going for a number?

Yeah a number. You'd have to reduce it into a scale of 100.