Holy hell! Can this thing get any more political! Madness I tell you! Madness I tell you!
Right, lets start at the start: I am certian (also) that there is a correlation between the number of posts and the score that the people are recieving, however, I believe that it is not an artifact of popularity.
Whenever I get up to do a gig somewhere, I need to consider the audience I am talking to - somepeople like certian jokes over others. Humor is highly variable, and even though my friends thought that my entry was "Bl**dy funny" other people with different types of humor will not agree.
In saying that, we need to keep in mind that the ones who have been involved with this forum for a long period of time will be more atune to what people like to hear or see, and also be more likely to "hit the nail on the head" with their entry.
Stats: I haven't done an analysis on the significance of anything, but there are a few things to keep in mind (after doing this for 2 years at uni). The voting system is currently open, that way, people will be more inclined to vote for that which appears to be better - often they won't read the poorly ranked posts (as with nearly anything on the market: think - if you heard that a game had a crap review - would you buy it?). This is easily solved: you can't view stats until you have voted.
Suppose post entries were renamed, and not viewed by anyone before entry (without the name of the submitter) it would give a totally unbiased view as to which one a person votes for.
Different IP's should be used for each vote: however, in saying that, if any of my friends were to try and support me, 4 only use the Uni computers, 3 use one computer at a mates place (2.5 gig, 600 MB ram, ADSL - wounder why?) and a further 2 use the same internet cafe. Only about 5 of us have our own machine. I don't know if you can tell public links from private links? Suppose someone was to go to a cafe and vote for themselves, they would clock up nearly $30, which is nearly the price of a second hand N64 anyway.
In short: this is probably going to be blown totally out of the water when one person whitewashes the competition. No one likes to lose, however, no one will lose. I don't intend to sell anything I get - it is called a "Souvanair".
But still, it is fun to have a good scrap.
:jason: Fredric J Crougar
"Sleep Tight"