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Message: <blockquote data-quote="anonystu" data-source="post: 998810" data-attributes="member: 10897">Monte posted in a rave this morning about the ENnies:People point out that the drawback is that you can vote 10 for your favorite product and 1 for all the rest, skewing the vote. I don't think that will actually be too much of a problem -- and it's something the moderators can watch for, in any case. The potential problem that I see is that the system favors products with fewer votes. For instance, a product that gets 99 votes of 7 and one vote of 8 receives an average rating of 7.01, which beats out a product that gets 5,000 votes of 7, generating an average of a straight 7. (Again, this assumes my understanding of the process is correct.) But that's only a potential scenario.I posted in return on that message board:Monte makes a very good point that the system may not account for different numbers of votes, but this is easily rectified by using a bayesian estimate, the system that you've most likely run into as the system that the IMDB uses to determine what the top-user-rated movies of all time are:Check out this, for a not too technical explanation:<a href="http://www.wowwebdesigns.com/formula.php" target="_blank">www.wowwebdesigns.com/formula.php</a>The technique is quite simple to explain: entries with low amount of votes are pulled towards the mean, because you should be less confident that those are representative of true preference, instead of just random sampling.It's a quite easy solution to that issue: I'll email Morrus about it, but hey, you can talk to him too! I don't think this is a change that should happen this year: switching voting schemes mid-vote is as shady as it comes, but it's a good thing going forward.So are the ENnies using a bayesian estimate formula to determine the winners? What do people think of switching to this method if it's not being used?</blockquote>

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