I have changed the ratings system to stop abuse. No longer is it possible to down-vote everything and then three star your own maps. There is now only one way for a map’s rating to go now, and that is up. This should preserve the usefulness of the ratings and greatly increase the work-load of anyone trying to stuff the ballot.
Unfortunately all the legitimate votes were also lost. In the future if anyone does try and stuff the ballot I can reset the ratings only for that post so hopefully this situation will be not repeated.
I have also turned on comment moderation, this means for normal users is that your post may have to wait a few hours before your comment appears on the site.
Most importantly I want to say sorry to those who originally got behind the ratings, thank you for trying to make this site better and SMR maps more approachable. I hope you will be willing to vote your favorite maps again.
I mentioned this before. The best rating system would be the number of downloads or the combination of vote and download. I realise that it would take more of your meager resources. But it is something to contemplate.
As for myself I would never vote for one of my own maps. It is not sportsman like, only politicans are doing it. :>)
I have thought about ratings by page views but once a map gets to the top it is unlikely to ever leave. The problem being that people really do listen to rating, back when I first added ratings the number one viewed map went from Africa Challenge to BC Gold, which is good. Counting by downloads is not much better and would also require adding download tracking.
The current format comes down to if someone wants to recommend a map. At some point in time I will likely have to rejig it to be more obvious which maps are highly rated.
This system is not that much different from pageviews/downloads, the difference being that it is more directly tied to the quality.
It has everything to do with the fact that a download/pageview says nothing about the quality of the map.