More on Recommendations - 6 comments

Our recommended posts facility is clearly popular, and the facilities will be upgraded further over the weekend, but it does appear that a small minority is not being entirely ethical in their recommendations...

There are very few 'rules' when it comes to recommending a post; in fact, just one: that you can't vote twice for the same article in a particular browser session, on a particular day. All voting is anonymous, so I have to rely on people's honesty for the system to produce satisfying and informative results, but perhaps I should have provided some examples of what I would consider unethical voting:

1. Voting for your own blog post. This is cheating, but I'm also confident it's extremely rare.
2. Voting more than once for the same post, whoever wrote it. I can't stop people doing this, and I've done it myself by accident, but consistently doing it - however fervent your opinion - just ruins things for other people., and there's strong evidence this has occurred in recent days.
   
3. Voting consistently, over time, for blogs you're associated with, or otherwise wish to promote. All I can suggest here is to try to be as even-handed as possible to avoid skewing the results.
   

I don't mind people having favourite blogs, and it's quite understandable that people are more likely to consider a blogger/post they agree with, or are sympathetic to, more worth a vote than someone or something they strongly oppose. It's human nature, but it's also likely to be evened-out as more people getting involved - unlike (1)-(3).

This shouldn't deter the vast majority of readers from recommending posts, just bear in mind that it's much more fun to find some surprising results, and to get some votes you never expected, than to look at the results and find something that just doesn't ring true.

Sermon over :-)