Remove registration to voters?

[Adam Drake]

At the moment, if you want to vote you have to register. If im honest, only people posting their designs are likely to register here.

Look at hotornot.com or any other rating site and you will notice that you can vote without registering. Thats why they are hugely popular.

So lets talk pros and cons.

Pro's

Anyone can vote
More people likely to vote on products
More people visit the site
Better averages on votes

Cons
People can multiple vote their design
People can link to their design from forums and get people to vote even if they dont like it


Now, the cons are possible and true but are easy to avoid. A one vote per IP/machine will fix the problem of people constantly voting up their design. The 2nd one is harder to do, except for spotting in your stats links coming from one place to vote just one design. So its easy to spot.

Even if someone does vote their design up, if the site is popular, then more people will vote honestly giving a nice average.

Any other views on this?

[LONGHORNS]

I would have to agree. I know if I were to link to this site from another, I wouldn't register just to vote. I don't even know if I would do it if I knew the person.

[IRateThis CS]

This is something we are looking at and as it was very nicely put by Adam, there are pros and cons on both sides.

The difference with something like hotornot is that its a fun site and people are less motivated to bump up the ratings. However, with something like IRT, there are obvious benefits of having high ratings for your T-Shirts in both a prestige and commercial sense. This is why we need to be extra careful when we are working on this and your suggestions are greatly appreciated so we can come up with a solution together.

Another alternative we are considering is a Hydrid, where different weighting is given to registered and unregistered voters. Maybe also include the reputation of that voter in the mix.

But, we are definately after a way for non members to vote and find a way for Shop clients to more conveniently vouch for their labels.



Whilst on this subject, we are also working on aspects to make people want to become members which we are quite excited about.