This avoids two specific cases that are kind of covered by point #2 above:

- There were certain people out there who may have been rather prolific posters who were had many more self-ratings than they had ratings from other users.

- There were certain stories where nearly all of the ratings on the story were self-rated chapters, bumping an individual’s story up in the hot stories and top rated stories without actually getting any feedback from other users, simply because they had rated many chapters of their own work.

Both of those issues are resolved by this change, which i think is a very good thing as it gives others a better chance to have their work promoted by the site automatically.

Now what we’re seeing is the odd user registering multiple accounts to rate their work from alternate accounts — this is a major no-no and we’ll be deleting any ratings that we see in this manner, as well as giving users a warning. If it happens twice, they’ll get a one-week ban, and the third time’s the perma-ban. I really want to see this practice gone and I’ll be enforcing it pretty heavily. (Not aiming this at you at all, just something we had to deal with yesterday with another user.)

In any case, I definitely think that although some people may have suffered in the rankings a little due to the ratings changes, it’ll work out for the better for all of us on Protagonize.

Cheers,
-nick