Helpful Votes Updated

OK, the new tallies are up. Also, those of you who were waiting for "Top XX" tags now have them.

The shake-up was not as big as I thought it would be - we ALL lost helpful votes.

You May Want to Sit Down for This One

OK, how about a post about everybody's favorite topic... helpful votes.

There is going to be a big shake up in the rankings.

For a long time, the display used to track the top helpful vote getters has only taken into account positive helpful votes. What this display has failed to capture is what happens when users delete their accounts, when users are banned, or when generally bogus accounts are deleted. In all of these instances, the helpful vote tally for each user should go down.

This has not happened to date. The tallies could go up, but they could never go down to reflect helpful votes that are taken away with the deletion of a user or an account.

Momentarily we will be recalculating the helpful votes of all site members to reflect their true value. I'm expecting some pretty radical shake ups.

Anonymous Ratings?

Historically on RateItAll, a rating without a review has been as good as an anonymous rating. If I wanted to drop a five star rating on the new Britney Spears anthology, I could do so without fear of reprisal.

This may no longer be the case.

One of the unanticipated features of the new rating widget is the ability to see all of the raters of a given item. Let's take for example, the RateItAll Reviewers list. By building a rating widget for Magellan, you can now see all of the folks who have rated Magellan - whether or not they posted a review. To do this, just play around with the icons at the bottom of the widget.

While this may result in some awkward moments ("I can't believe so and so gave me a one star rating!!"), I do think that more transparency is generally a good thing.

However, now might be a good time to get your house in order in terms of being able to back up your ratings :)

RateItAll Reviewers on RateItAll

Let People Rate Your Blog - From Your Blog

Do you remember all that testing that was going on a while back? Well, what we were testing is this cool new widget that lets you rate stuff on RateItAll without ever going to RateItAll.

We're trying this concept out as a Blog Feedback Widget. So, if you have a blog, and would like to let people rate it right from your Blog, click here.

The widget does all sorts of other cool stuff to - like show thumbnail pics of recent reviewers, and let you scroll through the most recent reviews.

Server Update

We now have two quad webservers, fully load blanced, up and talking to each other. Those annoying login problems should be a thing of the past.

I am hopeful that we can now get back to rolling out cool stuff with the fear that our servers will be overwhelmed.

Need some testing help!

We're testing some changes that should fix this login status problem that we've been having, and that will also make it easier to add more servers as we grow.

Can you please try surfing around demo3.rateitall.com as you would on RIA? Try rating stuff, logging in and out, messaging - in other words, anything that you would be doing anyway.

Look for things that don't work right, and that seem strange.

Demo3 is hooked up to the live database, so anything that you post will post to the regular site.

Thanks!

Login Status

I'm hearing more reports of reviewers who are getting logged out on the fly as they browse RateItAll. We know what is causing this issue and will be working on it today and tomorrow.

Cross Your Fingers

I *think* we have site performance under control now. We now have a total of four servers up and running (2 web, 1 db, 1 mail), and they all seem to be talking to each other.

The good news is that the way the site is set up now, it will be easy to add new servers as traffic grows.

Rate On.

I Love Google (and burgers)

Is this an attractive ad or what?

Sit Tight

If you're on the site at this moment, you may see some screwed up things. We have set up a server farm configuration with multiple webservers acting as one, but we're losing login state if you bounce from page to page.

I'm calling it the "birth pangs of a multi-server RIA."

Things should be resolved shortly as we figure out how to maintain login status between all servers..

Update

We have the new server built and configured, and will be working today on putting it online. Site speed will be a little spotty until it goes live.

Dropping a New Server Online

We'll be dropping another high powered web server online tomorrow to complement our existing servers. This should speed the site back up again.

Having some performance issues

The site seems to be struggling right now... we're doing a big clean up of old sub-domains, and something seems to have broken.

We're aware of the issue and are working on it.

Email Invite Tool

We've just added a very neat tool to all the "Invite a Friend to Rate" pages that lets you add folks in bulk straight from your address book.

This should make it a lot easier to invite friends to rate your stuff, and should eliminate the typo problem when dealing with long email addresses.

Here's a screenshot:

























To try it out, look for the little "Add From My Address Book" icon on any of the invite raters pages.

Rebooting DB

Guys, we did a remote reboot of the site, but unfortunately it didn't work. Our hosting company is on its way to do a manual reboot, but it's going to be another 30 minutes or so.

Things always go wrong heading into holidays....

Baseball Players

Hi All, we've updated our best baseball players list to include the latest MLB all-stars.

Zuchinibut also has a complete list of the 2007 MLB all-stars.