Technical Forum

It's not exactly a technical point but what do you do when someone gives you say 40 ratings within 3 minutes and, naturally, shows complete misunderstanding what the page is about in their comment? And do such ratings count at all?

Erm.......I imagine the ratings will count as usual (unless there is some sort of clever timing mechanism involved).

As for the misunderstanding, I'd probably leave a page comment or email the member concerned.

If you are concerned that the ratings may be 'iffy' you could email feedback@virtualtourist.com and explain the situation.

I have no idea what they are - I have never come across the member who gave them. Perhaps he has read all the tips at once and then rated them at one go?
But I'm sure he wouldn't have confused a town with a whole region in this case.

I have come across 'whizzy' rating in the past. That wouldn't bother me in itself, though I'd want to clear up the misunderstanding.

Ewa, I saw this yesterday in the newest comments page. What caught my curiosity was that I saw his name several times and then I realised that he did the same with 6 other pages.... all approx. 30-40 tips and 3-4 minutes per page. I would immediately think that someone looks for reverse ratings from many people....
But... I also realised that you made updates :-) Which was the good part of it :-)

Ewa, this question has been already asked on this forum on several occasions. I will try to summarize the answers, as far as I remember them. There are actually several possible answers.

First of all, there is a technical answer.
When ratings are performed at a “reasonable” speed, they can appear as fast ratings on your notice page. The information is not collected in real time by VT servers but every 5 or 10 minutes or so. We did the experiment and normal ratings appeared with a delay as fast ratings. There are other examples of the same kind on VT. If you go to VT home page and refresh, the featured member will remain the same while the two featured tips will change each time you refresh. Now, go a little below to :
The VirtualTourist Travel Community in Action, View All Latest Activity
You will notice that when you refresh the latest activity page, it will not change each time. It will change every 5 or 10 minutes (don’t remember how long).

I also remember that a member wrote that he usually read first the tips and came back to rate without reading a second time.

There were also other answers but I can’t remember them.

Of course, there can be an actual fast rating for any reason, there can be reverse rating (that has apparently occurred very seldom).

Misunderstanding of your pages is another problem. I had on a few occasion completely irrelevant comments. You will never know why (joke, someone mentally disturbed, etc…). Ignore them. Remove them from your page or (this is what I prefer to do when it is worth it) add yourself a comment on your page. That will not be for the author but for other visitors of your page.

Here they are, three threads on the subject :

http://forum.virtualtourist.com/discussion-438471-1-1-Miscellaneous-0-0-World-discussion.html
http://forum.virtualtourist.com/discussion-456648-1-1-Technical-0-0-World-discussion.html
http://forum.virtualtourist.com/discussion-441385-1-1-Technical-0-0-World-discussion.html

Thank you, J.,Ingrid and Jean-Louis. I'll just ignore it then, except for a comment on the rater's homepage, pointing out the misunderstanding. I wonder if he does that regularly though.

I think there is some sort of timing mechanism to prevent someone from downrating pages with negative ratings in some sort of vendetta. Therefore if I'm going to rate negatively, I am careful to do it slowly (joke).

If the comments are really off the wall, I delete them. (Like someone who claimed that Bermuda was a hotbed of gun violence)

If the comment is disagreeing with something I wrote (like that the history of the Mormon church or something like that where there used to be discrimination of various kinds, and it isn't so prevail anymore), I will sometimes take the comment and refute it in a tip.