Right, said I was going to post one of these each day. Well, I'm moving on to the vote counting part of the system which has some interesting bits, and aiming to get the user admin stuff done by the end of the day. I hope folks check out the preview build of the site that's out live, but right now let's talk about the vote system and old abuses.

If you look at the archives 2008 looks like a banner year, right? Maybe? Not exactly. The software that was in use at that point was kinda ass and someone more or less hijacked the public admin voting and the top 100 voting to organize the site as they wished by exploiting a few loopholes. I hacked closed the loopholes, booted the responsible party and recalculated the top 100. It was a pain in the ass and rather embarrassing that I only caught on when the top 100 had the top 5 items separated by single digit votes.

That's not going to happen again. The new voting systems are designed to ensure that it is not possible to vote more than once, like literally I cannot record more than one vote from a given IP on an account. But how does that stop them from running up the value and not being recorded? Simple, I'm not incrementing on vote, I'm counting up all the stored votes and re generating the score when a new vote is added. I've finished the public admin voting system yesterday and pretty much need user admin working before I can open it up publicly, and there's a thing with login not triggering or redirecting properly that I need to sort out before it's usable. But, what's important here is the design works and I'm already largely done with the ass end of the public rating voting, it's a matter of getting the front and middle parts working and hopefully deployed sometime this weekend for you all to abuse.

On a note, anyone have opinions on changing the Vote tags from "WTF!" and "meh"? I still like them a bit, but simple up and down or + and - seem more intuitive. Or does the content of the site lend itself to those reactions?

Anyway, assuming I get user admin done today I'm going to say it was good 30 hours of work on the site this week and screw off tomorrow, maybe doing a bit more this weekend, but I have some things going on. That said, I do have another week of vacation and no significant plans. Sure as hell won't be spending another full week on the site, but I should have plenty of time to get things handled, particularly with the help volunteers who have stepped up to take over the place.