Song Ratings Available

I just completed the work on the long awaited song rating feature. On our main page you can now rate the currently playing song. So let the ratings begin!

The system will keep a cumulative average rating for each song from 0 - 5 points. We have designed this rating system to allow 1 rating per song every 24 hours. It seemed a little restrictive allowing only 1 rating of a song forever, so if you like a song and then you get sick of it, you can let us know by lowering the rating.

One thing to keep in mind is that depending on your internet connection, site traffic and other factors, it is possible that the song displaying on our front page does not sync with the song you are hearing. This is because of the way streaming works. Just keep that in mind and make sure the song you are rating is actually the one you are hearing.

We are going to use this rating data to display on our request pages, history and queue. It will also be used when we come out with our musician database as part of our reviews on individual musician CD's. It will be just a matter of averaging all songs for that CD to come out with a member rating! And we will periodically review all ratings to remove unpopular songs.

Thanks, Paul. It will be interesting to see what everyone likes. Can you set it up so that Barddas, Heather Dale, and Stan Rogers only get fives?

Eamon

Somehow I think that will happen anyways!

sounds good to me. Although why do I suspect that Barddas will get at least one heavilly biased raiting =)

not that it would be that far off from several others....

How can we be sure that the tune we are rating is the one being played? Especially if there is a time lag between server and end user.

Could you simplify the front page but still keep the current tune info updated for more accuracy? You did have the front page in that condition before and subsequently changed for quicker access to the site by removing a lot of information. Coordination between the two would be better and a little more accurate.

Hey Now! I only requested my own stuff when it FIRST got on here. I never request it now....

But a 7 would be good... hint hint

this is a great idea,and i am sure that it will make this brilliant site even more enjoyable for everyone. ta suil agam go muinuibh gach duinne athas as an clar seo.

Is there or will there be any way to see what a song's current rating is before it's played? ouldn't want to be able to rate it when it's not playing, but would be nice while browsing through the list if one could be able to take a peek to see what other folks think of a song. Also wouldn't be a bad idea to associate comments/reviews.

(I know, I know..more work for a harried/hounded/overworked/underpaid webmaster type)

OK, this flopped. Mary L. McKay was playing, Mary L. McKay was displayed in the page, I went to vote on it and it voted on the next song, which I don't care much for (Bonnie Blue Flag). Now, Mary L. McKay still lacks my vote, and Bonnie Blue Flag has a false rating from me.

Yes, all of this is coming! The request pages, queue and history pages are going to be all worked on in the coming weeks. We will be adding ratings to all of these sections. We are also going to beef up the search feature on the request page to have by artist, title, album, song.

Our musician database will have ratings and comments like amazon.com. We are going to build it out from the forum so it will use the same code that we are using to post messages now.

Ok, you got me!

We need to consider that a song can change between the time you view it on the frontpage until the time it takes to rate it (contact the webserver, access the database, etc.).

I will add something that checks to make sure that the current song is the same song that is viewed on the frontpage.

I think this may also have something to do with the way I changed how the frontpage reloads. I added a random # of secs between 5-20, to distribute the load over the course of 5-20 secs, but maybe I should change that to 3-10 secs.

Will take care of these changes later on today to help and hopefully solve this issue. Thanks for bringing it up!

This bug has been squashed! I added some code that checks to make sure that the song you rated is still playing. It seems there is a 5-15 sec window were it is possible that the next song is loading and you could send your rating off to a song that you did not intend to rate.

Thanks Aaediwen for finding this bug!!!