I think it's time that Votifier is phased out - thoughts?

http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/votifier/

Votifier is a system that most popular server lists utilize to notify votify a server when it is voted for.
it's a fantastic plugin that gets the job done, however it leads to a big problem with server lists: "Vote whoring" - Basically paying your members outrageous amounts of diamonds/cash/whatever to vote for your server. This causes giant servers with many members to stay at the top of the list, while small servers without many players stay at the bottom.

As the owner of a serverlist (ServerChunk, http://serverchunk.com) I do not want this to be the way servers reach the top of the list. This is why I think Votifier should change.

"Then why don't you just remove support for it from your serverlist?"
That would cause many server admins to not want to add their servers. What's the point without something like Votifier?

This is why I think that all major serverlists should adopt a new standard-- one that doesn't allow for amassing votes like that.

Unfortunately I don't know what could replace it. Any ideas? I'd be more than willing to develop said plugin to make it happen.

 

I had an idea for an application to make your server-list super unique.

Would you be willing to work on it with me?

I was thinking something which logs into the server (pretending to be a client) - downloads the chunk data around the spawn and generates an image (flatmap) of the spawn of that server.

I've got the framework for it written up (java) so you could just have a cron script to run it on your main box and then a directory redirect!

Anyway, this would generate a BananaMapRender style .png image but only one (big) tile. One pixel per block.

Thoughts?

 

codename_B
I've been wanting to do make plugins that provide extra functionality such is that- I think it would be fantastic.

Still, that's not a replacement for Votifier. I'll message you about the map idea.

th3cleaner@mcserver you liked the post, do you have any thoughts?

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

I think you will have to intervent some kinde of new formula to base rank on. One which not only go after #votes and uptime etc. There would be a new term, %of your playerbase who votes. Maybe a wierd explanation of my idea but I'll give you an example.

• Server_0ne has 100 votes with an uptime of 100% and 100 as an avarage # of players each month

• Server_two has 10 votes with an uptime of 100% and 10 as an avarage # of players each month

In my opinion these two servers should have the same score and same rank. Of course this is a simplied example. There are other things I think is important to consider, such as how long time the server has been active.
This would however mean that smaller servers would have a fair chance to hit the higher ranks. It would bring in some quality instead of quantity.

I don't know if this is a solution and I haven't given it much thought since I just came up with this. However I have really hard to picture the transformation of todays standard votesystem to something similar to this. Guess what the larger servers would think of this...

 

th3cleaner@mcserver

I love that. I'm gonna think about it for a bit to see if there are any glaring problems with it.

 

I'm the original author of Votifier, and one of the owners of Minestatus.

While I agree with your point that "vote whoring" is a problem for server economies, Votifier is a choice that server owners get to make. Before Votifier, there was no real incentive for players to vote for a server. Votes simply weren't being made due to hassle. Now, server owners get to choose if they want to reward players for taking the time out of their day to show their support.

Remember that it is a choice of the server owner. If a player doesn't want to play that kind of server, they can find a different server to play. I don't think it stands a significant problem - it's simply an option, not a requirement.

Not to mention that votes are good for server lists and their traffic.

 

blakeman8192

You make perfect sense, and now I 100% agree with you. Thanks for your input.

th3cleaner@mcserver I'll be messaging you

 

Just a thought - could you somehow set up a system where Votifier sends information about what rewards are offered on the server? Having never used the plugin myself I don't even know how/if Votifier distributes rewards. But it seems to me that if you could look at the voting incentives on a server it would allow you to say "Well, this server looks pretty good vote-wise, but they offer 7000 diamonds per vote per day. Let's move on." Obviously this probably won't (dunno how Votifier's security stuff works) stop people from modifying the plugin to send fake information about rewards and such, but it seems to me like this would at least *help* to do something about this problem.

 

And cause of that you need people who jump on every server frequently and check what they get for voting. Of course they have to have a different username from time to time to not get detected and worked around (if playername = "KnownSpion" give one diamond, else give 100). That would mean a lot of accounts = a lot of money and a lot of manpower = a lot of money, too.

 

= wont work.

 

That's what I wanted to say.

 

Alright. I'm aware that this isn't a perfect solution, and I never said it was. I just think that even imposing this small barrier would solve a large section of the problems with overcompensating for votes. Many server admins are simply not capable or willing to obtain the source for Votifier, then modify it and recompile it. Heck, if that seems a little far-fetched to you, then you may want to take a look at the Bukkit Help forums. I really don't want to get into a pitched argument about the merits or lack thereof of the notion, but I think that it would "work", as long as you define "work" as helping to solve some portion of the problem, rather than solving all of it.

 

What would be nice is if you can make users link there website info in to the site description because with all the advertising that I do it hard to update the description on all the site so I just made most of them say visit our website and that's it. But that not good as most players will just no click the link and go to the next server. So if there was a way that I could insert my website SQL Query from a page and it will display as the description for the site.

 

I know this thread is a bit old, but I would really like to input my opinion here.

I agree entirely that votifier is nesseccary to the voting system. Players aren't purposefully being asshats, but they just don't think to click that vote link with no real incentive to do so. It's the same with most voting systems out there, mmo private servers, minecraft servers, anything with items involved.

I think without votifier, it would simply excassurbate the situation, as most players are casual and tend to not bother to vote with no personal gain, whereas a larger server can much more easily amass votes by just telling people to do so.

I know that, prior to having votifier, my server recieved an insignificant number of votes.



However, I fully support the idea given by @th3cleaner@mcserver. I would absolutly love the idea of a voting average. Just because a server is smaller, doesn't mean it's a bad server. Yet it doesn't appear anywhere near the top until there is large amounts of players voting for the server.

The minecraft community is very harsh to new servers, most I see floating about will crash and burn within a few weeks of setting up (and I've came awfully close myself).

This is something that only the right people can make happen and I would love to see if any vote site owners would be prepared to make this change. It would benefit the minecraft community significantly, in my opinion.

I'd like to tag blakeman8192 in the hopes that he'll do this for his own site.

I would tag others if I knew their usernames here

 

If this happened, then all the "good" servers would code a custom script for there website, which awards there players for voting.

 

That's fine, but at least you're still not SORTING the servers by the number of votes. I would still give users rewards for voting, I just don't think that small servers have any chance of becoming large unless they pay for advertising.

Anyways, this thread doesn't really have a purpose anymore, considering that DrAgonmoray stopped ServerChunk.