So I had mentioned previously that the readers of Single Sentence seem to be very harsh critics. That might not be entirely true. It seems that I had not taken into account how simple ajax voting links would get tripped by every search engine that rolled through here to index the pages.
That means various bots and spiders have been coming through voting yay! and boo! on every sentence they can find. So the math works out that even if every human that has read your movie reviews love them, machines have been pulling your average rating down towards 50%.
The solution is to add a single step into the process. The first time you vote, you will be asked to click a button verifying that you are a human. (You'll only have to do that the first time that you vote.) Based on what I've read on this recently, that should do the trick. The search engines (in theory at least) index anything with the get method, while ignoring anything with the post method. (If that doesn't make sense to you, if just means that you aren't a total computer geek. Go out and enjoy your social life!)
The bad news here is that the votes are going to have to all be reset. That's right, everyone is going to be reset to zero. I'm not crazy about that, but it is the only real solution. The machines have been voting so many more times than the humans, that the current results are pretty meaningless. I'm going to do the reset later tonight, but I'm spending a few more hours testing to see if I can break the system.
Those of you who have posted sentences and/or voted, please accept my apology for my technical ignorance. So far this is the only major bug that has happened with the site, and I guess one was bound to come along sooner or later.
Please, please, please if you encounter any problems with the new voting system, let me know. Otherwise, here's looking forward to a bright future of accurate and meaningful ratings!
