Morrowind Summit Mod Ranking

Please, Morrowind Summit, change your mod ranking algorithm. The current one is completely useless. Right now, mods are each given a number based on an average of their ratings by users, and are arranged according to this average. This may seem an easy and effective way to do it, but ends up being very ineffective, for the following reasons:

1. Ranking a mod less than 10 penalizes it, by ensuring that it will never, ever get on the list of the top 50.

2. Mods that have many votes never make the top 50, since someone inevitably votes a 9 or less. Often the reason is because they're unable to get it working, or they think it's causing some problem that it isn't responsible for.

3. The mods ranked the highest are usually the least popular, since the 'Top Rated' mods consist mostly of mods whose authors rated them a 10.

4. A much more useful measure of a mod's success is the number of people who have actually downloaded it. This number is available, but it's hard to rank mods by it. Clicking 'Downloads' will rank mods by number of downloads, but in ascending order, such that all the best mods are at the end of the list. Clicking 'Downloads' again will not reverse the order.

5. This sort of hints that you might be out of touch with your audience, by not caring that your site doesn't present its data in a meaningful fashion.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself 'What kind of dork creates a petition for something as stupid as that?' Well, I'll tell you. First off, I sort of have a vested interest in changing the mod ranking algorithm; I co-authored one of the top Morrowind mods. Prior to the site's revamp, I enjoyed watching our mod climb slowly up the 'Top 10' list. When the site switched formats, I anticipated watching that again. Alas, this was not to be. Now, the list of the best mods is rife with mods no one knows about. Now, as soon as a mod gets popular enough to warrant enough votes that statistically a sub-10 vote is probable, it's thrown off the list.

While this may be small and pointless to some, it's kind of important to me, and many others. And I'm not asking you to change much. A very small amount of code that would take just a few minutes to change would transform a counterproductive list into a great resource. So how should this be implemented? Funny you should ask...

1. The easiest way to add a useful ranking system would be to rank mods in descending number of downloads as opposed to votes. Few people download crappy mods.

2. A much better way to rank mods according to votes is to average one zero vote in with all the other votes. That way, a person has to earn a high rank through votes. If a mod got enough votes, which it would if people liked it, the effect of the zero vote would be negligible. Heck, it could be above 9 again if as few as four people voted on it.

So please, fix this issue. Morrowind Summit is otherwise a great site and a great resource, and I think you may actually be underestimating the effects of your decisions. Think about it though, if it was worth a half-hour of my time to create this petition and however long it took me to write those emails that you never responded to, surely it's important enough to garner five minutes of your time to fix it.