It will be HARD or take a real mathematician AND a coder to make something legitimate that you can TRUST. But hey, if it makes them feel AWESOMELY GREAT to be #1, they’re not fooling anyone else but themselves.

The description was intigueing so I checked it out. It truely IS awesome, but I doubt we can truely call a webcomic with less than a dozen pages “The best of all time” In addition to number of votes, a robust voting system might attempt to take into account the age of the comic and the number of issues, etc… While comics like the one above may indeed be masterful there’s simply not enough data for it to eliminate the possibility of it’s quality being an aberation.

I wonder if there’s some sort of market for this sort of thing. Given the propensity for the human condition to avoid math like the plague, it seems like there should be organizations willing to pay people to construct complex mathmatical ranking formulas that take into account multiple specified variables.

As to the joke: Sorry. Rest assured that my failure to get it lies solely in my n00bishness rather than your humor.

The problem, Dan, is that - except for professional critics like Gary and I - nobody else is qualified to decide if a comic is ‘good’ or not. (this is a *joke*). An individual opinion that a comic is good doesn’t mean a lot - especially because it could clearly be the author themselves who is saying it’s good.

So the notion of including the total number of votes into the ranking is part of the whole notion of utilizing the collective stupidity of the internet.

Yes, new comics need exposure. And good new comics need exposure more than bad old comics need exposure. But listing a comic as one of the top ten of *ALL TIME*, because the chowderhead who made it got his friends to say it was good, is clearly wrong.

Anyway, you make a very valid point, but I ask the question, what is the reason for a rating system to begin with? I believe the answer is simply so that good comics get the exposure they deserve. In that case, what’s wrong with letting a comic with only a few ratings get some good exposure? If the rating isn’t true to that comic, people will see, and rate accordingly.

Incidentally, as I get more readers to my comic (I gauge this in terms of direct request and bookmark visits per day), less people vote for me.

What does that tell you? I have no clue.

Also, I think if you follow my link on “quality”, you might find that I was making a joke about the assumption that these measure quality.

As for Heiseberng Compensators… I have mine hooked up to a cup of tea. Well, Advanced Tea Substitute.

So crank up those Heisenberg Compensators.