How do we stop bad rating behaviour?

Over the years jovoto gained a lot of experience and expertise in monitoring crowdsourcing processes. We carried out big projects like the Betacup of Life Edited successfully. So please, put a little trust in what we came up with.

There are several ways with which we ensure fairness:

1) The Karma treshold: new members have to "earn" 50 Karma points to have their rating status activated. With this means we encourage community members to get active and to get to know jovoto and understand why it's important to be fair. Also, the vote of people who just drop by once to support one special member doens't count. They didn't earn their right to have their ratings count.

2) The community: you guys are the best watch dog. Talk to each other and contact members personally (eg via private message) if you feel like they don't rate fairly. You can also always alert us via the "report misuse" button in the lower right corner of the rating box.

3) The rating monitoring system: jovoto developed special monitoring algorithms that detect suspicious rating behaviour and alert the community management. The rating monitoring system analyses rating behavior statistically under different aspects.
As an example, the ratings of a user are reduced to a set of indices, expressing diversity and bashing tendency, amongst others. Also, efforts are made to identify micro communities and cliques which tend to rate each other favorably.
The coupled index of all such indices is called fairness index and is a measure of the users tendency to vote fairly.

4) Communication: in case the rating monitoring system detects suspicious rating behaviour we contact the community member via private message. It's nice to be nice and we hate to act like bullies. Hence, we rather convince people of the jovoto philosophy by talking to them - it's the best longterm strategy!

5) Punishment: jovoto resorts to deactivating a community member's rating status (meaning the ratings don't count) in case the rating behaviour is not changed to the better after we contacted the community member.

There are two ways:

• Deactivate project related rating status: ratings in a specific projects are deactivated. Sometimes community members are carried away by too much competitiveness - they usually rate fair but loose objectiveness when they are too involved in a project. We don't show this status in a community member's profile because we don't like public shaming.

• Deactivate global rating status: ratings in all project don't count. There are some people who just don't know better. We display this status with a light box in the community member's profile to make a stand.