This is pretty cool, I vote it over pretty much any rating system I have seen of anything.

Nice idea to implement the ELO system.

Is it calculated similar to the ELO system in Chess? Or does it just borrow the name?

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Thanks. It isn't a unique concept -- things like it had been done before elsewhere, especially with the late rating system that used to be on sports-reference pages, which worked similarly to this one. Elo is getting popular these days, though, and I knew the Odyssey community didn't have anything like this. I hoped it could make a splash. With over 15,000 matches, I guess it's on its way.

OACS uses a generalized public domain Elo system for PHP that was made by Michal Chovanec, so the mechanism should be the same as the system used in Chess. The relevant configuration settings for it are the initial rating of 2000, and a K-factor of 24.

Incidentally, since we're on the subject of how the ratings work, the 'points' system takes win rate and the Elo difference from 2000, finds the top and lowest ranked episodes in the system, and uses those in a geometry-type equation to get the proper total for each episode, with the values worked out into .5 increments, and rating floors/ceilings of 1 and 10, respectively.

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A classic never goes out of style.

Hey Bob, I wanted to say thanks for the credit at the bottom of the page but those summaries weren't my own summaries; they were the ones provided by Focus on WhitsEnd.org. Just thought I'd alleviate any confusion.
Here are a few questions about things to add: could you add a denotation for unaired, retrospective, and split episodes? Would it be possible to use the left, right, and down arrow keys for navigation (right: Vote 4 episode on right, etc.)? And can you add an out-of-884 rank to the columns on the statistics page?
Thanks for all this hard work!

EDIT: Also, "It Takes Integrity" sorts #1 when sorted by name. Some episode descriptions (e.g. A Class Reenactment, Target of the Week) display ۝ as the closing quotation marks. "Sir Buddy's Snow Day" should be named "Snowy Day" (and rated MUCH higher ).

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Signatures are overrated.

I can't do much about the rating of any single episode , but the other requests and fixes seem generally reasonable and something I'd like to get to when I make the time. I'm not sure about the exact implementation of the keyboard shortcuts; I would rather use something besides the arrow keys, since it's technically possible that you might want to use those to scroll. However, that's a detail that can certainly be worked out. Perhaps (W)SAD and also the numpad?

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A classic never goes out of style.

(W)SAD / numpad is good. By the way, what episodes are listed under the Official Podcast album?

From my memory, I think it's just "You Go To School Where?", but there might be one or two others. It'd probably be a good idea to include what album each episode is in the episode stats list (I'm surprised I didn't think of that sooner).

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A classic never goes out of style.

Just wondering, not sure if you've thought of this, but do you have any protection against spam attacks? Any way to rollback votes by some random person spam-clicking the left button?

The thought crossed my mind some time ago, when I was working on another project that I deemed potentially vulnerable to spambots (even though spamming would be completely pointless in the context of that project).

As far as mainstream spammers go, the page doesn't have any indicators of things that would be interesting to spammers (like comment forms, etc.) that it doesn't seem like bots would be that interested. I have a Wordpress blog just a stone's throw away that regularly gets a handful of spam comments, but if there's been any spambot activity on OACS, it's been just noise in the voting patterns, not something that can be differentiated from good-faith votes. I could probably add something to it to help throw off any bots that show up, though. I was planning on doing it for that other project at some point, so if I do that, I may add it to OACS too just for completeness sake. I don't think it's a big issue though.

As far as users, not bots... at present OACS doesn't have any kind of repeated vote prohibition. That said, though, an underlying assumption of the system is that the votes are made in good faith. There's nothing to prevent anyone from spamming the left button, but there's also nothing to keep them from voting only underdogs, or skipping matches to only vote for episodes that they like. It's just assumed that our users, in a relatively small community oriented around the subject matter, would attempt to make votes that are in line with what they think are good rankings of Odyssey episodes.

I suppose it's possible that a troll with a lot of patience and free time could mess up the rankings, but as a troll you have to consider the time-to-value ratio. You're spending a lot of time voting, and not just voting at random (which might produce results that look legit to the audience at large), but methodically voting episodes people think are bad up, and vice versa, to damage the ranking list. That takes a certain level of judgment about what episodes are good and bad itself, and there's enough inherent noise to the proposition that you might accidentally bring some episodes to a closer evaluation of where they 'should' be in the process, at least from somebody or another's point of view. And after all of that work, you don't have much to show for it. There's no outraged posts with people taking the bait on a forum or comments section -- just a bunch of numbers. And if I look at the rankings and think that something is amiss, I have the ability to look at the votes that've been made, delete them, and recompute Elo ratings based on the surviving votes, possibly more quickly than it would take to mess the ratings up in the first place.

If you're a troll looking to cause some trouble 'for the lolz', it's just not a winning proposition. You'd have a lot more fun going on AIOWiki and making troll edits, or posting inane comments on the ToO or SS, and it would take considerably less time to get the kind of results you want.

-- Sat Apr 06, 2019 11:40 am --

Plans for 2.6 (or 3.0, whichever number seems more appealing):

* Theme support, which has taken a disproportionate amount of time. For the purpose of getting it out the door, once I've gotten semi-completed versions of all the themes, I will probably release them as-is, with minimal tweaks for usability and blatantly ugly ones "as I go". Future updates will probably include bulk updates.
* Various improvements to statistics pages (lot of room for improvement here).
* Keyboard usage tweaks (I'm guessing JavaScript'll be needed, but we'll see).
* New episode descriptions and denotations.

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A classic never goes out of style.

*spends hours voting on the OACS solely to keep Darkness before Dawn as the top album*

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"Happy Birthday to Hot Leaf Water Ess!" - Belle

This project is kinda stressing me out.

Themes are the gift that keeps on giving -- hassle. At this point, my plan is to release the theme version of OACS as 2.6, in a sort of 'public beta'. 3.0 will come later and hopefully incorporate more features besides theme work.

-- Sat Apr 13, 2019 10:04 pm --

After a marathon work session today, I got the themes done enough that I'm satisfied to let the public be exposed to them. Incremental improvements to them and their usage on the pages of the site will, Lord willing, be implemented in future versions.

Included in this release:
* The infamous, notorious, legendary themes.
* Credits section expanded and moved to About page.
* Misc. minor changes.

Themes are something of a work in progress and can't be promised to appear correctly in every situation; that's the price to pay for complexity and a release on something resembling a reasonable time schedule. If you have any suggestions for tweaks or improved appearance, please let me know. If anything seems to be glitched or not appearing right, also let me know ASAP so that I can try to fix it.

Thanks for your continued interest, and I hope you enjoy the work I've put into 2.6. Once the burnout subsides, I expect to!

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A classic never goes out of style.

You're welcome.

The dozens of hours and six months paid off. It looks really snazzy. The first time I voted and the themes switched it was a little weird, but I really like it. It's a surprise every time. It makes the already fun system even more entertaining.

(And this took me more than 15 seconds to write, SO THERE.)

2.6.1 is out, focusing on small functionality improvements to the site.

* Episode and album statistics have been merged into one page. You can toggle which ones you want to look at by pressing a radio button.
* Minor tweaks and fixes to themes.
* Probably other minor changes not worth remembering.

-- Fri Jul 05, 2019 3:21 pm --

Non-point update updates episodes up to the present. Working on a new 'tag' system.

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A classic never goes out of style.

Tags? Tag you're it? What kind of tag are you talking about?

Back in February SG asked for 'denotations' for certain categories of episodes. I thought it was a pretty good idea and that the concept could stand some degree of expansion. So, I've been working for the past little while on a system to help categorize episodes. It's gotten good enough that I feel like something's missing when I use the standard non-testing version of the page.


There's currently 15+ hats (the internal name for the tags) planned. They're assigned to episodes; an episode can have an indefinite number of them, as many as needed. Hats come with both shorthand acronyms and a longer descriptive title that appears on mouseover.


The current categories planned include:
* Ret/Retrospective - used for episodes like "500" or "Auld Lang Syne" that are mostly about events in previous episodes, along with 'studio' type episodes.
* Non/Unaired - used for episodes that have never been aired on the radio, instead being album exclusives or the like. Does *not* include Club episodes, which have their own category.
* Spl/Split - Split episodes.
* Dis/Discontinued - Episodes that used to be aired, but now no longer are, whether they've been replaced or just phased out. This applies only to episodes that are still available on the Club, though, not episodes that aren't available anywhere at all ("Telltale Cat").
* Club/Adventure Club - Club exclusives. This hat applies to episodes that were only intended for the Club from the get-go, not just any episode that's Club-only.
* Live/Live Performance - Episodes that were performed in front of a live audience.

The following are 'topical' hats. An episode applies for a topic if it is clearly so themed or a significant portion of the story (probably 25% or more) centers around it.

* IS/Imagination Station - Imagination Station adventures, plus the Environment Enhancer.
* ROC/Room of Consequence
* KYDS/KYDS Radio
* BTV/B-TV
* Str/Storytelling - Episodes with characters retelling some kind of story. This turns out to be a popular means of conveying plot, besides just the obvious cases (like Bernard episodes), so whether an episode meets the standards of a proper story episode is decided on a case-by-case basis. I'm willing to hear suggestions on how this category can be narrowed down and made more specific.
* Bible - Biblical episodes all go here, instead of in History or International, although those categories do technically also apply.
* His/History - Referring to known American or world history, not just the history of the characters, although some episodes might qualify as both.
* Drm/Dream Sequence
* Hol/Holiday
* Spr/Sports
* Mys/Mystery
* IN/International - Episodes set in other countries. Possibly this can be expanded to include interactions with other countries as a major plot point (such as in "The Impossible" or "The Undeniable Truth").

If anyone has suggestions for how the hats can be expanded or improved, please let me know. This is all in the working phase and I think there's a lot of room for refinement.

The plan so far is for the hat system to be at the center of a 2.7 release. It's possible that other technical/backend changes or new features might make it in 2.7 too, but the hat tags definitely should.

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A classic never goes out of style.

Bump as requested.

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It's been a long night and I'm just about dead tired, so I'll make this announcement beautifully brief.

After extensive work on a few things that'll be visible to the public and more things that won't, I'm pleased to announce that we're leapfrogging the planned release to instead introduce to you OACS 3.0.0.

Notable changes include:
* New 'hat' tagging system.
* Elo range change from 25 to 100 for matchmaking.
* Keyboard shortcuts (A/W/D and numbers for button control)
* AJAX.
... as well as others too numerous, easily forgotten, minor, or secretive to mention.

As usual the changes are documented on the About page, also with instructions for how to use the shortcuts.

Suggestions, comments and (constructive) criticism are welcome. Feedback on tags to add or change are also especially desired, as due to the great quantity of episodes I haven't yet filled them out completely yet. Please let me know about improvements that can be made in that area as you find them.

Thanks for your continued interest in the site!

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A classic never goes out of style.

Yes! Keyboard shortcuts!!
Again, thanks so much for all the work you've done with this! My regret is that I haven't had time to look it over more closely. Perhaps I will sometime soon.
I do want to rehash the question I had earlier, about rolling back votes. If I make an accidental vote, can I undo it? Would that be a feature you can add?