I've briefly read through the past couple of pages - I don't have a lot of time to be on here at the moment. Just to give my opinion with an example:

Suppose someone wanted to include a top five and a bottom five:
1. Victor
2. Brian D
3. Kate
4. Anna
5. Aisleyne

5. Marco P-W
4. Helen
3. Dennis
2. Pauline
1. Connor

One way to do that is to assign 11 points to Victor through to 7 points for Aisleyne, 5 points for Marco decreasing to 1 point for Connor, and 6 points for every HM not mentioned.
I'd be very comfortable with allowing votes like this - it allows people to chip in and represent their opinion accurately within the spirit of the original poll.
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I'm much more sympathetic to that than the idea that in this case Victor should be given 291 points (or whatever). That doesn't seem to make the slightest bit of sense to me – in fact I wouldn't vote in this poll if that were the rule, I'd just give up on it as broken.

If someone submits a full list, it's clear what the 291 points mean because they're putting one housemate ahead of the next all the way up. The points represent places. If you're not putting someone in every slot then where is the number 291 coming from? Let's say you just submit the top five without the bottom five and no one else gets any points. You're not merely having all HMs outside the top five rated as the equal worst, but quite specifically as the equal 291st (or perhaps 292nd?) place.

That's daft enough, but next year someone submitting exactly the same list would effectively be ranking those outside their top five as equal 308th (or whatever). The gulf between the top 5 and the rest from last year has opened up further for some reason.

To pick up on Barracute's point: I do care a bit about places in the middle of my list. For example, there's a pretty big gap between Nush BB4 and Kim BB15 in there and I'd never have put them the other way round. But of course I'm much more engaged with how my top 10, 20 or 30 do. I care much more about whether eg Rachel is in the top 10 than if Nush and Kim have swapped places in the final results. If a top 30 (or whatever) presses all the remaining HMs down to equal 291st place then on average those lists are going to be much more effective at pressing their ranked HMs towards the top spots. I'd feel like I was not merely not incentivised to submit a full list, but actually being punished for submitting one.
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I absolutely f***ing detest copied-and-pasted lists, which have blighted this poll (and others like it) for at least as long as I've been aware of it.

As far as I'm concerned, when you submit a full list of HMs you're effectively making a whole series of statements like 'I think HM A is better than B, B is better than C.... and so on'. If it's not entirely your considered list, your post isn't just a lie, it's potentially hundreds of lies. If all you care about is one HM then you can express that by writing 'Nikki am da best' or whatever and she gets 1 point because you've ranked her 1 place higher than everybody else, rather than 50 points more than an HM you've never heard of and 200 points ahead of another HM you've never heard of.

Anyone c&p-ing lists like that is just showing a bucketful of contempt to those of us who've tried to do it properly and spent 15-20 minutes trying to pick the exact order of Bonnie (BB7), Eugene (BB6), Sally Broadbent (BB16), Sandy (BB3) and Sada (BB1). If it were up to me, posters submitting c&p-ed votes would be banned from voting in the next poll.
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Looking forward to the countdown.

I completely agree that this should be the method for those who don't submit full lists.
I assume this is how it's done? As it wouldn't be fair to give the same points to those submitting a list of 10 v's a full list. Trumbles method is absolutely fair and I believe that is Yohinn does it too.

Anyways looking forward to the results!
When are we kicking off Yohinn??!!

Whilst i can see the point Trumbles is making - re giving unlisted hms a midpoint(s) in the middle as per his example, there are a couple of flaws, what if the number listed is not even, where would you then put the split and the midpoint for the unlisted hms? Also it wont stop people doing literally one or two hms, i mean seriously unless you have a minimum number of hms required in a list it wont work, and there never has been a minimum requirement so to introduce one would be a contradiction in terms? But the big problem i have in giving someone who hasnt done a full list the same gap between top and bottom as someone who has is that it invokes the obvious question of whats the point in doing a full list, in those who just want to maximise the gap between top and bottom? There wouldnt be and so you would end up with less full lists and the vote would lose integrity if it contained lots of hms being given the same points by default multiple times. Whilst i am all for boosting the popularity of the poll, doing so by making short cuts and damaging the integrity of the poll is not the way - if its not done properly then its not worth doing at all is my opinion.

As i have said before and will again, the ONLY reason i started doing a full list was because of the fact you only get full points if you do all hms, i can openly admit if that was not the case and an idea such as above had been in place when i started i would never have done a full list and nor i am sure would many others , whilst you may have got more votes, you would have had less full lists - do you really think it would have made for a better poll ?

Anyway looking forward to the commencement of the countdown today. But heres a stat that maybe of interest given the current topic - there were 53 votes this time of which 50 were full lists.

Well not all of those that were looking like full lists were due to one or two duplications.

...and on another not me the recount is taking a little longer than expected and therefore the countdown is being pushed back to next Sunday - sorry it's taking. Longer than expected 😬

Ah right, i only checked who had listed 291, didnt do a detailed check lol

Thanks for at least letting us know about the latest delay.

It's at times like this I really wish DS hadn't got rid of the roll eyes smilie

Ha Ha sorry, didnt mean it like that, there have been more than one, so just being literal, not taking the P honest !

Thanks.
Sfaik, yohinnchild gives limited points to incomplete lists (ie 10 points to the top spot in a top 10) but simply ignores the 'bottom 5' type lists atm. At least that was what cheeks always did and I've never seen yohinnchild say he's doing anything different. People submitting bottom lists are either misinformed or doing it in a 'just saying' sort of way.


I'm not sure how much we're disagreeing here, or whether you've fully understood what I'm saying.

I still think that full lists should have the greatest clout. In fact I'm against the top place on partial lists getting full points not only because there's less encouragement to come up with full lists but because even if you had a full list ready it might be tempting to switch to a partial list.

I can't see why it would cause a problem for there not to be an even number of places unless you're assuming that whoever was counting up would be forcing a mid-point into a vote where there wasn't one specified. There's no need for that: a top 10 is a top 10 and shouldn't be forced to be a top 5 with a bottom 5. But I doubt many people would be submitting long 'top' lists without 'bottom' lists if it's clear the latter would be counted.

Take Reserved's list: at the moment he (or she?) has effectively ranked everyone in BB1-3 above every HM since, which even the grumpiest BB traditionalist would probably concede is going too far. My guess would be that as a Kate fan he doesn't actually like eg Alex Sibley that much and wouldn't have needed any persuading to convert it into a top 15 and bottom 15 (or top 20 and bottom 10 - whatever) if that were an option.

In Salv's case he's submitted a bottom 31 and a top 26 (Sam and Amanda have to be separated). So on my view, Conor would get 1 point, Jennifer BB9 would get 31 points, all unlisted HMs would get 32 points, Rachel would get 33 and Aaron would get 58. So there would be a 57 point gap between Aaron and Conor rather than a 290 point gap. He could almost have done that anyway by joining the lists (giving a 56 point gap), but only at the cost of, for example, giving Helen Wood and Steven the Significant more points than both of BB15's Chris's, as they are unlisted.

When I counted up a hottest female HMs poll a few years ago - which had fewer as well as (obviously) much shorter lists, I said I'd "...get the results up as soon after Christmas as possible."


They went up in March.

I may have misunderstood, i was assuming, you were suggesting in the case of less than full lists, treating all the same in that for example if someone listed 20 hms, regardless of how specified, you would split so the top 10 would receive 291-282 pts, the bottom 10, 10-1pts. I was assuming the unlisted you would give the mid point but with 291 current, the midpoint would be either 145 or 146, but do you mean to give the unlisted 11 pts, 1 above the halfway mark of 10 ? What i was pointing out is if someone listed 21, then you would have another problem? Who is to say whether the 11th in a list of 21 should be given 281 or 11pts? Most unfull lists would just be a single block of whatever total they choose to list as as not everyone would conveniently list a top or bottom number or an even number total or as this year the total is not an even number, some choices would therefore have be made, where to split?

Yoh does the same as Cheeks, numbering from the bottom up, from 1 upwards and wherever they stop thats where the points stop, so if you do 10, you top gets 10 pts or 20 you top gets 20pts and so on, ignoring any splits the poster may indicate, so if you say your doing a top 10 and a bottom 10 makes no difference as its still treated as a block of 20 and so given 1 to 20 pts.

Don't give him any idea's !

Hi Yohinn, is this starting today? Just want to make sure I don't miss it if so!

Hey, not that I want to p!ss everyone about but the results aren't ready and am working on them now. I'm not going to state a next date that they may be posted at as I keep doing that. So I will post on here a few days before the first results will go up.

It will probably;y be next weekend as I'm near enough done on the counting, its just the statsy bit that I need to do. However I will post on friday if its a GO situtation. The starting again has really set me back and I didn't think it would take this long.

Sorry for the long wait - it wasn't intended and has just worked out this way.

Yes best to just wait until you are 100% done before stating the actual start date ! Thanks for keeping us informed anyway !

Perhaps it's just too late to make any change in the way votes are counted, because the same system has long been used, it seems to work pretty well, and there doesn't seem to be any agreement about what should replace it.

But I think there will be an increasing problem that there are people who want to vote who haven't watched every series, or don't remember all of them well enough, and who, if they vote, will have to either

* leave out the HMs they hadn't watched or can't remember, thus giving them even fewer points than the worst of the listed HMs, which is unfair on those HMs; or

* use various dubious techniques to fill up their list. (Dubious techniques include copying someone else's rankings, putting the HMs in a random order, and adding the HMs for some series in blocks that don't reflect any considered ranking.) (Out of those three, I think I prefer the random order.)

As I understand Trumbles proposal, it is that people would be able to designate some HMs as their top n (n = 10, 12, 37, 100, however many they list), another group as their bottom m HMs (again however many they list, and m needn't = n); and then every HM who wasn't listed would get m+1 points (all of them would get that same number), and the points for the HMs in the top part would start at m+2.

I think that's a good suggestion, and if someone doesn't take advantage of being able to list "bottom" HMs, it's the same as what we do now.

As long as the extra housemates go in the middle of the list then that's the way I'd recommend it with the current rules. I suppose you could put them in the same order as the previous years' results had them to be as fair as possible (assuming you were willing to expend that effort!).


I could see that working.

It's a minor point, but I've realised that it wouldn't be exactly the same as what we do now, since (at least in the way I described it) if someone didn't list "bottom" HMs (so m = 0), the unlisted HMs would all get 1 point, rather than 0 as they do now; and the "top" HMs would also each get 1 more point than they do now. But that makes no difference to the finish order. (It's the same as calculating as we do now and then adding 1 to every total. That can't boost any HM past any other one.)

I'll include a couple of points from earlier in the thread for context.


At that point, the turnout hadn't dropped by a large number. Barracute posted the totals for this year and last:

2015 = 63
2016 = 51

and some more people have submitted lists since then. But though that doesn't look like a big difference, it's a fall of nearly 20%. I don't have numbers from earlier years, but I vaguely remember that one year had something like 75.


I agree that there's a danger that comparisons would change their meaning and significance, but I think that also happens when people resort to the sorts of methods I mentioned last night in order to make their list a full one.

So I think it could make sense to make things work better for people who haven't watched some of the BBs and so can't properly rank some of the HMs.

On the other hand, there is a danger in making partial lists too attractive, if it means that many people start submitting very incomplete lists, to the point where that dominates the results. That clearly would be a problem when comparing with other years.

...

BTW, though there's a lot of focus on who wins, and who's in the top 10, there have been so many HMs by now that even getting into the top 50 is a significant accomplishment.

The main problem i have with the above, is that you will give the same points to a large group of hms by default which will still not reflect the true opinion of the voter and so in turn will distort the final stats. How (without checking) would you know how many of any hms total were from genuine votes or default votes for example? The total imo should reflect genuine votes only, adding a load of default votes just devalues the whole thing.

The constant argument that those who do not wish to do a full list (for whatever reason) shouldnt be disenfranchised seems to be being solved by disenfranchising those who DO do a full list! You cannot justify treating someone who has watched all 17 series and chooses to do a full vote, the same as someone who has only watched 1 or 2 or whatever?! Thats why the current way of doing it, is the best and fairest, i accept it is not perfect, but none of the alternatives are as good as, never mind better. At the end of the day the more votes you make the more points you get, is unarguable and also provides encouragement to do a full list and it is important, to offer some plus for doing a full list otherwise you will find that you get a lot of short ones, as people will think what is the point in doing a full list if there is nothing to be gained and so this will inturn further undermine the legitimacy of the poll. The biggest difference between the current way and the alternatives is that in the current way, the total, is the total of all votes CAST, whereas the others include made up votes - putting the unlisted in the middle etc! Which takes us back to the point i made at the end of my first paragraph.....

Those are all important concerns the need to be addressed if there's to be any change in the voting system.

I think Trumbles's proposal has a huge advantage, re such concerns, compared to what I was suggesting earlier. In Trumbles's proposal, the people who do a full list have almost exactly the same advantage over those who submit short lists as they do now. Their top HM, for example, gets the maximum number of points. If someone lists only 10 HMs, OTOH, their top-listed HM gets only 10 points (like now) or 11. If they want their top HM to get a lot more points than their bottom-ranked HM, then in Trumbles's proposal they still have to submit a long list, just as they have to now. "The more votes you make the more points you get" would still be true.

(Re 10 or 11, I said earlier why I don't think that "extra" 1 point is a problem, and I'll eventually say more below.)

Instead of only full lists and very short ones, there's another sort of case that should be considered. Suppose someone didn't watch bb8, for example, or bb2, or some small number of series. Suppose they leave those HMs out of their list. Under the current system, the HMs they don't list are (in effect) ranked as if they were the worst of all HMs.

Under Trumbles's proposal, the unlisted HMs are instead given an intermediate ranking. While that's not absolutely ideal, it's nonetheless an improvement. It allows people to say "I know about my top HMs, and my bottom, but there are some in between I don't know how to rate". And a key mathematical fact about this intermediate ranking is that, since they all get the same number of points, it does not have any effect at all on where they finish compared to each other.

It's important to bear in mind that it's only point differences in person's vote that make a difference to the finishing places. For example, I submit a full list, and if I were allowed to add 1000 points to every HM, I would have no more effect on the finishing places than I do without the 1000. It might look like I had more power than anyone else, because my lowest ranked HM got 1001 points, and it counted up from there, while everyone else started at 1 instead. But it wouldn't actually give me any more power. Adding 1000 points to every HM cannot lift any of them above any other.

So giving a bunch of HMs the same intermediate number of points makes no difference at all in how they finish compared to each other. All it does it give them a minimal bit of help towards finishing above the HMs in that voters "bottom" segment. "Minimal" because it's only 1 point. There's no lesser difference that's still a difference.

(The "extra" point that the top HM in an incomplete list might get (see above) is just to allow that intermediate score. It cannot give that voter's top-rated HM more points than a full list gives them, and it gives the top-rated HM the same number of points as a full list only if the "gap" contains only 1 HM. I don't think that is a problem.)

Now, what about the stats?

There are two things to bear in mind.

The first is that some of the stats are based only on complete lists. Trumbles's proposal would not change that.

The second is that it's never made sense to compare vote totals form different years. The vote totals depend on the number of HMs (which increases every year) and on the number of people who vote (which can change in arbitrary ways from one year to another). So adding default votes to the totals does not make meaningless any totals-based stat that was meaningful before.

There is, of course, a sense in which giving unlisted HMs an intermediate ranking isn't a true ranking; but giving them 0 points (as we do now) isn't a true ranking either. I think that the intermediate ranking is a better way to handle HMs a voter can't rank and will be closer to what their true rankings would have been if they'd been able to make them.

And I don't think Trumbles's proposal would get more people submitting short lists, because (as I tried to explain above) what they'd gain from that is hardly any different from what they'd gain now.

If someone omits one series because they didnt watch it, then they have no opinion, they dont know where they rank, so whatever points you give is still false as its not based on any actual opinion.... and if you give them points in the middle, then despite them not having any opinion you are still rating them above the bottom half - which is still false. And unless everyone omits the same hms, then you will distort the final totals and positions. Imagine in the final totals hm 1 has 1000 points and hm 2 has 999, you dont know how many are true or default points. But what if just to prove a point that only one person didnt do a full list but listed all bar the series hm 1 was in, hm 1 would have got more than 1 default point and so would have finished above hm 2 despite that voter NOT expressing an opinion (assuming hm 2 was in a series they watched and was put in the bottom half at least one place off the top of the bottom half)- say the series they didnt watch had 20 hms, so that would mean 271 (using this years 291) to their top hm and so around 145/6 or so to the one unlisted series hms and so hm 2 could have been genuinely given 130 pts and still been beaten by hm 1 - not because the voter thinks hm 1 was better then 2 but because they did not vote for them at all!

Thats an extreme example but just one way that using default votes could lead to false results. and one scenario which couldnt happen in the current method. So multiply that by several short lists none of which would have the exact same unlisted hms so even more hms would be affected and so you can see just how far and wide the distortion would go.

Bottom line for me is that the poll should be about what people think and the points totals should be what were given. Not adding default points to make up for people not giving an opinion - because however you do it - a default is still a default and not and never will be a true, genuine or accurate figure. If hm x gets 100 points that should be what the voters gave, and not be 90 + 10 added to by default points to fill in the gaps.

I've never commented on comparing votes year to year, or each hms stats individually, i am simply talking about making each years as accurate as possible and adding default points will make it even more unaccurate.

Finally, if a hm isnt listed (for any reason) that is the choice of the voter and assuming they have read the instructions will know that this will mean 0 points and so this will be their choice and reflect their choice. But as will happen in most cases a voter just lists a single block with a group left out, so putting any unlisted hms in the middle will not be their choice or reflect in anyway what they may really think of any particular one of the unlisted hms either. So its just swapping one inaccuracy for another but in the alternatives, the inaccuracy is worse because it involves ADDING points that the voter never gave ! To put in the plainest context, take any of this years votes, now note any voters bottom hm, now imagine if for any reason they had not watched that particular hms series and so not listed them (or any from that series). Had that happened under the current system that hm would have 0pts which is a lot nearer to the truth (1pt) then if due to being unlisted they were given 130ish (in an otherwise (apart from one series) full list)?!

Giving them zero points isn't based on any actual opinion either, and I think it's outrageous for unlisted HMs to be in effect rated lower than the worst of the worst.


Just to be clear, it's not dividing the list in half; the two parts can be of different sizes.

Giving them an intermediate number of points is likely to be closer to what the voter would think than giving them zero points; but anyone who wants to continue using the current system for their own votes can do so by listing only their top HMs.

So if they think an intermediate number is a worse reflection of their views, that's fine. It wouldn't be forced on them.

There is no perfect solution if incomplete lists are allowed. If you are implacably opposed to ratings that are "not based on any actual opinion", then you should be arguing that only full lists should count.


To call it a distortion is to presuppose that the current system somehow gives true totals. It doesn't. The same goes for your assertion "that using default votes could lead to false results". Giving omitted HMs fewer points than the worst of the worst is not their true ranking. (It's arguable that it can be right for one of them, as in your example later on, but that's for one at most.)

Anyway, the point I was making there is that awarding an intermediate number does not make any difference at all in how the omitted HMs finish compared to each other. I can't tell whether you're disagreeing with that or not, but if you are disagreeing about that, you have it wrong. All the intermediate number does is rank them above the HMs the voter listed as their bottom rankings.

Of course, this applies separately to each voter.

So if I leave out Rachel and Rex, for example, then under the current system I would be giving both of them zero points. Under Trumbles's proposal, I would be putting them above my 'worst' HMs, below my 'best', but still without making any difference to where they finished vs each other.

You seem to think it's better to give them zero points, so that I'd be ranking them below Dennis, Conor, Helen, and other nasties.


Here too I can't tell whether you're disagreeing with something I said, in this case what I said about the example in which I gave 1000 extra points to every HM. This was just meant to be a simple example to show why giving some HMs the same number of extra points doesn't make any difference to where those HMs finish.

Of course, in Trumbles's proposal the intermediate number wouldn't be given to every HM, only to the unlisted ones. But that's why I said that awarding an intermediate number does not make any difference at all in how the omitted HMs finish compared to each other, and that all the intermediate number does is rank them above the HMs the voter listed as their bottom rankings.

That does mean we wouldn't know without checking how many of a HM's points came from the rule and how many from explicit rankings. But it could be listed in the results, and then we would know. So the problem that we wouldn't know is easily dealt with.

If the issue is that the final placings could be different than if the omitted HMs had been given zero points, that's true, but it's not undesirable. One aim of the proposal is to treat those HMs better, rather than have them continue to be treated as if incomplete lists ranked them as the worst of all HMs.


You're right that the results can be different than when using the current system. But different doesn't have to be worse. Calling the difference a "distortion" assumes that the current system somehow gives true rankings. It doesn't. As I said above, giving omitted HMs fewer points than the worst of the worst is not their true ranking.

Re "despite that voter NOT expressing an opinion", they did express an opinion. The opinion was that the HMs they listed in their bottom segment were worse than the unlisted HMs (and the ones in their 'top' segment were better).

They expressed that opinion because that's the meaning the rules assigned to their ballot, and they were told that's how their ballot would be interpreted.

In the current system, when someone omits HMs they're expressing the opinion that those HMs were worse than all of the listed HMs.

If they still want to express that opinion under Trumbles's proposal, they still can. The proposal just gives them another opinion they can choose to express.


The voter knows they are giving that default number and has chosen to submit a ballot that gives that many points to those HMs.

Giving those HMs 0 points instead is no more true, genuine or accurate.

It seems to me that, logically, your position ought to be that only full lists count. That's the only way that every point will reflect an explicit comparison of every HM with every other.


"Accurate" by what standard? The choice is between ranking unlisted HMs as if they were worse than the worst of the worst and ranking them as if if they were worse than certain HMs and better than certain others. There's nothing that says ranking them at the absolute bottom is more accurate.


Similarly, under Trumbles's proposal "if a hm isnt listed (for any reason) that is the choice of the voter and assuming they have read the instructions will know that this will mean" a specific number of "points and so this will be their choice and reflect their choice."

If a voter "just lists a single block with a group left out", that can be treated so it has the same effect it does now. They haven't specified any middle, so there won't be any middle for unlisted HMs to be put in.

In any case, remember that the proposal is not that a voter's list be divided in half at the middle. Each voter gets to pick where they put the "gap", and the two sides of the gap can be of very different sizes. If a voter doesn't divide their list into two segments, with a gap between, then the unlisted HMs are assumed to be below the bottom listed one, as they are now.

Your example is right that a voter's omitted HMs might include the HM that voter would have put at the very bottom of a full list (if the voter had been able to make one). By equally the omitted HMs might include the HM that voter would have put at the very top. An intermediate value is likely to be closer to the "right" result overall.

For the record, I'm with Veri on this one

I am as well. I can't rank the quieter, lesser known, (etc) HMs below the one that are the nasty HMs.

Looking forward to seeing the results!