FAQs & Definitions

[ravnostic]

[*]I’ve meticulously cleaned the data. There were several instances of reposts (Scarlet R’s) and posting more than 3 voting-enabled entries that weren’t caught in the original contests. I’ve marked these entries as “stats ineligible.” They’ll still show up in the Contestant and Total Votes sorted pages, but their votes don’t count, they’ll be grayed out and marked with “DQ” (disqualified) and they aren’t factored into either the contest results, contest statistics, or user statistics.[/list]

I noted, though, that the ‘elements’ allowed for the 4 entries? (At least it did on the cumulative votes view).

[CauseISaidSo]

Yes, up to 4 are allowed for that one. Also, reposts are allowed in anniversary and a couple of other contests (although they’re supposed to be within the past year and I didn’t try to enforce that… yet). Hence the “meticulous” part – it was done on a contest-by-contest basis.

[Kestrana]

Great work although I do want to note, and Elsinore or linguine or curious can correct me if I’m wrong, but they did allow more than 3 entries in the early contests, prior to the current rules being instituted. I don’t know when the change actually happened though.

[linguine]

Great work although I do want to note, and Elsinore or linguine or curious can correct me if I’m wrong, but they did allow more than 3 entries in the early contests, prior to the current rules being instituted. I don’t know when the change actually happened though.

It’s been 3 entries since I started in the 20’s(I think). There may have been no entry limit back when the contests were just people posting pictures in the totalfark discussion before voting even started.

[CauseISaidSo]

Great work although I do want to note, and Elsinore or linguine or curious can correct me if I’m wrong, but they did allow more than 3 entries in the early contests, prior to the current rules being instituted. I don’t know when the change actually happened though.

It happened at contest #7. The first 6 contests (of which I have 4-6) are considered “reference only” and while they’re still assigned places & votes and the contests have stats, those entries and contests don’t figure into cumulative user or contest stats.

At some point I’ll put an asterisk next to those contests with a note to explain that.

[Kestrana]

Ok cool, I just wanted to make sure you were aware.

[CauseISaidSo]

I was asked to re-post the link to the quick ‘n dirty user page I setup, so let me use this post to recap the pages currently available:

1. Thumbnails of every entry for a given user can be found at http://www.bibliostats.com/farktography/user/UserName, where UserName is the Fark username you’re interested in. For example, this is my entry page: http://www.bibliostats.com/farktography/user/BecauseISaidSo . Note that capitalization isn’t important in the URL.
2. The results page for the most recent contest can be found at http://www.bibliostats.com/farktography/contest . The actual contest this page points to changes as new contests are scanned, so today it points to Upside Down and at midnight tonight Fark time it’ll point to Abandoned.
3. The results page for a specific contest can be found at http://www.bibliostats.com/farktography/contest/nnn, where nnn is the contest number from 4 (Seen Better Days) through 321 (Upside Down).

Within a given contest results page you can sort by individual entry place/rank, contestant username, and combined vote totals. You can also view the contest voting charts for contests #286 and later. The results pages also have links to the next/previous contests to ease scrolling through multiple results pages.

I apologize for not having comprehensive navigation links yet (that’s what the Nav Menu Placeholder on the left will become), but I’ve been really slammed at work lately and there’s no sign of any immediate letup. Eventually, you’ll be able to just go to http://www.bibliostats.com and then navigate to all other pages without having to remember specific URLs. There will also be pages where you can search for specific users or contests or view sorted lists of the same.

Or, if there are any lottery winners out there who’d like to setup an endowment so I can work exclusively on the stats site, I’d be tickled pink to do that. 😉

[ravnostic]

My offer of a paypal donation is still valid. Doesn’t compare to the various lotteries, of course. But your work IS appreciated, and worth the few bucks I could throw your way. The time you’ve invested in this is an exemplary accomplishment, and I can’t imagine anyone here isn’t awed by your efforts nor results. It’s been one of my 6 ‘bookmark bar’ entries since its inception, and I only put bookmarks in the ‘bar’ when I consider it to be an ‘essential’ resource.

[CauseISaidSo]

Thanks much, rav. High praise indeed.

[kashari]

My brain is still twisted after hearing of Amy’s passing today…what does NVC mean?

And thanks for all your work on this CISS! 🙂

[Plamadude30k]

There should be a special thread in this forum dedicated solely to explaining NVC.

NVC means Normalized Vote Count-it’s a way of comparing votes across contests. Basically, it gives you the number of votes that a certain entry would have gotten had there been 1000 total votes. Multiply the percentage of the total votes an entry got by ten, and you get the NVC.

[kashari]

Ahh, ok, thanks! I figured VC was vote count, but couldn’t guess what the N stood for. 😆

[CauseISaidSo]

There should be a special thread in this forum dedicated solely to explaining NVC.

Right you are and there will be shortly. Right now I’m working toward getting the site ready for its public debut next contest. As soon as I’ve got that ready, I’m going to go through this forum and organize all of the past discussion into stickys and announcements.

And you’re welcome, kashari – glad you’re enjoying it!

[Elsinore]

+1 ^^

[CauseISaidSo]

Q: How do I get to the pages of your site?

A: All current functionality can be accessed from the home page at http://www.bibliostats.com. The home page contains a link to the latest/active contest as well as “search” boxes to go to any contest or user page. (I put “search” in quotes, because it doesn’t actually search – you’ve got to know the exact contest # or username.) A comprehensive navigation menu and real user/contest search features are under development.

Q: What are the browser requirements?

A: While I’ve only tested with IE9 and FireFox, any modern browser should work. IE6 is not and will not be supported, and Javascript must be enabled for most features to work correctly.

Please report any bugs in the Feature Requests & Bug Reports forum.

Q: What’s all this NVC nonsense?

A: NVC stands for Normalized Vote Count and is the number of votes an entry would’ve received if the total votes cast in the contest was scaled to 1000. Due to the wide variation in voter turnout each week, it’s a more apples-to-apples method of comparing vote counts across contests. For example, 40 votes in a contest with 3000 votes cast (13.33 NVC) actually represents a smaller percentage of the total vote than does 20 votes in a contest with 1200 votes cast (16.67 NVC).

Since NVC is scaled to a total vote count of 1000, it is also equivalent to the percentage of total votes cast in tenths of a percent; e.g., 37.33 NVC = 3.733% of total votes.

The relationship between votes and NVC is most easily seen in the Color Popping Naturally contest, which had an even 2000 total votes cast. Scaling that to 1000 means that for that contest, NVC is exactly half of the actual vote count.

Q: What do the “Sliding” periods represent?

A: Sliding Quarter covers the last 12 contests (roughly 3 months), starting with the currently active or most recent contest. Sliding Year covers the last 52 contests, starting with the currently active or most recent contest.

Q: What contests are represented on the site?

A: All Farktography contests starting with contest #4, Seen Better Days, have been scanned and analyzed. Contests #1-3 are TotalFark only and are not represented here.

The current rules allowing only 3 entries per contestant were not standardized until contest #7, so contests #4-6 are for reference only. They’re still assigned places & votes and the contests have stats, but neither they nor their entries figure into cumulative user or contest stats.

Q: Why are some of your stats different from those on the FSM?

A: One other thing I should mention: When the FSM comes back, you’ll find that our numbers will vary a bit, especially on the older contests. There are several reasons for this:

1. At the time that I scanned the threads, a handful of users’ entries have been “disappeared”. I’m not sure why/when this happens, perhaps they’ve been banned or closed their Fark account; nevertheless, there’s nothing I can do about it, they simply don’t show up on the fark contest pages anymore and so I don’t count them.
2. I scrape both the contest and voting results pages, so even entries that got no votes will show up and are part of the stats. Entries with no votes aren’t on FSM.
3. We have different mechanisms for determining valid entries. The FSM considers anything on the voting results page as a valid entry which results in voting-enabled comments being listed as entries. My scraper accepts text links as entries as long as there’s a URL somewhere in the text that starts with “http://” and ends with “.jpg” or “.jpeg”. Any other text-only post, even if voting-enabled, is not considered an entry. This means that entries where there’s only a link to a flickr or deviantart page (instead of directly to the photo) aren’t considered entries in bibliostats, but the number of these is insignificant.
4. I’ve meticulously cleaned the data. There were several instances of reposts (Scarlet R’s) and posting more than 3 voting-enabled entries that weren’t caught in the original contests. I’ve marked these entries as “stats ineligible.” They’ll still show up in the Contestant and Total Votes sorted pages, but their votes don’t count, they’ll be grayed out and marked with “DQ” (disqualified) and they aren’t factored into either the contest results, contest statistics, or user statistics.

Q: What text should I use when posting OBO another user?

A: If you follow a somewhat flexible text pattern when posting on behalf of someone else, my stats parser will automatically pick it up and assign it to them. You can have other text in the post as well, as long as you follow the pattern somewhere within the text.

The text pattern to follow looks something like this:

[Posted] (OBO | on behalf of) [Farktographer] username

where brackets “[]” denote optional text, parentheses denote sets of choices and the pipe symbol “|” denotes logical or. So, these are all valid designations that will automatically be picked up and assigned to username:

• OBO username
• Posted OBO username
• On behalf of username
• Posted on behalf of Farktographer username

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