22.01.2014 - We would like to inform all game owners about our latest improvements on the game improvements. There are 2 important things we would like to talk about. Callback function and new improved rating system.
About callback functionality
First of all you hve to instruct your users vote using url like this:
http://www.onlinesportmanagers.com/vote.php?id_game=YYY&id_user=XXX
Obviously you need to replace YYY with the id of your game on this portal and XXX is your identifier of the user who would vote for the game.
You can use a code like this to get a voting button:
<a href='http://www.onlinesportmanagers.com/vote.php?id_game=YYY&id_user=XXX' target='_blank'>
<img src='https://www.onlinesportmanagers.com/banner/vote_button_90x44.png' border='0' alt='OnlineSportManagers.com'>
</a>
<img src='https://www.onlinesportmanagers.com/banner/vote_button_90x44.png' border='0' alt='OnlineSportManagers.com'>
</a>
Then you need to do is to contact us at this email (info@onlinesportmanagers.com) so we set the callback script for your game.
After every vore we call your callback script and post this two parameters:
$_POST['reference'] - this is your identifier of the user from the url you called.
$_POST['valid'] - this is 1 if vote was valid vite with same reference did not vote this month yet, 0 if vote is not valid - same reference already voted. Keep in mind that every user can vote only once every month.
$_POST['counted'] - this is 1 if vote was counted to the game rating after all the antispam protection, 0 if vote is not counted.
About changes in voting system
We were fighting against bots and spam votes for a long time. We invented pretty good system to detect most of the attacks to the ratings but there is no way to fight against users instructed by one game to vote against another game. Yes we consider this to be a serious problem, because the main idea of voting is to get real opinion of users about the games, not negative votes on games which some voters does not even know, they just vote because someone told them to do so.
Therefore soon we are going to do the change. This change is already prepared and we are testing it. The main thing in the new system would be rule which says vote against the game with low rating is still better than not voting at all.
So the final rating of the game will consist of the rating part and number of votes part (more votes during last month would increase this part). Games which have a lot of votes will get some extra points, and games which got only few votes (even highest rating) will get some deduction.
We think this is fair as any game can work on getting rating for the own game, and noone should care about geting negative votes for another game.