Sim popularity tool experiment - your help requested

Here is my latest post on a device that I've been designing:
http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/2006/06/08/if-one-likes-sim-x-one-may-also-like-sim-y/

The basic idea here is:

* you have a HUD, which has a "vote" button and a "clear" button
* if you are in a sim you think is good for whatever reason - it has a nice shop in it, it's well laid out, you like the name, it doesn't matter - you click "vote"
* if you change your mind you click "clear" and it cancels your vote
* the database records who has voted for what - anonymously, no details will be publicly displayed
* anyone visiting can then click on a sim name and see what other sims people who have voted for that sim have also voted for.

In effect it's very much like the tools on Amazon et al which say "people who bought this book also bought..." except, er, for sims. I deliberately designed it to work on a sim basis to restrict people just using it for advertising, though of course they still could... the beauty of it, though, is that that doesn't really matter. If someone just votes for one sim, the "similar" tool isn't affected. If they vote for more, you still get perfectly valid information. People who are likely to vote for sim X also voted for sim Y.

Of course, it's pointless unless a wide variety of people use it and vote with it, so I'd appreciate it if anyone to whom this sounds like a good idea would get hold of the item and cast a few votes. There are links in my post to it on SLX and SLB, and it's also available from my freebie box in Caledon.

I'd love it if anyone had any questions or suggestions on this. It's just something that I pulled together in my lunchbreak, really, but I think it at least has some potential. Of course, it's possible that somebody has already done something like this, but I can't spend my time checking to see whether I'm being original here.

Sounds like a nice experiment...question though, besides the hud, is this different from the voting stations that used to be available way back in 1.2?

- Newfie

Well, erm, I don't know, I wasn't there... how did they work?

Who are you calling a tool?!!

Only in a good way though.

Newfie/Juro: Well, with this system, you can only ever vote for a sim *once* (though you can remove that vote) and you can't vote for a parcel, just a whole sim. The "ranking" isn't really the point, I might remove that bit and just have an alphabetical list of sims... it's the "similarity" part that I think is most interesting.

I have to say that my SQL isn't that great so it might groan under the weight of a lot of submissions. Hopefully I'll have tidied it up by that point.

NB Anyone thinking about this, get the HUD, get out there and vote for a few sims! (Don't just vote for one, because that means there's no similarity data at all.)

Indeed, that is the part that sounds interesting to me. 'Oh I like this, what's similar, or what else did people like'. It'd be a great way to discover new things if enough people were using it. I'd use it, I go on random explorations all the time. Sometimes I'll check out a new place, then if I see a build I like, I'll look at the creator's profile and pick a place from their picks and have a look at that. When there I'll spot something else and see where that leads.

Actually, I did this the other day when I went to your shop Ordinal. You had something with landmarks for things you found interesting... I went and had a look at some, and one place lead me to another place and so on. Eventually I ended up in Indigo, where I found a sci-fi museum.

Sounds like quite a good idea. I'll grab one and start voting.

Need...more...data...

but if we could get enough people to participate, it'd be super cool.

I'll do my part.

Nice effort Ordinal. Please let m eknow when you are field testing this device I would love to participate.

It's ready now! You can get it from SLX, SLB or from my shop - the direct links are in the post I made.

I actually rewrote the post completely because, well, it was a bit rubbish actually. This one makes more sense and contains more useful information. Sorry, I was absolutely dying from the heat yesterday.

It only starts to get useful when you have lots of people voting, so if anyone reads this and is even slightly interested, get hold of the thing and tag a few sims, even if you forget about it soon afterwards.

Perhaps you could separate out the simple good/bad into a variety of categories, such as artistic design and lagginess as two possibilities?

Yes, that would be quite possible, though once you start using categories, you run into the problem that you end up defining qualities that you think are important, rather than the people who are actually voting.

I quite like the idea of encountering a group of sims which seem to have a strong connection to each other from the data, but there doesn't seem to be any reason why....

Grabbed it...using it.