HHR News: Anonymous voting?

218 –

We've turned off anonymous voting (the ability for all site visitors to vote on stories) and limited it to registered users for the time being.

The idea behind the Hao Hao Report is to have a method for all of us to quickly find the best and most interesting posts and news reports about China.

It has always been the policy of HHR to allow users to submit articles from their own blogs, as a way of both promoting their blog and exposing the community to diverse sources of commentary and information.

The only limit we've ever put on this is a stipulation of not flooding the page with submissions (ie. blogger submits half his blog posts all at once). This is spamming, and isn't tolerated.

The problem with anonymous voting is that it is IP based, and allows frequent visitors to come to the site and vote for their story a number of times over the course of several days or weeks. Again, this isn't something we're particularly bothered by, if it is a small portion of submitted material.

Unfortunately, this isn't currently the case. Rather than help the HHR community grow, several members limit their submissions completely to their own material and limit their votes in much the same way. This isn't communal, and goes against what makes HHR cool.

Though we appreciate all involvement and activity on HHR, activity that only takes from HHR and doesn't give back (in the form of varied-source submissions, varied voting, and adding comments) is selfish and over-time does nothing but hurt HHR - the very tool being used to help you promote your site and the China-focused sphere in general.

So, in response, we've turned off anonymous voting for the time being. We are also actively looking for additional ways in which we can improve HHR as both a tool for China-centric bloggers and for the HHR community.

We appreciate any and all feedback or ideas you may have. Simply e-mail us (info [*at*] haohaoreport [*dot*] com) or leave a comment here.

Read »