By: Rowena Lim
(Note from CereCere: The SMWPR Roween refers to was a code you could place on your page a few years ago, where people could rate your site on a scale from 1 to 10. The sites with the best ratings would make a top 10 list of sites. It has nothing to do with Web Page Reviewers.)
It all started with SMWPR.
When I was starting out with my site, I desperately wanted to promote it.
I attempted to register with all the search engines I could find, submitted
to various anime and Sailormoon link sites, and went around hunting
for ways I could make my site known.
Not long after, I came across with an SM page with a ranking fragment.
It was from SMWPR. Intrigued, I surfed to SMWPR. I was quite
amazed by what I saw there, and decided that this could be a good
vehicle for me to help promote my site as well as gauge how people like it.
So I put up the ranking fragment on my page. I checked the ranking
results everyday and my site had pretty good scores at first. After
several days, however, I noticed that all of a sudden my site was
way down. I checked the top ten, and to my disappointment, I
thought the top ten sites really sucked.
I discovered later that there was actually a lot of cheating going
on. The "contestants" would rank their own pages "10" and give
the other pages low scores like "1" and so forth in order to boost
their own standings. You wouldn't believe the lengths people
would go to… In spite of this, I stayed on SMWPR. Later
on, I was approached by PSSMDJNSCA to join their ranking
system. I obliged, and later found out that cheating didn't stop
at SMWPR. Before I knew it, ranking systems and pages were
blossoming everywhere.
I stayed on the two ranking systems for several months. The
cheating worsened as time passed. Finally, I decided to remove
the fragments from my page. I was free! But what really made
me scrap these things altogether?
- I decided ranking systems are an exercise in futility if majority
of the people can't be honest to themselves and to others.
- I really had problems deciding where the fragments would go in
the lay-out.
- I wanted to eliminate as much unnecessary stuff as possible
to speed up the loading time.
If you want to know how people feel about your page, you could usually
get a pretty good
estimate from the e-mails you receive. Or maybe
you could put up a comments and suggestions center, like a
guestbook or something. If they like it, they'll tell you. If they
hate it, well, maybe they'll flame you…
On the positive end, those ranking systems did bring me more hits!
Comments on this article can be sent to:
Rowena Lim.
