with the first post in the thread summarizing the collective views

-mouser (February 27, 2006, 04:19 PM)

ok but if 3 people love a program and 3 people hate it, then what is the "collective view" - is it positive or negative?  I also am not sure I see the merit in having a best-of section that lists programs rated poorly in general by just about everyone (e.g. Norton).  I am fine with everyone just posting their mini-reviews and opinions in fact that is fantastic, but if we just blindly list every single app in a category, then all we have done is to really recreate sites such as Download.com or SnapFiles, etc.  I guess I had a slightly different idea that this would be a place for people to come and quickly separate the wheat from the chaff and be presented only 2 or 3 apps for their purpose, then maybe they could download all of them and reach their own conclusion, without having to for example download 10 sticky note programs only to find out that 7 of them are rubbish.

mouser, I see your point but aside from ranking the programs, how could we really determine which were the top apps?  To have detailed reviews of every single program in every single category would be a monumental task (there are already 53 categories, each would contain 4-8 programs so we are talking about hundreds and hundreds of programs).  Certain measures could be put in place to minimize fraud such as:

• require XX number of posts before being allowed to vote
• ban users who register multiple accounts from the same IP
• require the user to post at least a few words about why they are voting that way (something more substantial than "it's great!")

In the end, the "worst case scenario" is that someone downloads and tries a program here based on its rating, and decides that they don't like it after all.  They can uninstall the program and come back here and post their reasons for doing so, which would benefit everyone.

edit: I was thinking of making a new sticky called "Guidlines for Posting in this Section" which would outline the basic format that we are looking for. Something like:

Guidlines for Posting in the "What's the Best" Section

Here's how to make a new suggestion for a program or vote for your favorite) ... blah blah blah ... this is only an example, any and all comments are welcome so please don't hesitate to post your opinions!

JoeUser:
 My favorite Clock Program is ZanyClock 1.1!
 ZanyClock is great because it shows you the time in up to 4 time zones, only uses 1.5k of memory, and runs on Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, and XP!
 I think it's better than BoringClock 4.0 because BoringClock takes up your whole screen and crashed on me when I tried setting the time.
 The ZanyClock website is:  http://www.zanyclock.com
 The program is FREEWARE.
 Here's a screenshot:
 

P.S.-I think further discussion of the voting should be moved to its own thread as it is not really specific to this AntiVirus thread.