Now that the site is getting more reviews in, I'm going to start working on a little bit more complex ranking algorithm. Here are some of the factors for calculating the review score:
- Total number of reviews - a person who only submits a single review shouldn't have a much authority as a person who has reviewed dozens of commentaries.
- Number of reviews in for a bible book - the more reviews a user does for a given book of the bible the more their reviews will count.
- Number of "Helpful reviews" - Much like Amazon, the site will eventually have a "Did you find this review helpful?" link.
- Account Age - over time, older accounts may gain more weight.
- Internal modifier - for some reviewers, I may add a behind-the-scenes modifier that will give their reviews more or less weight . The reason for this is to be able to give more weight to credible academic sources that may not have many reviews.
Other factors that might adjust the score would be to take into account outliers in the data. For example, if a book has 5 great reviews and a single 1-star review, that single 1-star shouldn't tank it's score.