Our new voting system and why it was necessary

GSMArena.com is a place to find everything about a phone – its specifications, of course, but also what others think about it. In previous incarnations of our site users got to give 1-10 votes in three categories, but with the latest redesign we scrapped that system.

Many of you miss it, but having done some analysis on the numbers in our database we learned that these ranking scores aren't nearly as useful as they appear. The scores are more dependent on the popularity of a phone (or how much people like to hate it) than the actual quality of the phone itself.

This turned the whole thing into a popularity contest, an overly loyal user would give in the automatic 10s, but they will also go out of their way to give 1s to competing phones. We much prefer objective numbers and the old voting system just didn’t cut it, the numbers were too skewed by some very dedicated fanboys.

Three years ago we suggested – and attempted – a change. We decided (with input from you) to allow only registered users to vote in order to curb the worst of the fanboy voting. And it worked, for a while. But soon the turf wars started again and once again the highest rated phones were the ones with the most loyal fans, rather than the best looking or performing ones.

With our latest redesign we scrapped the old system and replaced it with one that only allows positive interactions. You can hit the Become a fan button a phone's page (you'll need an account first) and that shows that you genuinely care about it. The lack of negative votes means trolls can't derail unrelated phones out of spite.

Better yet, it's now easy to check up on your favorite phones from your account page - they are all listed there. This is also the place to check for replies you've received so you can keep the conversation going.

You can view other people's accounts too. That will show you what phones they've favorited and also stats like number of comments they posted (and read the last few of them), plus how many upvotes that they received.

This makes it much easier to learn more about your fellow commenters and we think will improve the GSMArena community. We know some of you miss Disqus too, but there was no way to integrate it this tightly with our site.