Firstly, lets speak about some recent changes that I announced on our Twitter account but not here on the blog. The rating average calculation has been completely rewritten and should in theory work better than the old one. We are now using a weighted bayesian average combined with some influence alterations based on various variables such as user level and how helpful a review has been. Rather significant is that if a user has both reviewed and normally rated an item, only the review is now counted, so we have eliminated the ability to vote twice using this method.

I’m working on tidying up the source code, and taking care of some issues. This is my main priority at the moment as any feature additions will build on this base.

Probably the next change you will see most visibly will be the addition of statistics regarding the user ratings being added to listing detail pages. You’ll be able to see how many guests have rated as compared to how many registered users, and the averages for each set of users.

After this, the next change to be rolled out will be the new homepage that I posted awhile back on Twitter, and revised URL’s. We will finally be getting rid of the redundent browse/view/ in the URL. It was simply a carry over from our WordPress days and isn’t really needed. You’ll be able to access listings with a URL as simple as muses-success.info/tales-of-mu/. Of course, we will keep the old url’s working much like muses-success.sorrowfulunfounded.com URL’s continue to work well after we have made the move to muses-success.info.

These are the most basic changes coming – I would love to announce more but I can’t be sure when I will have time to code them up. I’ll just say you can expect Muse’s Success to become much more open and transparent.