Revision as of 15:02, May 28, 2007

Welcome to YTMND, nubcakes. This page will familiarize you with how the website works.

Voting

What is it?

Voting is a vital part of YTMND. Voting is a power given to every user on the site. Users have six choices when looking at a site.

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  • 5 stars: The highest rating users can give to a site.
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  • 4 stars: A site that is better than average, but below anything spectacular.
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  • 3 stars: The average rating of a site, not crappy but nothing special.
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  • 2 stars: The site is below average and could have been better.
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  • 1 star: The lowest rating users can give to a site.
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  • Not voting on a site. All sites start out with the no-vote. It should be noted that a no-vote does not affect the sites score at all

The Site Rating

A site that is published begins to collect votes and a rating is established. The rating is derived by the total number of stars divided by the total number of votes. Once a rating is established, it is then compiled with all the other sites and an order of ranking is determined. It seems that sites are complied into the different rankings every couple of hours.

Note: This could change if a weighted voting system is put in place.

Controversy

Voting is the culprit to most conflicts on ytmnd. In fact there has been a need to classify users by the way they vote or their voting habits. Such categories are:

• Upvoters/upvoting
  • Users who only (or mostly) vote
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    .
• Midvoters/midvoting
  • Users who only (or mostly) vote
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    .
• Downvoters/downvoting
  • Users who only (or mostly) vote
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    .
• Split voters/NARVs
  • Users that only (or mostly) vote
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    and
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• Voters by deal/Deal voting
  • Users that send a message to other users in order to exchange
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    for
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No user is limited to only voting a certain way. All users are entitled to their own opinions.

Guide to Making YTMND sites that Don't Suck.

The original version of this guide was from Max at the forums when YTMND.com was first opened. It is his guide to making an enjoyable YTMND site. Several additional volumes were made but were lost to the Nuclear Forum Holocaust.

Sound

Once you have a sound file you would like to use, there are two key things to remember:

1. Don't make it too large, something between 800k and 1.5megs would work.
2. Make sure you end the file so it loops with the beginning.

If the sound file is too large, people will just close the page before it loads, making the site pretty much useless. Also, it wastes Max's bandwidth and makes him hate you. The exception to the rule is if you plan to release a full remix of a fad song, and even so, you should use a low quality file and offer a HQ download at another site. So before you think it's a great idea to upload the entire song of "Livin La Vida Loca", please remember that it's stupid on many levels.

Looping is very important and not that hard to do. You will usually want to use WAV format, as MP3 has a spacer at the end and usually doesn't sound right. For an example of a properly looping site go to pussycat or fyad. When using WAV, you probably want to encode somewhere around 11khz Mono at 15kb/s. Depending on your sound file you may need to encode it at a different rate. Please note also, when encoding WAV files use PCM format, it's the standard and most of the others don't work.

Images

Animated gifs are fine, but don't use 300k animated gifs that have 200 frames and lock up your computer. It makes the site much nicer when the gifs maintain a fluid motion. Also, remember that transparency shows through.

General

Take a look around. I know you are all tempted to get right to creating your awesome idea of a "Is Wayne Brady gonna have to choke a bitch?" site, but it's been done. Many times. Check to see if you are duping someone's idea first. It's happening a lot.

Your (inside joke|anime reference|personal pictures|video game) isn't funny to most people and would cause your site to be downvoted or possibly deleted.

Explanation of all the lists on the front page (such as Up and Coming)