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I want to start by saying that the following is not intended to replace the FontStruct rating system. I just really love numbers, so I have been playing around with ideas for developing a rating system of my own. I wanted to share my ideas. Suggestions are welcome.

18 Comments

What I have developed is a popularity system that takes into account everything from rating, to number of downloads, to number of clones. I have started calculating points for popular fontstructions.

Here is the system:
√# of glyphs
plus √# of downloads
plus [(√# of votes) x 2 x balanced rating]
plus # of favorites
plus # of comments
plus 50 points if it is a top pick
plus 50 more points if it is or has been a featured fontstruction
minus 20 points if it is a clone (of a font not by the same author)

So, here is an example: Structurosa by pauldhunt:
18 points (for 329 glyphs)
+ 83 points (for 6872 downloads)
+ 373 points (for 494 votes & balanced rating of 8.4)
+ 63 points (for 63 favorites)
+ 57 points (for 57 comments)
+ 50 points (for a top pick)
= 644 points in all!!!
I am 99% certain that Structurosa will be in the top ten (if not in first). Possibly no font has more votes.
I am not going to calculate all 22 thousand some-odd fonts, just the top ten fonts in each of the filters (besides sorting by sharing date, last edit and creation date).
Suggestions to the system are welcome. If it’s all right, I’d like to post results of my calculations.
Comment by ETHproductions 28th november 2012
Interesting idea, I'd want to see the results :) But I'm not sure about "20 points for each clone", cause it denies the fact that not every fontstruction allows users to clone, so your rating system will be like "if you allow to clone, it'll be a more high rated work".
Comment by kassymkulov 29th november 2012
@ architaraz: I appreciate your comment. I thought the same thing when I posted this. Getting rid of points for clones would reduce structurosa’s score significantly (by 340 points), but it will definitely make the system fairer. I have changed that now.
Comment by ETHproductions 30th november 2012
The unofficial results! :)

1. ariapenciroman kix 1131

2. Hommage á Escher Frodo7 964

3. Dioptical Em32 948

4. Bat Country loboarches 916

5. RMWL Uncialic p2pnut 666

6. Structurosa pauldhunt 647

7. Swifted Strokes badgerkins 644

8. Foldstruct emepar7 609

9. Badger Spine hollydennis 597

10. Broadway kix 584

If you interested in helping with this and you see a font that has more than 584 points, please feel free to notify me on this topic.
Comment by ETHproductions 13th december 2012
You should update the results on this every month or so, so we can keep up to date with FS pop culture and celebrities like kix and thalamic and p2pnut and architaraz and AFT and you. :)
Comment by Noah F. Ross (winty5) 4th april 2013
@winty5: :-)

I've updated the list as of this morning.

1.ariapenciroman kix 1186

2.Hommage á Escher Frodo7 1028

3.Dioptical Em42 988

4.Bat Country loboarches 954

5.Foldstruct emepar7 713

6.Swifted Strokes badgerkins 698

7.Badger Spine hollydennis 681

8.RMWL Uncialic p2pnut 677

9.Structurosa pauldhunt 677

10.Broadway kix 612

I also have created a 'What's New' list, using the same formula, with the addition of one new rule:
What's New page # * (-10) + 10

1.fs iie thalamic 176

2.Diagona architaraz 174

3.fs When We Were Young thalamic 162

4.fs handwritten ETHproductions 151

5.Clownstruct fugitiveglue 149

6.Siberiada Yautja 148

7.Usynbld MONO regular_one 147

8.Candyfloss four 143

9.Ketonggeng BangDje 139

10.zinabrium eYe/FS elmoyenique 139
Comment by ETHproductions 4th april 2013
Also, maybe you could have a Top 10 FS'ors.

This could judge people by:
•How many fonts they have created
•How many downloads they have
•Their avg. rating for all of their fonts
•How many comments the FS'or has said
•How many comments on the FS'or's fonts
•How many people have favorited their fonts
•How many TP's
•How many FF's
Comment by Noah F. Ross (winty5) 4th april 2013
and
•How many glyphs they have created
Comment by Noah F. Ross (winty5) 4th april 2013
wow...
Comment by kix 4th april 2013
@kix: I know right? XD
Comment by Noah F. Ross (winty5) 5th april 2013
@winty: Whoa, that would probably take waaaaay too long... And doing it for beate would be awfully hard.

@kix: Yep, your ariapenciroman is definitely one of the most successful fonts on FS. Congratulations!
Comment by ETHproductions 5th april 2013
Yeah, good point. Just a crazy, dumb, idea of mine.
Comment by Noah F. Ross (winty5) 6th april 2013
@winty: I actually think it's a very interesting concept. If time wasn't an issue, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Comment by ETHproductions 6th april 2013

I made a font that is really good and you have to try it out, the font name is Brynda1231.

Comment by brynda1231 6th august 2016

Eth, the idea is novel, involves a lot of work and time, and has been thought through rather well. I think that first-wave FSors score high due to exposition, a fan base, being known in FS and elsewhere, years of practice and personal/skill development. Looking at them I noticed that some early members must have stopped the DLs quite a while after publishing, clocking high popularity in the past they would now continue to show in the top of your league table; I also thought of the large number of members creating and discussing which at the moment is quite reduced so that scoring points would be very difficult for many newcomers. 

If your idea were in any way published as a general rather than a font-specific, then I think this could easily create an insurmountable gap for students working on a project, for talented font design newbes, for occasionalista FSors who might require some tips or want to refine a good design before feeling happy to share their font. They might work for days/weeks/months and improve but they would hardly see their fonts score high enough for a mention anytime soon. Waiting to arrive even in the top 100 published FSs might take a year; it is possible that such public summary of (lacking) points could turn people off FS and this fabulous expressive and www-accessible type of creativity. However, as an overview of a font this system ight increase individual desire to become more involved in FS and the forum.

I think that your idea involves more than a simple labour of love. I'd admire anybody sorting though thousands of fonts shown in the two 'live' presentations on the site even if access to a large variety of font stats or similar info is provided about all published fonts. Maybe doing something like that in a public access forum rather than for separate fonts every trimester or semester might give new FSers or the latest fonts an equal shot at this sort of peer appraisal and encouragement; might it make finding additional information faster? The scale of what you explained is gigantic , the idea has great possibilities but might require a large analytics team to work as you foresaw even if it is not site-wide.

I had a similar idea for my fonts but ignored creation date. I kept it simpler (??!): DLs -- constructive comments and general observations related to the design (ignoring the general comment count as something negative is not constructive) gave points -- favourites count -- TP count -- glyph count -- I used the date of publishing as a factor of change, but unfortunately I never chart when I reduce DL time to allow myself font modernising through improved skills or for extensive increase of the glyph count so I had no idea if 3 favs were in 1 or in 20 months of visibility. I did substract points for every trimester since font publishing which I noted because I thought it indicated the true popularity of a design based on any interest it had generated recently. I did this analysis every 4 months as I am not all that prolific; in my case I know that DLs, comments etc don't change much in a trimester. I have lost my list, but I remember that my deco-fun designs were more popular than deco-headliner designs and that both those display types combined seemed as popular as text fonts. I still make most of my fonts to share with FS even though the more important and comp fonts, the time consuming designs, and fonts I make for my personal circles or my other hobbies are not cloneable for at least 21 months.

Comment by Aeolien 7th august 2016

Interesting concept.

Just to point out that the more you get a vote the higher possibility you will get higher balanced rating, as balanced rating system counts the number of voters, CMIIW.

Imagine a font with two voters giving 10, it will get a balanced rating of 8.40. I think it suffers the font a lot since it needs many voters giving superb vote to higher its balanced rating.

My idea is to use average rating instead so that fonts with smaller recognition (in this case fewer voters) don't get "double downgrade" point for having few voters and little balanced rating (because of few voters), which give to fairer results (in my humble opinion)...

Comment by cablecomputer 8th august 2016

Wow, I had completely forgotten about this project of mine...

@Aeolien: I agree that this system is unfair in that it favors much older fontstructions. Maybe the algorithm could take the publishing date into consideration in some way, but I'm not sure how that would work. It may not even be possible to make it fair, because as you mentioned, the community hasn't been as active recently. Perhaps it would even be best to unpublish this, so that newer users don't get discouraged for the reasons you mentioned.

In the time since I published this nearly four years ago, I've gained a ton of experience in using HTML and JavaScript to create webpages and web-based apps. Maybe when I have some free time, I'll set up a system that automatically calculates the points of each fontstruction and posts the top ones on a webpage. This would greatly relieve me of updating the list manually, although I'd still have to put in quite a bit of effort to get an automatic system up and running....

I like your idea of only grading and comparing your own fonts. That would be a much more constructive system; you can compete against yourself instead of against the "giants" in the fontstructing world. The way my system is set up currently, it's kind of like comparing the marathon times of many people; some are going to be quite a bit slower than others, especially the ones who are just learning how to run long-distance. Many will give up and say "I'll never run as well as the pros!". But in a "personal best" system, each person is encouraged to improve upon themselves, leading to much more improvement than they would have accomplished otherwise.

@cablecomputer: Ah, yes, taking into account both the number of voters and the balanced rating seems a little redundant. Switching to average rating sounds like a great idea. I'll take that into account if I revive this in the future.

Thank you both for all of your input.

Comment by ETHproductions 14th september 2016

It's actually quite easy to run your original algorithm as a database query (on all public fontstructions). The current results are:

FS Ariapenciroman    1411.5246427511452
Hommage à Escher    1308.9987531707059
Badger Spine    1170.6263419220536
Bat Country    1152.438769113141
Dioptical    1129.081753385882
SwiftedStrokes    1026.5949947399904
RMWL Uncialic    868.016958976845
Foldstruct    863.1606605523766
Structurosa    782.4649076678752
en origami - pencil shaded    726.1597334388159

– so indeed a big bias in favour of the old “classics” there.

Comment by Rob Meek (meek) 15th september 2016

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