SnowJapan

We will be keeping an eye on it skidaisuki. Seeing the IP addresses and the patterns of voting is truly revealing. Anything that seems 'wrong' we get alerted and can step in if we feel required. It's going to take more of our time each day, but that is probably the cost of this working. What would be great is if people who live near or at resorts made it a habit of taking a minute or two and voting for the resorts where they are every day. If lots of people do that, as well as people visiting, it will hopefully be very useful and interesting info.

Actually yes! Well one of them. We have prepared a few silly messages, depending on what has gone on. All to make it 'fun' for us.

Originally Posted By: Hokkaidough What if someone for example, just goes round voting for lots of resorts at the same timem, SJ? The system will notify us with a witty specially recorded audio message. I will call it Tenkibot. Tenkibot will help us smile about it all. I have just blocked the site from someone doing just that. They had gone in and voted "Blizzard" for 10 resorts, in different prefectures. Said data never had chance to go public.

Hopefully, though I doubt it will get rid of them all quickly. It may take a bit of time for them to realise that they are wasting their time! But anyway, we now have it covered so I'm feeling much better about it all. Took about 70 hours of work that lot.

Good news folks. We now have some rather snazzy new functionality that allows us to very easily and very quickly get rid of obviously rogue data on the weather voting parts of the site. This rogue data may be posted by mistake or by someone deliberately posting misleading information. Over the last few days, it seems that two people have been posting misleading info.... multiple times. Why someone would want to do that, I do not know. However, such people sadly exist. Anyway, my colleagues have developed something that gives us a lot of control and information: we can now

Not for long....

SnowJapan Daily Now! reports from Monday 19th October 2009: Click here to view the reports: http://www.snowjapan.com/e/daily/archivednow.php?caldate=2009-10-19 Please note: as the season approaches we will occasionally be updating some of the Now reports. Look for more over the coming weeks and months as the new season approaches. ----------------------------- Archive Reports NOW CALENDAR (search by date) Individual report pages (latest page with links to archived reports): Niseko Now (Niseko, Hokkaido) Furano Now (Furano, Hokkaido) Rusutsu Now (Rusut

We have made a few changes to the daily archiving report pages: http://www.snowjapan.com/e/daily/A_TO_Z_ResortVoteChart2.php?caldate=2009-10-17 These charts can be accessed from the Now Calendar page: http://www.snowjapan.com/e/daily/nowcalendar.php Further work is being done as explained to enable us to easily get rid of obvious rogue data. We hope to have that working in a few days time. Thanks.

For the weather vote thing? Because it would greatly reduce the potential number of votes. It would also over-complicate things on our main resort pages as well as no doubt confuse a lot of people. Like I said, we're on the case - will be sorted fairly soon.

SnowJapan Daily Now! reports from Friday 16th October 2009: Click here to view the reports: http://www.snowjapan.com/e/daily/archivednow.php?caldate=2009-10-16 Please note: as the season approaches we will occasionally be updating some of the Now reports. Look for more over the coming weeks and months as the new season approaches. ----------------------------- Archive Reports NOW CALENDAR (search by date) Individual report pages (latest page with links to archived reports): Niseko Now (Niseko, Hokkaido) Furano Now (Furano, Hokkaido) Hakuba Now (Hakuba

A few changes today: 1 The weather voting numbers are now being shown now consistently over all the pages - there were a few issues there which have been cleaned up. 2 Now this page gets updated every 15 minutes as per the other pages (it was previously updating instantly): http://www.snowjapan.com/e/daily/A_TO_Z_ResortVoteChart.php?caldate=2009-10-16 3 Some fine-tuning on the maps

Here's a feature on it http://www.snowjapan.com/e/features/features-boarding-fuji.html

Originally Posted By: BagOfCrisps Originally Posted By: klingon Go to the Niseko area map and put your mouse over the "i" (information mark) in the bottom right area. I noticed on the top right of http://www.snowjapanmaps.com there's the line "The land of snow" as well. Oops that was just put in there right at the beginning when we started making it. It has just not been changed. Perhaps we should change it....

Please click on the links specified in the first post of this thread as that is the new content. Thanks.

We initially thought about doing that and in fact began developing it - but decided that it would be way open to the abuse/misleading thing that was seen above re: Niseko's blizzards. Perhaps more open to abuse and a differing of opinion than just the simple current weather conditions. And the Now reports should every day report on such things. We do have the basic systems in place though so it is something we could reconsider and could relatively easily add..... Thanks.

Yes we will make one of those little thingies. In fact... does this work?

Haha yes. Good thing out of the above incidents though is that we realised that we need a better edit/admin for that than we had. About 3 days worth of work involved but in the long term it will be good to have. It's good to see so many 'proper' (I think) votes up there today anyway. The more the better of course. Quote: Will it be easier to deal with new listings on the maps now that the ground work is done? There were a lot of headaches on the way but from now on, it is all easy for us to change the maps yes. Thank you.

Originally Posted By: r45 I see you have got the detail more on the maps themselves this year - Hirafu was a bit too simple on the ones you had up before. Yes the maps have been reworked, especially the Niseko and Hakuba ones. We have tried to get them as detailed/correct as possible. Maps sure take up a lot of time and effort, I can tell you!

Good idea. We will try to get round to that soon. In the meantime, we have adjusted the main mobile page to only display prefectures that have resorts with the weather voting functionality turned on. Point your mobiles this way: http://www.snowjapan.com/i/weather.php As we add this functionality to more resorts, these lists will update automatically. If you want to post votes for a certain resort that currently does not have this turned on, please let us know. Thanks

We have deleted that data. Someone had voted 11 times for blizzard. Have to delete it manually for now, but once we get our systems in place it will be much easier. As I said, we'll get it sorted.... trust me, they will get tired of messing around way before we will even begin to get tired of working for the good of this website.

Haha yes. One of two of them have sent us nice messages thanking us for the extra exposure they will enjoy within the site and also on the new site (snowjapanmaps.com)....

Quote: [Had any hotels complain to you yet?] Yep!!

Let them have their 'fun' - we'll sort it out fairly soon. No worries. It's difficult to know what some peoples motivations are but each year we learn more and more not to let clowns like this get to you, just work away at doing what we can. We'll sort it out. In the long run, I'm sure they'll get tired of it.

Those 5 votes for Niseko all came from the same IP address, so I don't think they are by mistake. Give us a few days to get our systems in place - those obviously bad intentioned votes will get deleted.

OK we've had a talk about this. We are going to change the message on the chart to try and make it clearer to only vote if you are there. But that won't put off people who will be intentionally messing around and so we are going to implement a new system that allows us to easily pick off obviously rogue votes. It's going to take a number of days for us to make these latter adjustments. It is always sad to have to spend so much time and resources on features such as this but got to be done. Again thanks for the feedback folks, always good to hear comments and suggestions.