How about user voting?

[YellowBook]

It's really interesting seeing all of the albums on this site but it would be nice to be able to vote on your own favourites and have these stats reported/ranked in some way.

[albummaster]

This is something we're currently thinking of adding.

For ratings, users 'grade' each album similar to Amazon's 'five star' rating system and other sites. On this kind of site when we are talking about the best albums in history, I'm not sure this really fits the theme. Also, grading is not what this site's about and I'd prefer to do some kind of ranking system instead.

So, how best to implement a ranking system. Options seem to fall into two camps:

1. Users pick their top 5/10/20 albums (not sure how many would be best and I'm not sure that everyone could think of 10 albums and rank them properly while other people could quite easily think of 50 albums.) From these user rankings we then compile aggregate rankings, statistical themes etc.

2. From the listings on the site, users vote 'yes/no' 'like/don't like' etc against the albums. This gets around the problem with [1] but for users is less flexible but if we trust that approx 80-90% of the best albums already exist in the database this might not be such a big problem. Statistics would be generated from the most popular albums.

From a functional point of view option [1] is more appealing but a lot more complex to implement than [2]. We're currently thinking of how this might work in practice. If anyone has any thoughts, do let us know!