The new Top.gg voting system

The new-old owner and developer, Veld, of the Discord bot list, Top.gg , started a poll on the Top.gg community server on the 14th of February. In the poll he asked if bot developers preferred the current monthly voting system or a new 'last 31 days' voting system.


Open the message in Discord

Understanding the current system

Currently, when a bot gains votes, they are reset on the 1st of every month. Let's say Wamellow , a Discord bot, gets 100 votes every day. This would result in 3,100 votes in a 31 day month like January.

So at the end of the 31st of January, Wamellow would have 3,100 votes. On the first of February, the votes would be reset to 0 (zero). This happens for every bot at roughly the same time.

The problem with this system is that it severely affects and breaks the search order.

Since bots are sorted by how many votes they have from the current month (more votes = higher ranking), sorting breaks when every bot is at 0 (zero). In addition, the search indexing/sorting mechanism takes a few hours or even days to display the correct order. This means that a bot with 1,000 votes could be ranked higher than a bot with 1,100 votes, but the second bot just got a bunch of votes to overtake the first bot.

While Veld says that the new and improved Top.gg (a rewrite of the website) should address this issue somewhat, resetting votes for everyone at the same time puts a lot of strain on the sorting process.

The new improved system

With the new 'last 31 days' system, votes would no longer reset on the 1st of the month. Instead, it would show the amount of votes a bot has received in the last 31 days, hence the name.

This means that if Wamellow gets 100 votes every day, Wamellow would always have 3,100 votes, no matter what day of the month it is.

This not only improves the search sorting, but also makes the votes much more meaningful, even if they are at the end of a given month. Personally, I've often felt that voting on, say, the 29th, 31st, 32nd of a month is pretty useless, as the votes would reset on the 1st of the next month anyway, and the search indexing wouldn't rank my bot any better, as it also takes time to re-sort bots when one overtakes another. It would also make it easier to compare bots in terms of voting activity, as it's consistent throughout the month.

Criticism of the proposed system

There were three options to choose from:

• "I prefer resets (lose all votes every month)" [65 votes].
• "I prefer persistent scores (show last 31 days of voting)" [535 votes]
• "Indifferent, either way is fine for me" [116 votes].
  
  

Open the message in Discord

While the vast majority of users are in favour of the proposed system, some have expressed concerns.

Catching up

Currently, if a bot is approved on, say, the 15th of a given month, you have to wait another 15 days until the next vote reset in order to catch up and properly compete with other bots, as the new bot has lost 15 days of voting.

With the proposed system, this window would always be 31 days. However, this would be consistent for everyone, as it wouldn't matter if the bot was approved on the 1st, 15th or 31st of a month.

While I personally understand that this can be frustrating, all new bots would have to deal with this in the same way. It also makes the new votes in the first month much more valuable, as they won't be lost in the next few days until the next month starts, but for the next full 31 days.

Harder for smaller bots

Many people have expressed concern that this change will make it harder for smaller bots to grow, as big bots would be consistently ranked high.

I couldn't disagree more, as your own bot would also consistently rank higher, and the proportional difference would remain the same.

If a big bot has, say, 100 votes on the 2nd of a month, and your small bot has 10 votes, this means that the big bot has 10 times more votes. If on the 25th of a month the big bot has 1,250 votes and your bot has 125 votes, this is still a 10x difference. Although the number of votes is much further apart, the ratio is still the same.

In addition, there is a "Trending new bots" section on the front page, where newly approved bots land, significantly increasing a bot's visibility. In fact, a bot known as Thunder (emoji manager) abused this a few years ago because the impact was so great, although the bot was banned from Top.gg.

Suggestions

Some users have also suggested a new "Trending" section, which would still show the bots with the highest monthly votes. I suggested adding a sorting option (like top votes, most servers, most invites) to also support the most votes of the current month, with the option to use the old system again.

Finally

Finally, as the developer of Wamellow , a small, semi-open-source Discord bot, I am very much in favour of the new voting system and think it will greatly improve the visibility of my bot and other smaller ones.