How We Rate
Our review system is pretty obvious. We drink the vodka and give an honest opinion. The rating system, however, is a bit different. When people ask me about a vodka I'm drinking, I usually compare it to other vodkas. That is, I'll say it's better than some commonly known vodka and worse than some other commonly known vodka.
I decided a similar rating system would be good for VodkaBuzz. On the back end, I assign each vodka a quality rating and "bang for the buck" rating between 0 and 4294967295. When the rating is shown on the front end, it is averaged between 0% and 100% by subtracting the lowest rating from the rating and the highest rating, dividing the rating value by the maximum value, multiplying by 100 and rounding to the nearest whole number. In more mathematical-looking terms, that is:
round((rating-lowest_rating)/(highest_rating-lowest_rating)*100)
So, the lowest rated vodka is always zero and the highest is always 100. In the beginning stages of the site, there will be a lot of good vodkas with zero ratings. That doesn't mean the vodka is bad. It just means the vodka is the least good.
The quality rating is fairly obvious. If a vodka is better than another vodka, I rate it higher. If a vodka is worse than another vodka, I rate it lower. The "bang for the buck" rating takes into account price, quality, alcohol content, and some other factors. A good vodka that is fairly cheap may have a lower "bang for the buck" rating than a lower quality vodka that has a higher alcohol content for the same price.
I've also created some measures to determine the relative price of the vodka against other vodkas that have been reviewed. This is calculated in a similar method to the ratings, but is based purely on the price of the vodka.
That is how we rate vodka at VodkaBuzz.