I emplore all members to read this quick Minti article on Code of Honor and the rights of members regarding voting.

I reiterate and will keep reiterating the following....

1. You can only vote ONCE on a particular article when logged out. We know that the person voting is not logged in to an account, so this once off vote (you can change your vote as many times as you like, but it still only counts as ONE vote) counts for very little. So to ask someone to vote whilst logged out is of little effect. We will also track how many votes are made from one computer whilst logged out.

2. We do NOT allow bulk voting and we are warning any members flagged for voting sprees. What are voting sprees? See this article on Voting Sprees.

3. Fair voting: if you vote honestly the system will reward you with weighted rankings, all this means is if you play fair and vote according to your beliefs you can't go wrong. Members also have to accept that not everyone can have five stars, and if you feel bad that you have received one vote marking you down, over time you can either edit and improve the article or accept that not all your articles can have FIVE STARS.

4. You can change your voting on any article, as many times as you like. It will still only count for ONE VOTE (your last vote you made).

5. You can try and ask others members to vote in a certain way, but I would hope you get reported for "Voting Coercion". This would make it very easy for you to get voted off.

6. Visitors don't often arrive at your articles via your member pages. More often than not they arrive at your content by searching in Google for a particular term. So members should not focus on ratings as much as making sure that they have tagged their article correctly, added lots of related Minti articles and bookmarks and an article that is well received by the Minti community. Visitors don't compare ratings of members, but they see the ratings and feel better to read this information than other search results that haven't been rated.

In another words ratings of an article help the article stand out from other parenting links in search results. What members should be obsessing over visits from all over the web, rather than voting is the following...(HINT: that is the real rating, the number of worldwide visits, that is true popularity)...thousands and thousands of visits, versus a handful of votes - votes only provide confidence building to the reader, visits is what the member should be tracking, to get the most readers!!!!!!

- Title contains the right keywords of the theme of the article, this optimizes the article for the most visibility on Google.
- Google loves articles tagged with relevant terms.
- Learn what are the most searched terms. Clay has a list, if your articles can use these search terms (must be related, as google can tell if its not) update your articles with the new titles and keywords.
- Google loves related articles and external bookmarks to the article.
- Google loves comments to articles.
- Google loves articles that have healthy informative content with an image.

Focus on visits and improving the "quality" of your article, then you can't lose in regards to voting and MORE importantly VISITS. Also take into account that if you have improved your articles, your older articles may have more visits, or the theme is more popular. But each individual article can be optimized to received the best amount of visits, given the genre and topic.

So stay true and focus on giving back to your world wide community of parents, looking for easy to access, community supported parenting advice and provide QUALITY information and ADVICE to parents who desperately need to find it and find it fast.