Tom--
Two thoughts:
1. To some degree, the reader of ratings who may be contemplating player the course (as opposed to the rater who participated in the rating) is most likely looking to find evaluations based on th course's "current" condition (he obviously she understand that weather and course conditions can change very rapidly)
2. What would you think about a firm, time limit on number of years since last played (irrespective of how many times the rater played the course prior to his last round there)? Could be 5 years or 10 years of whatever but shouldn't be too long (which would make it meaningless) or too short (which would make it very difficult to have enough ratings for "statistical significance".
Best
Paul
Paul:
I don't really care about rankings any more so I'm not going to try and make the rules for them.
You can make a case for cutting out any votes that are more than ten or fifteen or twenty years old. [Five years would never work IMO]
There are many fine courses that I haven't seen in more than twenty years. Some would say my thoughts on those should be ignored. But are the things I wrote in The Confidential Guide about Sunningdale and Swinley Forest and Rye [or Manufacturers and Huntingdon Valley and Rolling Green] irrelevant today? I don't think they are. It's possible one or two of them have been improved more than the others . . . but really none of them have changed that much apart from bunker face-lifts . . . they haven't changed the routing or the greens [much].