Frequently Asked Questions

What’s #moot?

#moot is a hashtag for Marks Out Of Ten, a simple way of scoring just about anything, using a tweet. It’s a ‘crowd scoring’ mechanism - anyone can add marks (out of ten) for anything with just a tweet. There’s a bit more on this on our ‘What Is #moot?’ page.

Why?

All the other rating systems seem too complicated. You have to create an account or maybe give them access to your Twitter account. This way you just tweet a score and it appears here.

How does it work?

The ‘#moot’ server searches Twitter regularly for tweets with the hashtag ‘#moot’. It checks to see if there’s a score in the tweet, and if there is it adds it to our scoring database.

So how are tweets scored?

A simple average of scores is taken. Every tweet that matches the search terms has its score added to the total, and the total is then divided by the number of matching tweets.

Every matching tweet?

Umm, no. At most one tweet from a given tweeter is used for a given search. This is so you can’t endlessly tweet marks out of ten for your favourite search term to skew the results unfairly.

How can I change my score if I change my mind?

Remember at most one tweet from a given tweeter is used? Well, it’s always the latest one. If you change your mind, just send another tweet with the same terms or text, plus your updated score, and it’ll make it’s way into the database.

Does the score have to be an integer?

Yes. Keep it simple.

Do retweets count?

Yes! (At least, that's the current functionality. Should they count?)

What about @replies?

Yes, them too!

What if I don't want to pollute the stream my followers are reading?

I hear you! The tweets have to be public (otherwise the server won’t see them), but to keep your regular stream clean you can send them as an @reply to @HashmootTidy - only people who follow both you and the person you’re @replying to will see the tweet, and no-one follows @HashmootTidy. (Please don’t follow @HashmootTidy...)

What if I have a protected account?

Sorry. All the tweets have to be public for our server to see them, so I’m afraid there’s not much point you sending scoring tweets. You can still use the web site to search for scores though.

What if I want to delete a tweet?

That's tricky. There's no automatic way for our server to pick up you deleting a tweet from Twitter itself, so if you delete it on Twitter and you want it deleted from our server too, you’ll need to let us know. The best way to do it is to send us the ID of the tweet you sent that you now want deleted. (If you tell us the ID of a tweet that's different from your sending account, we'll just ignore you for security reasons. If you send us the ID of a tweet that's not deleted from Twitter, we'll just ignore you.)

Deleting tweets seems to be a rare thing, and there's little need to delete a tweet from #moot just to change a score - just resubmit the same text with a different score. This is a painful manual process for us as well as for you, but if it turns out to be a frequent problem we'll maybe revisit it and try to come up with a better solution.