Why voting app version instead of app

[FinixFighter]

Hi! I was wondering why in the AppDB you can vote for an application version and not for the application itself. I think that the active method is not very good because I saw apps with a lot of versions which seem not too much voted because they have votes in every versions (so they result low in ranking, because not every person votes for the same version, or a person voted many years ago and didn't change the vote to the newer version) and applications with one or two versions that are upper in ranking, although the sum of the votes from different version is lower.
What do you think?

[jhansonxi]

There's no industry standard as to what "version" means. The test submission guide covers this a bit. In addition to major/minor versions there's also CD/DVD, GOG.com, and Steam versions of the same app which often have different bugs (copy protection, Steam integration) even though most of the code is the same. So this turns into a debate over how significant is a "version" needs to be to justify its own voting score. I don't think there is a mechanism to restrict voting to app-only or app version-only on a per-app basis so the AppDB just does version voting which covers everything.

A more significant problem I think is that votes don't expire so many of the top-voted apps have very few test reports submitted, probably because they're not being used anymore and the voters never removed their old votes. I covered this in a presentation at WineConf 2019 and my slides are available in the program listing. Main problem is a lack of dev resources for updating the AppDB.

[FinixFighter]

Thanks for the answer!