Yeah, that's why we make sure we have judge voting for the main prizes.

Community voting can do a great job, but if the number of ratings is low, or people try to do rate for rate voting, the results can be very skewed. 😅

No I think it's for how active someone here is, how many ratings he gave and how much comments he post those things.

We aren't going through the game pages to check each game, but I've been deleting posts here in the community tab that explicitly asks people to swap ratings, along with spam. (And checking whenever a game/post here are reported by other users.)

Tracking and moderating this sort of thing is unfortunately fairly tricky, since it would be hard to separate people who don't play the games at all from the people who are playing the games, but only very briefly and giving a score based on only a few minutes of gameplay. (That's not ideal either, but everyone is going to spend a different amount of time rating/playing each game.)

This isn't the exact same type of rate-for-rate that I'm asking people to avoid here in the community tab though, because this is (I'm assuming) at least asking people to play their game, and so if they follow that suggestions, the person who's spamming will still have to have a good game in order to get a higher rank because of it. (Total number of votes doesn't really say anything about what scores people have been giving their game.)

The type of rate-for-rate that I think really ruins jams is the kind where two people agree to rate each others games, because one or both people may give scores without ever playing the game, and if several people do that together, they can all end up with scores that don't reflect their game in any way.