... Without transparency, it is a pretty useless system and should either be fixed or done away with.

I concur.

Jay

I agree and concur. I'm also of the same opinion.

Curt

I agree and concur. I'm also of the same opinion.

Curt

According to DDT there is no excuse for personal attacks. 1

1. see Lab thread

I know this is unlikely to happen, but there's a couple things I'd like to see changed with the post rating scheme because in its current incarnation it is rather nonfunctional and of dubious utility.

First off, my gripes with it:
1. While it allows ratings between 1 and 5, in practice it seems people only use 1 and 5 in a very binary fashion. As such there's no particular reason for there to be 2, 3 and 4.

2. Relatively few posts even get a single rating, let alone multiple ratings, so reporting a rating for an individual post is of dubious value due to the potential for abuse of the system. Case in point, I recently had a user 1 star a post of mine saying simply that the DMM Dragon Recall thread had been made sticky. Certainly not the sort of post that one would think merits a 1 star rating, but this user apparently has decided all of my posts deserve 1 star and has taken it upon himself to mark them as such.

3. Without reading through oodles of old posts there is no way to tell who consistently gives good information (which got high ratings) and who consistently gives bad information (which got low ratings).

What I'd like to see it changed to:

1. Go back to the Trophy / Poo model, since that's how the stars are being used anyway. While I find Trophy/Poo amusing, Thumbs Up/Down would work just as well.

2. Don't report averages for individual posts. Instead report the number of Trophies/Poos.

3. Allow drill-down into the ratings for a post to see who rated it, as well as the average rating for that user's posts. This would accomplish two things:

A. Help curb abuse of the system since it brings user visibility to who's doing what

B. Help separate out which ratings are serious from which are personal grudges by way of giving visibility to who gave what rating. (i.e. bad rating from someone who isn't highly thought of is one to ignore, bad rating from someone who is highly thought of is one to think about)


4. Report on every post that user's rating average and totals in with their join date, etc. Again, this would make it easy to distinguish sage advice from the seasoned climber who should be listened to from the more-balls-than-brains-egomaniac-n00b that thinks himself to be an expert.

5. Make the ratings multi-level (for lack of a better word...), by which I mean a rating from someone who's highly thought of (e.g. RGold, JimTitt, etc) should weigh more heavily than a rating from a troll account. Easiest way to accomplish this would be to incorporate the user's own average post rating when applying it to the post they're applying a rating to. I guess that would expand it to reporting the Trophies, the Poo and a Weighted Average, but that seems easy enough to do.


But as I said earlier, I realize that there's little chance of this happening so in lieu of the changes, can I just banz the user that's 1 starring me? That would make me just as happy.

Yeah, sorry about that. Kind of been on my mind a lot lately given that USn00b gives all of my posts 1 star and I can see my average slowly creeping down.

Any idea why that information isn't made available to regular users...? I don't recall if it was a conscious decision or that the Stars system simply never got fully implemented. I think that's the big part of where the Stars falls down... there's nothing that ties it back to the user.

Anyway, feel free to pass this along to the powers that be.

Oh, and this mean I can't banz USn00b for being an ass?

Actually that's not quite how it happened... he started 1-starring everything well before I began picking on him. And to be honest, I only started in on him after tiring of the harassing messages from him on FB, blocking him there and then having him continue it here over PM.

Dunno. From the looks of it he's getting them all and it goes back quite a ways, hence the concern above re: abuse of the system

Yup, that he did. Several times, in fact. My wife balances out some of them and other people catch some of the others, but a lot get left with the 1star. Quite annoying, as I'm sure you're aware given your own problems with this. What's even more annoying is that as a Mod I can see my average post rating, and have been watching it slowly creep downwards because of him being an ass.

Heh. Surprisingly high, given the number of 1stars I've seen you get. --> 3.3

I guess my concern is that if the intent was to make worthwhile content stand out the system is horribly, horribly broken. Good stuff is getting panned due to personal grudges, bad stuff getting rated highly because someone finds it funny... Seems to me that does more harm than good in terms of making good advice obvious to n00bs who happen to wander into the Beginners forum.

Anyway, I've got a wedding to get to....

Actually I've only gotten your posts up to Sept '09, so there's a couple hundred left to do. Don't know if I'll get to them though; the baby's feeling better so I'm no longer stuck on the computer with nothing better to do.

Do remember though, I only did that after being harassed by you on FB, then here on RC and you continued 1starring all my posts after being told to knock it off.

Oh, one other thing Xmesox.... This all won't work unless the ability to rate posts is a controllable user permission. Otherwise there's no way to keep people determined to abuse the system from doing so.

Well, isn't my point here that the system is open to abuse and needs to be fixed?

I also think that going back to a thumbs up/thumbs down (trophy/poo) system would be better. If anybody bothers to rate a post, they probably feel compelled one way or the other to do so. Who the hell rates a post three stars out of five anyway?

Curt