Suggestion: Ability to rate a message

[neal007]

Instead of rating the entire thread, it would be nice to show kudos to an individual that put some time and effort into a post, (as well as vice-versa) by allowing us to rate each individual post. You could average this to calc a thread rating.

Just another idea, as I'm sure there aren't many running around! :)

[Kaizen]

Interesting idea.

If you cant wait to see it in the next version (if it is in there ); request a hack at vbulletin.org :)

[Goldfinger]

This is a very interesting idea that i would like see in the next verson :).

hmm i wonder if version 3 will include karma because that seems to be a widely requested hack.

[Ernie]

Great idea.

This could get rid of spamming and trolling posts from view if you could have a pop down menu to select something like "Only display posts with a rating above 2 stars etc."

Perhaps even a option to set in your user preferences so you never have to read unrated posts, then the spammers can go for it and as long as the rating stays low, I guess initally set by a moderator, you would only see the quality posts.

[MattR]

I hacked both of those into our site at FanHome and while it sounds like a good idea on paper I can say that community involvement for post ratings and the 'hide threads < X stars' has been lukewarm at best.

We've had 8848 total posts rated with 8144 of them being distinct -- so there is not a lot of overlap with particularly memorable posts being rated.

The 8848 post ratings were made by 1027 distinct users, so it seems like there are a lot of users who are making many post ratings.

Thread ratings have had more involvement, with 3082 distinct users rating 12705 distinct threads (out of a total of 16172 votes cast).

The number of users who are utilizing thread 'threashold' are as follows:
0 means 'show all threads' and is the default if I recall correctly.

stars #of users %
0 13788 46.60%
1 15582 52.67%
2 68 00.23%
3 62 00.20%
4 14 00.00%
5 29 00.00%


Numbers taken out of 29583 members.

So if I had to do it again I wouldn't bother taking the time to write the code to accomplish post ratings and the thread threashold stuff (perhaps, but the number of threads which receive less than 2 stars isn't that much).

There is a discrete cost with developing new features -- Jelsoft needs to weigh the cost of developing a new feature with the potential benefit the new feature would have. I'm not saying to Jelsoft to take my word for it, but I just thought it would be useful to have some emperical data for the use of such a feature.

[Ernie]

I have just done some reasearch, and the way they solved that on slashdot.org is the appoint rating teams like moderators that get a certain finite number of rating points to dish out before it's someone elses turn. Also a default rating is assigned to a post based on who created it and what there karma level was. Newbies get a low default rating. Experieced posters with good karma get a higher default rating to a new post. That way none go with out a rating.