   Negative Rating explanations.
  ...[Edited by - Lohrno on December 3, 2004 10:36:05 AM]
  This is the umpteenth time this suggestion has been made. The arguments against it that I find most compelling:* It puts additional burden on the moderators, who must moderate those comments.* In situations where several people rate you down, it's pretty easy to see why they have (usually at least one of them will also flame you in the thread)* It puts too much emphasis on individual ratings. Look, even Dave can't affect someone's rating by more than 40 points or so. If you're going to live or die based on every dinky 8-point rating someone gives you, you're not going to be concentrating on helping people out and being helped out. Sit back, relax, and be helpful and kind, and your rating will be high before you even know it.   ;Quote:Original post by Sneftel* In situations where several people rate you down, it's pretty easy to see why they have (usually at least one of them will also flame you in the thread)* It puts too much emphasis on individual ratings. Look, even Dave can't affect someone's rating by more than 40 points or so. If you're going to live or die based on every dinky 8-point rating someone gives you, you're not going to be concentrating on helping people out and being helped out. Sit back, relax, and be helpful and kind, and your rating will be high before you even know it.Fair enough...Again, I'm not stressing what happened to me, just curious. Rate me down if you think I'm being bitchy though. =DI know it would be a bit more work, but you could make a self-moderating system where the mods only have to mod reported ones.  But that could get annoying I suppose.  Like be able to report if someone is really cursing you out anonymously or something, but otherwise mods don't read them.  The only thing the mods would need to do would be set warnings if the comments are truly crude/breaking some laws.  Otherwise anything flies.The fact that it is suggested a lot suggests it's a wanted feature though. =D  At least I think it would be cool.-=Lohrno   ;  What about if there was a checkbox system where you could set various checkboxes like "Frequent flamer", "Rude responses", "Generally unhelpful", "Very helpful", "Fast replies", etc., where each check box would rate them up/down by a scaled amount, then you could select as many checkboxes as you want, and the actual rating would be calculated from those. Then, the user can see which checkboxes have been selected by the other users, possibly in some sort of graph...   ;  Whats the general opinion on a system like that used by vBulletin? i.e. Link to the the thread the rating comes from, no rating from user profiles (so the rating must have a known reason) and an optional comment box that can be used for either good or bad ratings. Mods don't need to examione each and every one, but blatently offensive comments can be reported for approporiate action.Personally, while I'm not a big fan of rep or points systems (though clearly they have their uses), this approach strikes me as one of the better ones...   ;  I also suggested that the ratings, both good and bad, should be linked to the post that generated them, so you can at least have an idea why you were rated.For example, if a bad rating comes from a post such as: "OMFG u r a relly stup1d n00b go die!11!!1", then perhaps you desrved it.However, if a bad rating comes from a polite, or even helpful post, then you can at least know that you've been rated unfairly.   ;Quote:Original post by Sr_GuapoWhat about if there was a checkbox system where you could set various checkboxes like "Frequent flamer", "Rude responses", "Generally unhelpful", "Very helpful", "Fast replies", etc., where each check box would rate them up/down by a scaled amount, then you could select as many checkboxes as you want, and the actual rating would be calculated from those. Then, the user can see which checkboxes have been selected by the other users, possibly in some sort of graph...I like this idea, but radio buttons are better than checkboxes because it's simpler and faster. The "[somewhat|very|extremely] helpful" radio buttons can remain, but the other two can be replaced with more descriptive things like "rude" (slightly negative), "flamer" (very negative), etc. And that person could see which options were picked by people (somewhat helpful: 12; rude: 3; flamer: 1, for example).   ;  It wouldn't really work, how can you explain, with radio buttons, why you rated someone down because that person believes in creationism? :)Just link the rating to the post that caused it, should solve the problem.   