Star ratings

[Majorjim!]

Hi all,

Lately there has been a rash of peoples craft being voted 1 star when they clearly deserve more. What irks me is that they never give a reason for this low rating.

This gives other people a skewed view of the quality of peoples craft.

I propose a system whereby you cannot give a rating without giving a reason for that rating in the thread. Is this possible and practical?

[zekes]

Hi all,

Lately there has been a rash of peoples craft being voted 1 star when they clearly deserve more. What irks me is that they never give a reason for this low rating.

This gives other people a skewed view of the quality of peoples craft.

I propose a system whereby you cannot give a rating without giving a reason for that rating in the thread. Is this possible and practical?

Oh i know! Someone gave my shuttle 3 stars and it upset me - I put so much work into that thing, and it's literally 5 times larger than any other shuttle in KSP, bigger even than the modded ones. What gives?

[Majorjim!]

LOL, that went down like a lead balloon.

Guess the tyranny of trolls continues..

[VR_Dev]

What gives?

Jealousy & trolls

[worir4]

I agree with this!

(Notice how i added 5 star rating)

[Red Iron Crown]

I have come to ignore the thread ratings, they are essentially meaningless. It's too bad, they could be used to indicate which suggestions or mods are popular but instead are given more for the reasons clown_baby mentions.

[Ikaneko]

I agree, I generally look straight past them.

In fact, I didn't nice them until someone complained about this.

[Majorjim!]

I agree with this!

(Notice how i added 5 star rating)

lol thanks man. Ok, interesting to hear people say they ignore it.

[vexx32]

As far as I've seen, the general consensus amongst a lot of the community is that they ignore it entirely. It's too easy to bring a thread rating down, in truth, and the system doesn't work that well. :/

[One-Way Films]

Wait. There are star ratings on the forums? I never noticed them...

[vexx32]

Yeah, each thread has a star-rating. It's not used very often, as far as I'm aware...

[Starwhip]

I've never even used that darn thing. Just noticed how one does it right now.

Hmm. I always assumed that it was the moderators who did it...

[vexx32]

No, we don't bother. If we like a thread that much, we usually decide amongst ourselves to sticky it or something like that. It's pretty rare that we go to that much effort, though. We have enough things to do.

[sal_vager]

Sometimes I'll click on the stars if I remember, but they usually go forgotten :/

[Specialist290]

Personally, I tend to find giving rep to the poster to be a tad more meaningful myself, since I think the star ratings are anonymous.

[ScriptKitt3h]

I wonder if that's why some of my last full craft releases I posted to the Spacecraft Exchange never really got any large-scale attention...

Oh well, regardless: It's just scummy to try and shoot down someone else's posts for the sake of trolling or petty jealousy.

[Norpo]

Eh, I hardly ever use the star ratings (if at all), since nobody seems to use them.

If more people started to use them, then maybe more people would follow, then again, trying to get humans to decide on a standard is like trying to herd cats. If you're a sociologist/other expert on the subject. If you're not an expert, then it's like trying to herd cats that happen to be in various sunbeams and want nothing to do with you at that moment. see: incredibly difficult

I can see it now, motivational posters encouraging people to use star ratings! "Vote that thread five stars! It needs it!"

Then again, that may be overkill and not an important issue at all.

I just stick to rep, most people seem to use that, and I can at least provide a message saying WHY I liked a post, as opposed to "I liked this post". But there's a problem with rep, Nobody else can see it. You can see rep for a person, but not for a post. That's where star ratings would come in, if people used them.

I find that if you like something, you should say WHY you like it. Otherwise it's just saying "I liked this post", and that doesn't help at all, did you like the formatting? the humour? the 10 by 50 spreadsheet on data for kerbal impact tolerances? You can do this with rep, but not star ratings.

Of course, the same logic should be applied for disliking a post.

Star ratings ARE helpful for finding out the overall consensus about a thread at a glance though, but when nobody uses them, there IS no "consensus" to speak of, making the star ratings useless. It's like reading a review that has 2 reviews, one 5 star, and one 1 star. You'd see "3 stars average", but that doesn't really sum up the whole story, now does it?

-my two funds and hopefully not too long. tl;dr: star ratings are useless because nobody uses them, if people used them, then they'd be incredibly useful

Edited December 9, 2014 by Norpo
added extra point

[John FX]

That would be good, to see the rep a post has generated. I reckon if more people used the star system then the actions of the `lone star trolls` as I like to call them would be reduced.

What would be good is a little bar showing how many of each score the thread had received, like the ratings on the google play store. Then you can see if a lot or a few people think that the thread is good or bad or average.

If one person clicks one star and one 5 stars then we just see three stars.

If a hundred people click three stars we just see three stars.

This would suggest the first thread is very good but had a troll and the second thread was actually mediocre but there is no way to tell them apart.

Even just showing the number of votes would help.