Should we hide ratings?

cstanton  I will leave stars mostly for projects. The problem is that with most of my blogs (a lot) I get likes, some comments but almost never a star. -- REMOVE THEM.

~~Cris

It's been agreed that this will be acted on. At the moment the development team are working on migrating to the new platform.

I'm guilty of rarely providing a rating and equally rarely of posting a like. My preference is to use my voice to express my level of engagement.

I use the services of a book service that requires you to rate a book before it will store my selection in the read library. I find it frustrating at times because I know I don't consistently use the same formula to apply the 1 to 5 rating. I just want them to keep track of books I have read. I've never concerned myself with the rating and I'm even sure how the site uses the rating scale.

As for going forward, I made a choice from the poll options that reflects my lack of participation. Because I don't use it doesn't mean it hasn't provided benefits to others. I do believe it should have some limits on the results distribution.

Awesome question!  Many of the core concerns have already been addressed, so I won't repeat them.  We already do something similar to the "Thumbs up" in that content is typically rated in the three to five star range.  One and two stars are very rare because we're just not motivated to rate the content or be that aggressively critical.

I recommend leaving it as it is because every system will have its faults.  If we just did a "thumbs up", there would be a numeric threshold that might be even more painful than a 4-star rating.  How many "Likes" is enough?  I do think we need a way to acknowledge that we like or appreciate something.  It makes the forums more personal.  Personally... I want emojis. <thumbs up>

I dont see alot of people giving a star rating feedback.

I tend to overlook leaving a star rating myself, usually leaving a comment.

If I were to get a poor star rating, it has no credibility, I'd dismiss it as someone having a bad day. 

I do appreciate if constructive criticism is provided, but really don't even check the stars rating.

Could leave it alone, or just make it go away, same difference in my humble opinion.

On Jive, when you do rate, it does then suggest 'do you want to leave a review?' which then associates the rating with the comment that's made, and as an admin at least I can then see the rating associated with the comment on the top right of the comment. Not many people use that functionality, or it wasn't obvious at least that this's how it would behave. I can see the pro's to a 'here's a rating, and that's an overview of the comment you're about to read'.

This forum benefits from being multifaceted. There are many aspects of the forum that only appeal to or get traction with a subset of members.

All the tracking information is used differently by different members, so it is not accurate to assume that the count of Helpfuls means the same as if everyone used the same criteria for clicking on it. (Likes, Helpfuls, comments and star rating, etc are all exercised with different criteria by different members) Members may or may not find meaning in the numbers, and if they do, it may not be the same meaning, but it all adds to the richness of the forum.

If the forum only catered to aspects that every member liked, it would probably appeal less to everyone, and it might have no aspects left at all. Caution should be exercised when contemplating a reduction in scope and features of the forum.

I have seen star ratings on other sites that automatically ask for a reason why a particular star rating was awarded as soon as you click on a rating.

I am aware of the arguments regarding the star feature and I am still not a big fan of losing the feature.  I have to say that the attention it has drawn has encouraged me use it more than I did before.

I don’t find them useful and try to ignore them.

The star ratings on most posts are statistically insignificant. For example, my last roadtest received only three ratings which is too few to accurately represent the overall membership and is skewed towards what I suspect is the small subset who consistently rate.

I mostly get 4 stars but have received three.   Why did it get a 3 and what could I do to improve it?  Did everyone, even those not rating, think it a three? What is the rating criteria?  Was the topic not useful to the person rating, or was my prose poor?  Did it have technical errors?  Does anyone ever get a five? 

The comments with encouragement and suggesting improvements on the other hand are great.

At present the rating system does not seem to have any accountable purpose. I used to be rated on a similar system at work, (1 to 5 in numbers rather than stars, but it is essentially the same). If you were rated less than about 3.0 to 3.5 then you had to put forward an action plan on how you would improve (although to be honest I never saw anybody monitoring the action plans so to some extent it seemed a bit pointless). Whilst it had some value it was dependent more on how the 'raters' liked you rather than just capability, plus the 'raters' were constantly changing  and there was little training in how to use the rating system. I cannot say that I cared for the whole system as it detracted (in my opinion) on doing the job as you were distracted by ensuring you obtained good ratings (i.e. by being 'nice and helpful'). Managers liked it because it produced a number rather than airy fairy opinions and allowed easy comparisons between workers.

I contribute to Element14 because it is fun and I enjoy it. If it stops being fun I'll probably stop logging on. There's always the garden, although that is approaching completion, plus cups of tea. Hopefully, there will always be cups of tea - and biscuits of course. I quite like chocolate as well. And dinner.

Dubbie

That wouldn't be a problem.