Originally Posted by cblaisd
Mary, with all respect, your statement about the purpose of thread ratings is simply one way looking at the matter. And it is certainly one that can be defended and argued for.
Among those variety of reasons could include (if you are rating a thread that I started):
-- You do or don't like me.
-- You find the information I post to be consistently unhelpful or helpful and you want to warn or commend re.
-- You don't think yet another thread on this topic is needed, or you do.
-- You don't -- or do -- like who has posted in the thread.
-- You just don't (or do) like the poster, the other posters in the thread, the topic, or the occasion.
Any of these can be legitimate uses of the ratings feature, imo.
I think we're going to have to disagree here
. It's "rate this thread" not rate the poster. I've seen it used on other boards and when I see it, to me it means that there's a lot of good stuff in that thread and the stars are bringing it to my attention. BTW - it is very infrequent that I see single stars on any thread on any boards. Most often the ratings are used to bring attention to very informative threads.
To have the feature abused by a few people on FT, as it was, makes the entire system worthless. How can a post about a birthday be a terrible thread? How can a post telling someone some tips about how to navigate a FF program (all 100% correct) be bad? It was the poster who was being rated, not the thread.
It was being abused, plain & simple by very few people who got together & hunted down the posts of certain people. They called attention to themselves when they started rating posts in forums in which no other threads had ever been rated.
I don't have any skin in this game either, but since I was moderately involved in discovering the abuse, I'm adding my two cents now.