Thread Rating Feature
 

The thread rating feature seems like it would be particulary useful on a travel board such as FT. In fact, I think that you implied as much:

Did you bounce those members who were abusing the feature and, if so, can we bring back thread ratings?

I am against thread ratings... as with all societies (and yes FT is an electronic society), abuse will happen. It will become problematic and no doubt Randy P. will have to continually bounce abusive members.

Well, this wasn't meant to be a debate about the merits of thread ratings. Randy has already stated that "it can serve a purpose, hopefully a positive one." I'm just wondering when the function is coming back.

It is back. I just rated this thread.

I just can't seem to find where the results are displayed :D

You've no doubt seen a similar thread (now closed) in Suggestions. If you indeed did do some of the investigating that you mentioned regarding the abuse of the thread rating system, I wonder if you found any irony in the results?

I'll just repeat what I said there, which is essentially that given the amount of controversy and heat generated by the mere suggestion of bringing back thread ratings, it may be a mistake waiting to happen. I'm all for ratings in a community without it being misused as a tool to abuse. But I don't really care either way. :shrug:

Thread ratings were a nice addition to FlyerTalk but not critical to it -- sort of like the proverbial icing on the cake.

What makes me unhappy is that instead of getting rid of the abusers we got rid of the the feature they abused.

The same thing happened with "Reputation", and for a while with "Signature" and Omni.

Those who like to cause problems can use any feature -- including PMs, e-mail, and open posts to do so. We shouldn't be getting rid of any features because of it. We should, however, see the behinds of the abusers.

There was NO abuse. Only whining from people who measure their lives by an IBB.

Same thing with Reputation. The only people whining were people who rightfully received negative feedback.

Interesting. Randy took a look at the birthday threads which a group had gangbanged and found enough abuse to remove the feature.

You say there was no abuse with Reputation either -- so apparently you think it is fine and dandy to send negative marks and forge some other F/Ter's name to it. I tend to disagree with you.

Incidentally, but the time it was closed I had 220 points and you had 123 -- so please do not accuse me of "whining" becäuse I "rightfully received negative feedback."

Randy has historically taken the path of least resistance. It is my opinion that a very vocal minority shouted, cried, whined and blubbered loud and long enough that he just disabled the features.

Despite the efforts of a very vocal MINORITY to constantly repeat the same misinformation, there was no abuse of either the Reputation or Thread Rating systems. There was only whining from people who had thier feelings hurt by the truth.

As for the "infamous forged dings" episode. That horse has long since been poured into an Elmer's bottle. Randy handed down discipline. Case closed.

As long as you're bringing up the rep feature, the simple solution to that was for individuals to turn it off if they didn't like the way they perceive it was being used against them. But what really puzzles me is that it's been what, maybe 16-17 months since the rep feature was turned off and you still remember exactly how many points another member had? :confused:

w/r/t thread ratings...I really didn't care too much about it being available or not. As mentioned elsewhere, whether a thread is "informative" is pretty subjective. It might contain information that noobs find very helpful, but others might consider "been there done that"

I do not recall bouncing anyone for this, though it may have been possible. What i found out is that the energy, time and patience to follow every single thread rating was an impossible aspiration. It could not be accomplished just listening to a few "report post" type complaints but a through and fair review, of which i simply did not have the time then and possible not now. At the end of the day, i think i decided it wasn't worthy the goals of FT to try and satisfy the barrage of "you missed a thread markdown by XXXX" or the "i truly thought it was only a one star thread..." I think you all get the picture. Who knows, we may see it's revival one day, though i'd feel comfortable it being something that the TalkBoard decides on. As i recall, and i could be wrong, we simply went with the feature because it was a default in vBulletin when we moved from UBB. We didn't think or put into place any guidelines and as a result were unprepared for the actions of any member to use the feature for anything other than apparently what it was intended for in development from VBulletin.

We lived quite well without it in the early days of FT and it seems than we can live peacefully without it right now - except for the dialog about why it doesn't work on FT.

and while i can appreciate your comment about turning the feature on and off - we have an 'ignore user' feature than functions the very same way. Guess what - most of the antagonizers do not use the feature.

Thanks for the question and it's one that perhaps you might bring forth to the TalkBoard agenda forum.

Cheers,
Randy