Could the thread rating system built into vBulletin be turned back on? The thread ratings are useful for people to express their opinions on what are worthy contributions to miles, points, and travel.

If the "minimum number of votes before rating is displayed" setting is increased to, say, 5 or 10, then any single person's vote is diluted by others.

Thanks,
FewMiles..

But we still have the (to my knowledge) unresolved problem which led to its being turned off in the first place, that of people voting down Happy Birthday threads and other such greeting/happy threads based upon nothing more than whether the person being greeted is popular or not. Unless that problem has been resolved, my $0.02 is that it would be a very big mistake to turn it back on, given the bad blood which has existed for a long time between active members here. If Randy fixed that problem, then I suppose it's worth another try. If not, then leave it off.

I am not sure I "get" all the drama over thread ratings.

If I start a thread (or even -- horrors! -- a birthday thread is started about me) and anyone wants to rate it poorly -- either because you don't like me, or don't like the subject matter, or don't like who's posted in the thread, or who hasn't posted in the thread, or that it was in the wrong forum, or that it was in the right forum but you wish it weren't, or that a similar thread you liked got a high rating and you don't want the new thread to get a high rating, or you don't like the moderators, or you do like the moderators, or you do like some of the moderators but not the particular moderators who
happened to have posted in the thread, or you wish it weren't raining, or you wish it were raining, etc., etc., ad nauseum -- be my guest.

To put the point another way, without some absolutely clear and unambiguous statement by Randy about the criteria by which threads are to be rated, all such ratings have are entertainment value. And even with such criteria, who's gonna enforce?

All this goes to say is that thread ratings have no meaning except to those who choose to put too much meaning into them, imo.

Good point. For those who wish to do further research, search ORP for "thread rating" - my search comes up with 14 amusing (in hindsight) such threads re: thread ratings and reputation points.

Yes.

And I see that my thoughts had been anticipated in this excellent post:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showp...8&postcount=92

What about restricting rating ability to "Premium" (ad-free) FT subscribers, and also with a minimum post count (e.g. 500). More of an audit trail would be created, thus allowing investigation if necessary.

Also, reactivating user voting could be useful - but even on a personal basis (i.e. the rating each person sees for someone would solely be the rating that they alone have given the person) - i.e. I may like to rate a particular user highly (or low) for future reference if I encounter another of their posts. E.g. someone is rude or unhelpful enough for me to want to note it, and then needs some information the next month which might take 10 minutes to find, I'd know not to bother.

Certainly possible in the admin options in vBulletin.

I still fail to see how an audit trail or investigation of who gave what rating and for which threads is of any use to anyone. The fact remains is that each user can only give one vote to any thread rating. Those decrying "abuse" are probably taking things a little too seriously or personally. People voting 1 star out of 5 on a thread could be doing it for any number of reasons, as one of the posters pointed out above.

I don't think this one is technically possible in vBulletin. By the way, you're talking about the "user reputation" feature which is a separate function and could be the topic of a separate thread.

FewMiles..

No, they are not taking things too seriously. If a group of people uses the thread rating to vote down a "happy birthday" thread, it is not a good thing for the community, but divisive behavior (kind of in the same spirit as running an external website to mock other Flyertalkers).

It doesn't take an audit trail or investigation to see who abused the thread rating feature. Since you give advice on vbulletin, you surely know that the software allows to see who gave which thread what rating.

As a sidenote, in a purely hypothetical situation, if someone libels or harasses someone else, how would the victim of that feel if the perpetrator told him "why do you take things so seriously"?

The thread rating feature has some potential for abuse, which in the past unfortunately has been realized, so that some people have spoiled an otherwise useful feature for others.

I agree with this. Like anything else I see on FT, I can form my own opinion about it. Just because something has 1 star doesn't mean it will be of no interest to me, in the same way tha 5 stars doesn't guarantee that it will interest me, or I will agree with it. Perhaps the visibility of thread-ratings could be a profile option, so that those who could be upset by it can switch it off and never see it?

Shame. (The reason I mentioned it was that it too could be tied in to Premium users).

The ability to use the reputation system can be tied to usergroup (and hence enabled for premium users and not for regular users) and is not at all difficult to implement. It's just that you can't have it keep track of just your own opinions of users (you'll need to make your own database for that!); like the thread rating system, it calculates the overall "reputation rating" of a user based on the input of other users.

FewMiles..

Another thing I am wondering about is if it puts any relevant additional strain on the servers. Flyertalk is already slow sometimes now, as it is. I could imagine (but might be wrong about this) that any additional feature will not necessarily make it faster, but be another potential source of slowness.

What about the poor schmuck who thinks that Happy Birthday threads in general are pointless? Are you going to deny his opinion too?

As far as people getting their e-feelings hurt because somebody out there doesn't like them, that is not "divisive" behavior. Why are we worried about who likes who? Is this 2nd grade? Are we never ever ever allowed to express anything that could possibly inform somebody that we think poorly of them? The FT world just has to be a happy place associated with a 7-year-old's birthday party???

Fatwallet is a site that I use in spurts (I tend to read heavily for a week or so, then forget about it for a month). They've had a rating system for a couple of years now. It works great. It even auto-ignores posts for you if you set a threshold (mine is "ignore all posts rated less than average"). But it also doesn't go off and mark a thread as rated poorly just because two people gave it a bad rating and everybody else has ignored it. A drawback of VB is that it does not appear to have that type of statistical significance.

He can already express that opinion.

In general, I am not a friend of denying people their opinion .

Actually, it was more than just one birthday thread - it was almost any thread started by a select few people. All birthday threads didn't have a single star rating, it was just those select few people. Those people also had most of their threads rated with a single star no matter where they posted - even in forums in which no other threads were rated at all. How do I know? Well, I noticed that a particular forum I visited had no thread ratings at all, except when a certain person posted something informative (nothing controversial). I then searched on all of the threads started by this poster. Guess what? Every single thread had a single star. I then checked another poster - same thing.

So yes, something was going on. Yes, it's a d@mned shame that some people carry grudges on an IBB (for years, it seems). It's entertainment, not life. It's just sad to have to see this type of childish behavior and I, for one, am happy the feature was turned off just so these kiddies can't get their cyber-jollies.

Just like the reputation fiasco, a few people that get off on chasing others around & causing trouble ruined it for the rest of us.

Are there people who actually used the rating feature to tell them what threads to read? It seemed pointless to me. I suspect we all have our own rating systems that are far more reliable for us - who started it, where's it posted, what's the title, etc.