FUDforum
Fast Uncompromising Discussions. FUDforum will get your users talking.

Home » FUDforum Development » Bug Reports » Thread rating feature slightly confusing  () 2 Votes
Show: Today's Messages :: Polls :: Message Navigator
Switch to threaded view of this topic Create a new topic Submit Reply
Thread rating feature slightly confusing [message #1366] Tue, 09 April 2002 23:10 Go to next message
snafu is currently offline  snafu   United States
Messages: 27
Registered: April 2002
Karma: 0
Junior Member
I found the thread rating feature to be confusing. Is two stars good or bad? I thought it would mean good, but the image displayed seems to communicate otherwise, (see attachment) due to the fact that there are two stars out of five possible; i.e. a scale of one to five, where one sucks and five is awesome.

I suppose there are a couple ways to approach thread rating:

First approach: Rating on a scale from one to five, where one is bad and five is good. In this case, it might be helpful to have the options be more verbose, example:
1 star - the worst
2 stars - bad
3 stars - okay
4 stars - good
5 stars - the best
In this case it makes sense to leave the image as n out of five stars.

Second approach: Marking the thread as helpful or informative, where one star means helpful, and more stars means more helpful. Again, it might help to make the options more descriptive:
1 star
2 stars
3 stars
4 stars
5 stars
In this case it might be better to make the image not show "empty stars".

Anyways, that's my two cents. Any thoughts?
  • Attachment: 2stars.gif
    (Size: 0.29KB, Downloaded 720 times)
Re: Thread rating feature slightly confusing [message #1367 is a reply to message #1366] Tue, 09 April 2002 23:19 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Ilia is currently offline  Ilia   Canada
Messages: 13241
Registered: January 2002
Karma: 0
Senior Member
Administrator
Core Developer
The 1st approach you've mentioned is what was intended. I'll add some sort of a textual indicator to help people to understand what stars represent.

FUDforum Core Developer
Re: Thread rating feature slightly confusing [message #1504 is a reply to message #1367] Wed, 17 April 2002 22:15 Go to previous messageGo to next message
snafu is currently offline  snafu   United States
Messages: 27
Registered: April 2002
Karma: 0
Junior Member
Great!

I did a FUD demo to a product team last Monday, and thread rating was one of the first things they asked about: they noticed the ambiguity *immediately*. (They're interested in 'harvesting' threads for use in some kind of kbase, which brings up a whole raft of issues/suggestions/RFE's that I won't pester you with right now)

Anyways, I now have these questions:

Does a thread's rating have any other impact besides making stars appear, such as adjusting prominence in search results display? If not, can I re-purpose the rating system to mean 1=slightly_good, 5=really_good, without adverse consequences elsewhere in the application? I think this would suit the purposes of a technical support forum a little better.

Let me know what you think.
Re: Thread rating feature slightly confusing [message #1506 is a reply to message #1504] Wed, 17 April 2002 22:35 Go to previous message
Ilia is currently offline  Ilia   Canada
Messages: 13241
Registered: January 2002
Karma: 0
Senior Member
Administrator
Core Developer
snafu wrote on Wed, 17 April 2002 6:15 PM

Great!

I did a FUD demo to a product team last Monday, and thread rating was one of the first things they asked about: they noticed the ambiguity *immediately*. (They're interested in 'harvesting' threads for use in some kind of kbase, which brings up a whole raft of issues/suggestions/RFE's that I won't pester you with right now)

Anyways, I now have these questions:

Does a thread's rating have any other impact besides making stars appear, such as adjusting prominence in search results display? If not, can I re-purpose the rating system to mean 1=slightly_good, 5=really_good, without adverse consequences elsewhere in the application? I think this would suit the purposes of a technical support forum a little better.

Let me know what you think.



Thread rating as it is right now has no additional functionality beside showing X number of stars beside rated threads.

You can pretty safely use it for other applications without really worrying about the consequences.


FUDforum Core Developer
  Switch to threaded view of this topic Create a new topic Submit Reply
Previous Topic: Moved forums and mailnotification
Next Topic: anonymous users aren't logged with IP
Goto Forum:
  

-=] Back to Top [=-
[ Syndicate this forum (XML) ] [ RSS ]

Current Time: Sun Nov 24 21:18:37 GMT 2024

Total time taken to generate the page: 0.02289 seconds