Ratings on the Board Page have Changed

[Molly K]

The ratings shown on the board pages are now the average of all the ratings of all the posts within the thread instead of just the average of the ratings cast for the first message in the thread.

Thanks!

[Ben]

Does this have something to do with the strange phenomenon I am seeing with my replies?

91 out of my last 100 replies show as having been rated!

It looks like the change is a little farther reaching than you thought.

I have to admit I like the look.

Ben

[Molly K]

Ben -

If you mean that you look at your Tracker view and you see that most of the messages are rated, then yes.  The Tracker view uses the Board view, so the rating you are seeing here is the average of the entire thread instead of each individual message.

Thanks!

[Ben]

And then short of click on each of my postings, how do I know which of my answers have been rated and which have not?

Ben

[Ben]

Regarding the above:

let me make it clear that I am NOT asking that this be changed back to the old way!

This is a nice improvement!

Nice work Molly and team!

Ben

[Molly K]

Ben -

When you are looking at a search result page, the ratings are shown for each individual message still (I believe).  So, to find out what you have received on your replies, you could search for messages posted by you and then you will have a list with a ratings column.  Does that help?

Glad you like the new look!

Thanks!

[altenbach]

I think it would make more sense if the tracker entries would show the post rating as before. Each entry corresponds to one post so why should it display a thread rating?

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I like the thread rating on the board pages though! 🙂

Still, I think it would be more informative to show the cumulative rating instead of the average, e.g. one big star for each N stars or actually show the total number on the page (instead of only on the tip strip), for example:

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25

Without this change, too many thread are tagged the same, giving loss in contrast.

[altenbach]

Then we have the problem that a single offtopic post can give a completely false impression for an extremely important thread:

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=129058#M129058

This post obviously got a poor rating from someone for being offtopic, now it looks like the entire thread is not worth a second look. 😞

[Ben]

I'd like to build on Christian's comments.

The star total idea sounds pretty good to me. It tells us at a glance a lot more than the info shown when floating over the star icons. If you think about it it would actually be an improvement.

Some of most enlightening threads would show up as 50+ star threads!

Along with that, the dreaded 1-star ratings would be a possitive event (if it were not for the average thing, but I digress).

I teach my rookies that you should not have to use your mouse to read a diagram if it is written well. Same applies to the board views. As it stands now we have an improvement over the old view. The previous method only gave us info about the Q. The new view tells us about the thread. This is an improvement.

But....

It could be better.

First we have to mouse over and do some math to figure the total for a thread. Second, the averaging has the effect of de-normalizing the ratings of the threads. The averaging was and is still appropriate for individual Q's or replies. For threads, I would prefer to see totals.

Ben