^ Maybe the poor soul(s) is confused and thinks they are grading at the high end?

That was a deliberate choice on my part (not to provide for comments on rating a set). It might seem a bit of an odd choice, but I’ve seen too many really rude comments about models on other sites whose rating system allows comments, and we took the decision not to let RE get that way.

I also felt, rightly or wrongly, that a mouse-click anonymous vote, rather than “vote, leave your name and comment” might encourage a few more of the silent majority to express their opinions on each set. We have well over a thousand members, not including special guests (including all the models) but we only get about 50 ratings for a typical set.

I’d have thought it was fairly obvious that more stars = better… it is certainly the system used by iTunes and Amazon without any explanation. It might have been smarter to put five stars at the top and one star at the bottom, in retrospect. Might look into changing that at some future revision of the scripts.

I’m not particularly surprised if a few people hate a set enough to rate it low, whatever the reason. I’m guessing that if you particularly love or particularly loathe a particular set you are more likely to click to rate it. They may not be the same people voting 1* all the time… it could just be that every set is so not to *SOMEONE’s* taste out of the thousand plus members that they choose to rate it 1*. I actually regard this as much healthier than every set getting all 4 and 5 star ratings: it means that there’s an appreciable spread between the best and worst rated sets. Any rating system which just says “everything is perfect” is useless to me as a producer think about what mix of my ideas to shoot for the site!

Cheers, Hywel.

It’s obvious that more stars = better, but it isn’t obvious what the “calibration” should be. E.g. does “3 stars” represent “wouldn’t mind seeing more – it’s good but not great(4 stars) or super-great (5 stars)” Or does it represent “so-so, don’t have any real feelings on it.”

I think that Guest’s calibration is a good one, and should be reprinted with each “please rate this set.” Or if you don’t like Guest’s version, then at least some general guideline of that sort. Like or dislike is going to be subjective, but I don’t want the ratings to be subjectively subjectively. If you get what I mean 🙂

A somewhat delayed reply to this 😳

I try to rate every set I look at, and I have always worked on the theory that 5 stars was best, but I have never been quite sure how to rate some of the “in between” sets. When I love it or hate a set it is easy, but what do 2, 3 or 4 stars mean?

Also I have always been strangely reluctant to give a 1 star rating. Partly this is because I prefer words when leaving a rating, but with words I try to always live by “if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing”.

So seeing the descriptions next to the stars is actually quite liberating for me, since I look at the words, consider my feelings about the set, and pick the words that are best. This allows me to ignore the whole “how many stars” question, so I view this as a very positive change. Hopefully it will help others as well, and more people will leave ratings.