I agree. There needs to be some sort of accountability in the rating system. You need to tie in a comment with the rating. This will probably cut down the pettyness or grudge rating.

Note: Only apprentices on up can give ratings. You can only become an apprentice through a manual increase in your access by an admin. I.e. the guy who rips on some skin by giving it a low review, like it or not, isn't just some random guy/gal. It's someone who has contributed in some way to the site or the community.

While the system isn't perfect (not by a long shot), as a GENERAL tool for USERS to wade through thousands of wallpapers or skins to quickly find the best stuff, it works remarkably well on the whole.

That said, I do want to have a feature where admins can see who rated what. If some guy is going around wrecking the ratings, we can re-evaluate their access priviledges.

But this has nothing to do with my thread Brad!

I never said to remove the system rating!

I just said that is good to improve it, 'cause it has some weakness.
The word Contributer is not equal with the word Saint, if you know what I mean.

it's really quite simple. the comments exist for the benefit of the skin author, as a place for feedback on their work. the ratings exist for the benefit of the downloaders.

as an artist, this has a huge benefit. when getting feedback about your work, in hopes of improving what you do, or to find out what it is you're doing right, quantitative numbers are the worst information. forcing a person to tie a rating and a comment together would do several things, in my opinion:

-reduce the amount of thought going into the comments
-force the comment to be qualitative rather than informative
-discourage people from making comments about various details of the piece which might not have anything to do with its overall quality

my advice to artists is to -definitely- not pay attention to the rating, but rather to read the comments.

additionally, if it's merely a desire to find a way to increase the number of comments, please remember that quantity is far less important than quality when it comes to critiques.

The peer rating is not representative in the most works. I agree with feline, that "with only 2 values entered, the score isn’t that representative". In the other hand, the most of the works are having no ratings at all!

paxx,
I can see your point, but if "...lot of people would give high ratings just to make themselves look like nice guys", it never hurt anyone, the bad ratings are those that are hurting authors and making them want to stop working.

The only reason, that make me start been a member of our community, (1 year ago), was when I have send my first wallpaper and I saw it having so big success, (you know, the one with big perspective MS logo), if the result then, was the opposite, I am sure that I will have stop.
That's why I am commenting a lot the new authors works, even if their works are nothing special, to give them courage to go on.
The child’s need encouragement and the most authors here, are children in authoring, for example I am not even 1 year old.
To be continued...

ditto jcg...I don´t give a crap about ratings

The rating system is intended as a 'filter' to help with band-width concerns....walls are usually fairly large dl's compared with some other skins, etc...and the section is [again] growing big.
Ideally 'IF' the artist's peers actually 'rated' the walls frequently enough to give a more 'accurate' indicator of its 'standard, or quality', then we'd have the most democratic, or community-led filtration system possible.
If there are too few ratings to generate an accurate 'average' then it 'can' all fall apart.

I guess the trick is to 'do more rating'....

In this thread look the opinion of the authors about ratings, briefly.

paxx says: get rid of them, they are useless

migellito says: not pay attention to the rating

treetog says: I don´t give a crap about ratings

feline says: i can see the point in the ratings

c242 says: ...the rating is still anonymous. Theres no use for that

jcg says: not accept ratings that are not accompanied by a comment

WiseOldMan says: I agree. There needs to be some sort of accountability in the rating system

OK now lets not get so excited about this, it took me almost 3 weeks to go through every last one of the skinz here and give them all a rating of 1. Now if you go and take the rating system away then all of my work would of been in vain And on top of that I will have not much to do during the day anymore instead of waiting for new uploads to give the rating of 1 to.

Did I post that out loud? DOH!

No, as I said, I don't think ratings should show who rated. Because then people won't score low and crappy skins will get good ratings.
No, every way I think of it, ratings are no good.

OK, so perhaps it's the public's accessibility to the ratings that's No Good[tm], and if there is to be a filtration system it should be transparent to the site users/contributors.
[What you can't see won't hurt you]....

I thought the public/community involvement in 'all' aspects of the site's management would be seen as a Good Thing[tm], but if there are miscreants abusing their privileges via vindictive or spiteful 'ratings', rather than via accountable 'comments', then maybe things DO have to change.

Maybe I, for one, am misguided in my faith and confidence that fellow skinners and artists with the capacity to rate submissions would do so conscientiously, and not use them to carry out some obscure grudge-war or whatever against their peers....