[pmwiki-users] RFC: Ratings Redux

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 11:21:14AM -0400, The Editor wrote:
> On 9/27/06, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 10:35:23AM -0400, The Editor wrote:
> > > Just a few general thoughts on the rating system.
> > >
> > > 1) I like the five point scale.  As Ben mentioned the problem is how
> > > many axis and which ones?  It might be easy to set up several and have
> > > them all listed at the top of the recipe in a little table.
> >
> > Please...
> >
> >  - not in a table, as that makes them harder to edit and maintain
> >  - not more than two or three axes, as then it becomes too much trouble
> >   to rate things
> >
> 
> Well then, I'd suggest just a simple one axis 1-5 rating system, with
> a link to comments where users can explain their ratings.  And perhaps
> with a way for authors to respond to comments but not change the
> ratings. Doing something simple is better than talking about something
> more complex that doesn't get done.  :)

Here's my current thinking... 

I'll need to finish my comments recipe first (working on that now),
but I'm guessing the cookbook will get a custom version of the
comments form that makes it easy to enter a rating and comment.
The result will produces something like the following markup onto
either a -Talk page or onto the recipe page directly:

    >>recipecomment<<
    Author: Alice   (Rating: 5)

    I loved this, I have implemented it on every site I ever created,
    and I highly recommend it to others.  Even if it's hard to implement,
    I'd give it a rating of 6 if I could. 

One issue to consider is that we don't necessarily want *every*
comment to come with a rating.  Sometimes an author may have multiple
comments on a page (e.g., question-response-reply-reply-reply),
or sometimes she may just be wanting to post a comment without 
giving any sort of quality score to the recipe itself.

Regardless, perhaps the cookbook can then have a custom {$RatingSummary}
variable that combines all of the ratings for a recipe and that
can be used for sorting and summary display purposes.
If we want to get fancy, the {$RatingSummary} could even have the 
links to the individual rating items, but I prefer to keep things
simple at first.

Pm