Can you add a way for members to rank other people's projects and galleries? Highest rankings can be shown on the front page. Either 10 stars or 5 stars. Preferably 10 stars.
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This has been discussed before on the forums. The consensus at that time was that competition would be more discouraging than motivating to new programmers.
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Kevin is right. We are staying away from rankings and ratings. Imagine a novice programmer getting bad rankings on her or his project? A lot of beginners would feel sad about that and might not want to try to use Scratch because of fear of bad rankings. We are already seeing that kind of behavior with comments sometimes and it's a hard problem to solve.
On the other hand, I enjoy seeing that members of the community try to give rankings to some projects. A lot of them look like reviews of movies. For example, angelical has a great blog where projects are reviewed: http://scratchon.blogspot.com/
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I agree with Andres, adding a rating system is the same as adding a "Hate It" button.
Last edited by MyRedNeptune (2007-12-09 02:34:18)
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i total agree about the rating system being a bad idea but i do think it would be quite nice to have a love it that you could award to a scratcher essential saying you love their work in general.
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bigB, that is one use for the "Friends" list. Unfortunately, that list has so many different meanings that it has become rather useless—it means:
1) people whose work I want to be able to get to easily.
2) people whose work I really love.
3) people who should be allowed to add to (some of) my galleries.
4) a random collection of people to show off how many "friends" I have.
The first three uses are distinct, though 1 and 2 are close. The 4th meaning is pretty useless, but is the one that most of the newcomers to the scratch community gravitate towards, because of the unfortunate use of the same word ("friends") as on social networks.
The "permitted gallery posters" meaning could be separated out, by having a list of users for for each gallery. This would also make "companies" easier to manage, as they could have a shared gallery which they could post to and no one else could.
The first two meanings could be combined into "favorite scratchers", with superfavorites at the beginning marked with a star.
The 4th meaning is pretty useless and should be gently discouraged.
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But you should always remember that this site's community consists mostly of children, and it is meant to be suitable for children. Renaming "friends" into "favorite scratchers" would make the site more dull and even "unfriendly" for young users.
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Can't we make some way to link to other peoples pages, that way we can keep defenitions 1 and 2 seperate and I could remember why some people are on my friend list.
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andresmh wrote:
Kevin is right. We are staying away from rankings and ratings. Imagine a novice programmer getting bad rankings on her or his project? A lot of beginners would feel sad about that and might not want to try to use Scratch because of fear of bad rankings. We are already seeing that kind of behavior with comments sometimes and it's a hard problem to solve.
On the other hand, I enjoy seeing that members of the community try to give rankings to some projects. A lot of them look like reviews of movies. For example, angelical has a great blog where projects are reviewed: http://scratchon.blogspot.com/
I've been reviewing some of the projects in my game competition gallery, is that okay?
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It is ok to put comments on projects (if they aren't nasty) and to put comments in galleries. People will know who made the comment and can read it or ignore as they choose---that is quite different from an officially endorsed rating scheme.
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I think getting 1 loveIts is the same. You have worked hard on a project, you upload it and you get just 1 or 2 loveIts because there aren't enough views. With a star-rating you don't need much views to get much loveIts, because one person clicking 4/5 returns to 4/5 on your projects page. instead of one loveIt
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