What significance do the forum ratings have, I have seen people rate people's post "Like" and "Agree" for example, I have done this, and people have always rated mine, but what significance do they have?
Now that you mention I haven't thought about this either. To me I guess it shows that you have made posts that the community believes is worthwhile and adds to their forum experience.
I have noticed that they have the regular and then they have Trophy points, what do the Trophy points do?
Trophies sit on the shelf collecting dust to display their insignificance. Am I talking about real life or the forums? I can't tell. Same thing, I guess.
They just show that the community likes what you have to say, nothing more really. It doesn't mean one guy is better than the other because he has 100 ratings and guy #2 only has 30. (By the way, this is my 100th post, woot!)
Minus ratings tend to make it more inaccurate. :/ Someone will hold a grudge on another user, and then go dislike all of their posts, ruining their reputation completely. The same thing doesn't happen for things like youtube because of how they are set up, but it generally doesn't work on forums. We actually used to have it for about a week I believe, it was forgotten to be taken out when we switched, and one person had more dislikes than they had posts because a group of people disliked nearly all of his posts, even ones that were many months old. And none of this is even to mention that the number of ratings you have is hardly an indicator to how popular you are or how much people like you. (Unless you're Andrew or WeWin.) It's really just nice to know what people like my posts. To be honest, I wouldn't enjoy the forums nearly as much if people were able to dislike my posts. I am always happy to see a rating, but a minus rating is just depressing to see and discourages people from using the forums.
Forum ratings aren't necessarily about 'how cool you are.' ECC is pretty good at only '+1' ing things they think were actually well done. I feel it shows how frequently you say something that people consider important, enjoyable, etc. Considering every rating counts the same in your ratings recieved file, I would like to have a statistical count of how often a person gets "Agree." v "Like" v "Funny" etc. I think that we could do a lot more with the ratings but that is just me.
