a question for mods and users about rating torrents
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do you care how people vote? if the content is good but presentation is terrible, or if its vote bombing due to controversial performers, or if the content is egregious but the uploader clearly put a lot of effort into it... what are your thoughts?
is there a rating etiquette or unspoken rule that we should go by?
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I've only really cared in the past about its misuse - specifically the member who so dislikes Asian BL shows that he gave every single one a one star rating, often before a torrent had even finished downloading for the first time. I suspect the introduction of the "Report voting spam" button has made this a thing of the past by its mere existence, without the need to ever actually use it.
"What am I rating?" is a very good question. How enjoyable the actual content is, is largely subjective. Of course, the quality is less so. To genuinely rate how good (or bad) you feel the contents are, you obviously need to have first watched it. So you have to find the torrent again once you have so you can rate it. I like to think of myself as fairly 'community minded', but that's seldom something I've felt motivated enough to do. Especially given that I'm sure I'm not the only one who might not actually look at something I've downloaded until weeks, or even months, after having done so, which makes finding the original source torrent something of a project.
So voting would to me seem more suitable for rating the quality of the torrent itself. Are there a suitable amount of decent images in the description? Is there even a useful description, or does that just repeat exactly the same words as in the title? Is the folder structure so unnecessarily complicated you need a map and compass before daring to venture in? Do the files have meaningful names, or do they look like someone's knocked over a scrabble board, ... etc., etc.
That's a lot to try to cram into a single rating facility, but maybe a link to a page of short guiding notes. Actually, it'd be the same notes for both rating a torrent and a helpful "Best Practice" for creating the torrent in the first place.
Of course, it's likely that only the two extremes will galvanise people into actually voting. Many will only do so if they think something is really, really good or really, really bad.
But it would be a really good way of encouraging best practice in torrent uploading. I'm betting many who upload poorly created torrents (yeah, I know, even that is a little subjective) have no idea others might feel that way and would happily follow a more user friendly standard if they knew what that was. And it would be a good way of telling the creator "This could be better" without making it look like a "You're a monster" personal attack!
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@Kevin4fm back when voting was open for everyone, I used it to rate poor torrent presentations, like gibberish titles that makes it hard to find on purpose, missing thumbnails inside the torrent file, huge collections with only one generic preview picture, etc... Now after being forced to download the torrent before rating, it feels like an invitation/encouragement to rate the content itself, which is like you said very much subjective, and I've had discussions about it in the comment section a few times.
By low rating a torrent I believe the intent is to dissuade people from downloading, or at least to be more mindful about it...
But sometimes you see a torrent, presentation seems fine, content looks promising, but it has a low rating and no comment whatsoever. In one way you're compelled to pass by not to risk wasting your ratio, but in another way you're too curious to let it go.
That is to say, finally, that if the rating system is there for everyone to use arbitrarily based on only God knows what, it's a waste of a feature that could be useful.
You know what, actually I will turn this demure rant into a feature request xD
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@ianfontinell Once you have, I'll upvote it!
Yeah, the simple ambiguity of what it is that people could be rating makes the answer somewhat meaningless. I've always basically ignored ratings for my "download or not" decision, and have only really rated myself to counter the antisocial "I hate BL" voter's spiteful one-star rating.
Maybe it needs two: "Rate the presentation" and "Rate the content", with having first downloaded the torrent only applicable to the latter.
And/or a link to an explanatory guide telling members what it is that they should be rating, and giving some guidance: "Presentation is brilliant" = 5*; "Presentation is awful" = 1*.
Perhaps it should even be a link to a more detailed rating feature, where you can rate individual elements, like those in my last post, and those are averaged to present an overall final score. That would be quite a lot of work to set up, I appreciate, but it would give a torrent creator better feedback on how it could be better next time. It might be brilliant in every respect, spoiled only by some files being unnecessarily buried in sub-sub-sub-sub-directories. (Although, being a fan of using sub-directories myself, sometimes that's exactly how it should sensibly be!)
To be honest, I personally feel that at the moment this feature adds no value, and is hardly worth the (tiny little bit of) real estate it takes up on the page.
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