New Feature: Message Rating System

I never did get round to working out how the marks-out-of-ten-o-meter worked. It seemed to drop a decimal or three every time Faith threw a tantrum but stayed put if you got a dozen green blobs for posting a good joke. Then all of a sudden you'd bump back up again in a single bound for no apparent reason.Not sure how you'd go about doing it, but if you do bring it all back, you need a method of preventing the 'Faith's gone postal' situation. Just as well she's only shooting jeers.

"Member ratings are on a scale from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest). They are a measure of a member's ability to draw votes for their messages over the past 90 days."It doesn't seem to work in a one to one way though. I vaguely remember that soon after I joined my rating was 10, but then it plummeted to something like 7.5 for no reason I could see. It then climbed back up to 9.9 and stays around there depending mostly whether Faith is in one of her moods or not.Can you describe how it works, just for interest.

I assume the jeers and the cheers cancel each other out equally?

What was the reasoning behind someone's personal rating varying as a result of someone else's?That seems more like a competition to beat others than encouragement to grow an individual reputation. I would have thought a mechanism that developed something like a personal handicap would be more appropriate? (Although it seems to work out ok.)What would happen if someone with a score of, say, 7, didn't post for 90 days? Would their score revert to 10 or stick at 7 - or change because of other's scores have changed?

It seems that whatever system you dream up, there are problems.Why not just keep it simple? Count jeers and cheers and display the ratio.

I'm personally disappointed in myself that I occasionally/sometimes/always care when people cheer me.I don't give a monkey's when people jeer - but I think that's because a jeer only comes from the (usually) insane creationist which is, in effect, a cheer in disguise - like being wounded in action attempting something incredibly brave.Strange and disturbing what this sin of Adam has imbued me with. God is a weird and sadistic git, but you can't fault his imagination.

It used to be the case that a newcomer to the site would know the creationists from the sane just by the score, now you have to do it by reading what they actually say - which seems fair.But I'm buggered if I know how Faith's score has moved from 1+ to 5.6 whilst everyone else is sinking from 8ish to 6ish.It's like everything is reverting to the mean.