Ratings

We wanted to let you know about a couple of tweaks we've just made to the way entries are rated on Blipfoto, and how we display the highest rated entries on the 'rated' page.

If you've chosen to enable ratings on your journal, your visitors will still be given the opportunity to rate your entries with 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 stars. However, the overall rating for an entry is now determined by the total number of stars given, rather than an average of all the ratings received.

So, if someone rates an entry 5, the next person rates it 3 and another 1, the total rating for that entry will be 9 (5 + 3 + 1 = 9). We've applied that principle retrospectively, and this total is now being used to rank the entries which appear in the 'rated' section on the home page.

Another principle is that when we rate someone's entry, we should be doing so based on the merits of what we're seeing and reading, not the ratings the entry has already received from others. So, when you visit another contributor's entry, the stars now show the rating you've given it, not the ratings it's received from others. As before, you can see the entry's total score by placing your mouse over the stars and waiting for the little tooltip to pop up.

When you look at your own entries, you'll see a single star icon and the entry's total score shown beside it.

That's it - we think these small changes will make a big difference to the way ratings are used. Any questions, drop them below.