If its possible I think there should be a way to rate topics, particularly in the tutorial section. That way anyone looking through them can see how good other people think the tutorial is.

Maybe have some special signature for people who write excellent tutorials. It may inspire more, and better tutorials, as well as the signature could link to their topic so other people may be like "Whats this thing? Tutorial on ________? Sweet action!" and check it out.

We do have the facility to do that - we used it in the Creative Commons- but it didn't work out. People were rating games for the wrong reasons.

On saying that for Tutorials it could work-

As for sigs I have seen linked ones - Holder has one for his sprites and tutorials,

Well, instead of the five starts thing, I've seen the thumbs-up thumbs-down ratings in a few other forums and they worked pretty well. Or instead of rating the topic, you could have a thumbs-up thumbs-down for the users. Like Rep.

We only have the star function on this board -

What does having a rating system add to the board?

a simple way for people to know what tutorials are the best ones.

Or a simple way for people to know who asked their friends to upvote their tutorials.

Ratings are just like reputation systems. It adds nothing but drama.

I believe we can limit topic ratings by member group, correct?
We could have the staff rate topics (they would base it on certain criteria, and general usefulness).
This would prevent people "upvoting" a topic's rating, and it would only be given a single rating (the average of the staff ratings).

Example, the staff see topic "How to program a missile launcher in VX" and 5 different staff members would rate the topic, the average of their ratings would be given to the topic.
If kept up with, it could work quite well.
(It'd almost be like "staff picks", except it would be based on certain criteria versus "i leik dis 1 betta".)

The idea sounds interesting, if a staff member is rating it, but what does it do? Does it get pinned if it meets certain criteria, because if not, then no matter what it's rated as, if somebody has to hunt through several pages of content just to find a high-star topic, it'll probably be ignored as it is now.

I think this is a great idea if done properly, and the staff member idea sounds perfect. A group of staff members each rate individually on a topic and the average rating will be given to the topic. Then if rated highly enough, there are several possibilities for benefits, such as a notice of this topic in the R3 News and Views, or maybe a reward, or a pinning.

Not sure about pinning the topics, as that could be problematic if there are more than 2 or 3 "pin-worthy" topics (imagine having a page full of pinned topics; not good).
Perhaps a pinned topic in that forum that lists the 4-star/5-star rated topics would work better. =D




I think I like the idea of noting it in the R3 News and Views, and we could always establish some reward for anyone submitting a "5-star Tutorial".

Good thinking guys, these are the sort of ideas I like to see.

I really believe that members with enough patience to go to the tutorial section and reading a topic there (ITT: a unfortunate low number) instead of rushing to the support forum to ask a basic question asked 1000 times before don't need at all a rating system to determine which tutorials are useful or not.

It just screams "Popularity contest" and in the case of staff monitoring, represents much more effort than it worths.

My opinion is the same for forums other than Tutorials as well.

I can see such an idea working if the 'voting/rating' was limited to staff only. Anyone could get friends or a proxy and simply abuse the ratings by themselves if it were not a limited function.

To me, implementing a function and allowing staff to rate it would give criticism without words based on how the tutorial was planned out. If it received a low rating, that might tell the writer to work on the tutorial in a better approach. Two cents on my end, anyway.