Jafo, i agree with what your saying

however:

ratings do not help the artist, mayb if with the ratings you had to give a reason for that rating, then it would b a better system

No, the ratings in themselves don't help the artist....but then they are not strictly intended to.
The artist is better served by comments on the work, where the value and significance of the comment can be assessed by seeing who made it.

Perhaps similar could be done for the ratings, except a 'true' opinion of a work may be softened by the intimidation of embarassment if you were to rate a friend's work poorly...

The ratings are for the users, not for the artists really. And they're for the site. By having ratings, the site can help filter out "stuff".

Other sites would simply delete most of the wallpapers. That's how skinz.org handled it and the result was constant message board flame wars. We have a much more liberal policy, we let in most wallpapers and then use the rating system to help people filter out stuff.

It may not seem fair to the artist at times (because it's not always fair) but when you have 600+ wallpapers, there has to be some way for the casual user to quickly browse. And let's face it, anything that's gotten a 6+ rating is probably a pretty darn good wallpaper.

And ratings are a fact of life. The game I spent years developing, The Corporate Machine, got an 8.4 on Gamespot (a good review but they even have decimal places in their rating). Why do they have that? So that users, who have tons of games to choose from, can filter out the "Crap" from the good stuff.

When we create WinCustomize, we didn't want to have it where only the admins and moderators would rate skins. We wanted to open it up where trusted users could do so. The entire access (or class system) is essentially a "trust" system similar to what you have on your own browser. The higher the access group, the more the Admins trust the user. So as their access increases, the more Admin functions that user gets access to since the Admins can trust that user not to be irresponsible. Ratings are one of those features.

Without ratings, there'd only be 100 wallpaper. Because it would be the Admins deciding what stays and I can tell you, I don't like 90% of the wallpaper and would ask that admins and moderators reject all but the very very very best wallpaper to the site (i.e. if it's not good enough for digitalblasphemy.com, it would be rejected).

That's really the alternative though. Ratings or rejections.

ok, that makes it more clear

Frogboy: there is another solution, let the download count do the ratings. Give each skin and wallpaper an exposure time (say one or two weeks), and if after that time the download count is not above a given number, then the skin/wallpaper is sent at the bottom of the list. The result would be the same as filtering with ratings, except it would be filtering with download numbers.

Jafo: copyrights take care of your problem. There could not be any Britnet Spears wallpaper, skin or theme because Britney's pictures are copyrighted.

Paxx....you haven't been to Winamp.com lately.....

A properly implemented rating system would be fantastic for WC. Has anyone here done a search of wallpapers arranged by rating? Try it sometime, start at page 13 and work your way forward. Just keep in mind that there are a LOT of wallpapers not listed at all because they received bad ratings.

As an example, I posted a completely red, unoriginal wallpaper with a windows logo in the center. Being sick of all of the Code Red hype I made it, I use it on my desktop and decided to post it here, maybe it would make someone else feel a little better. To not have it listed with all of the other 1.7 million XP skins/wps on here I left out the word windows, xp and britney spears in my description. 25 hours later it has 150 downloads and is rated so low it's not shown for anyone, but still gets a fair amount of downloads. Don't get me wrong I'm very happy with 150DLs.

ANYWAY...my point is, the rating system needs to be thought out a little better. At the minimum I feel that the ratings should be shown. Sorry this was so long...and thanks for not deleting me

Personally, I think the filtering of the skins/wallpapers should only 'kick in' after at least 5 seperate people have rated it...

I guess I don't see things the same way as most here do. I used to have a skin - one of my firsts - that I thought was kinda bad. But it was getting constant downloads over at Skinz.org, so although I was temted to delete it, I left it up because some people apparently liked it. So why should I judge their taste and basically tell them "Well, you got no taste. I think it sucks so you can't have it."
Anyway, even if I agree some things are unoriginal and distasteful, I can't presume to have a more valuable opinion than others.

Yea but we're snobs. If we were a wallpaper site, I might feel differently but we have wallpapers as a convenience. We don't want toh ave 20,000 wallpapers on the site.

But people like things like Britney Speer wallpapers and celebrity photo skins. That's not what Wincustomize is about. People can go to ezskins and get that kind of crap.

As I said, no rating system is perfect, but the one we have seems to work pretty well. I just wish more people would tkae the time to rate skins.

Frogboy, I entirely agree with you.
What I said is you can easily filter out the Britney stuff by simply rejecting copyrighted stuff, as you already do.
And I even agree with creaming off the lesser good stuff. We only disagree on who decides what is good and what is bad. I say the masses decide, therefore a skin that doesn't get enough downloads could get deleted or sent waaay in the back of the queue.

The masses are to dumb to walk around unguided. You'd get the XP and other OS crud as the most popular stuff. I'd like to see some quality and originality instead of that.

Here's a radical rating system, demote a user who gives a 1 or 10. People who rate extremely show that they know not what they're doing and should not be allowed to rate.

And like Hell Dragon asked, how many people can rate anyway?

Crae, how about....demote a person who doesn't use his position and abilities [ie....being able to rate] responsibly/enough....

Aha, so that's why I'm still an Apprentice here.

Crae: "The masses are to dumb to walk around unguided."
But, they are the ones this site is for though... Without anybody to download, we're just a bunch of losers tooting each other's horn.
Jafo: Does that mean that if a citizen doesn't leave enough comments he should be demoted to visitor?

Paxx....could be the go...
Reward PPL for doing things right, penalize them for not....almost like 'real life'[tm]....

who would have thought this topic would have got so many replies

Hmm, but paxx, aren't we that already?

crae: maybe.