Getting more interactive, go ahead and grade me |
Over the years, I’ve tried different rating/review systems with mixed results.
Some sites ratings work great, others not so well. My php-scripts diary entries have had a rating system since 1999 and has proven helpful to me in understanding what visitors of that site found useful. I also shared with others back then (7+ years ago, yowsa, I’m starting to feel old) how to create your own ratings script in PHP.
We tried doing a third party star rating system here one time at Hmm last year and it didn’t get much action. Probably because it was a third party hosted deal (I don’t blame readers for having those concerns, although I don’t think the program we used was doing anything evil), wasn’t integrated very well into the site and was stuck at the bottom of the post instead of near the title section. Bottom line, it got axed after about a month or two.
Why try ratings here again?
There are three primary reasons I want to try having ratings here again. The first is that I’m open with my opinion — good, bad and/or indifferent — about other people’s creativity and would like to give readers the chance to rate/review mine. If you really hate something creative I’ve done, then you have always had the chance to leave a comment, but now with the rating you can now send a message with an ‘F’ rating. Conversely, if you love a post and would like to see more of that type material, you can send me a message with an ‘A.’
The second reason is this time the structure is different: the ratings are running here, not using any third party hosted scripts. This means they benefit from the dedicated server this site already runs on and we don’t have to worry if some other company is down or getting hammered by traffic.
The final reason is more for personal development reasons. I can tell by existing stats how many people visit a post, but don’t really know how you feel about a post unless you leave a comment, trackback or message me some other way. For example, right now I’m curious how people feel about my weekday Hmmcast efforts. These take a much longer amount of time than text posts and I’m curious if viewers/readers are seeing much/any/no value in them, entertainment or otherwise. I’ve received some limited feedback and appreciate it, but would like to invite more. While leaving a comment is better, leaving a rating is a fraction of a second process. If you have a few minutes now you can watch through the Hmmcasts and rate them accordingly.
I realize there are issues with rating scripts accuracy and reliability and that they don’t become that useful until a large number of votes are registered. It’s trivial to fake any rating system out there including the one used here, but I have a few creative ideas if the ratings makes it through the beta testing phase to deal with that going forward more long term. As for the number of people using it, well, that’s up to you.
Ratings placement
Putting ratings forms at the the top they get more visibility but I think you also end up with votes where people don’t actually read the material. Put at the post/page bottom you get fewer votes, but they are likely more representative of the actual votes.
Where can I get the ratings script you’re using?
This morning I added the Wordpress plugin WP-Post Ratings by Lester Chan. I modified the code a little bit to play nicely with the customized version of Wordpress running on this blog. It’s a well written plugin that offers the ability to customize the type of ratings and messages shown and uses AJAX so you can make a rating without actually leaving the post page. This is one of the ways AJAX should be used. Small, unobtrusive, effective. If you hover over the boxes you can read the different grades:
1 box = F “please no more posts like this”
2 boxes = D “not among your best stuff”
3 boxes = C “average post”
4 boxes = B “good post, I liked it”
5 boxes = A “great post, please create more like this”
The messages above will probably be tweaked further as time goes on, but that’s the way it is as of this writing.
Go ahead and try the rating now. If you are already on the single post page, just scroll back up to the title section and look below the date. If there are no votes yet you’ll see something similar to what’s showing in the screenshot.
The ratings only show on the single post page although if it gets enough use I might move to the category and home pages and maybe even start displaying the data in the RSS feed. This feature surviving is up to you, kind reader.
Thank you for reading.
Did this post make you go hmm?
(4 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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I still think it’s crap. I know exactly the type of post you write, and they’re good quality posts. No need to pat you on the back for it. I already tell you that. For the most part, I don’t see any point since 1) it’s not like you’re going to change your writing style and 2) unless it’s relevant to a new thing like the time limit of your hmmcasts or what not, I don’t care to vote on every post, nor does anyone else I would imagine.
I can see it being useful in say… Netflix. Or Amazon. Or any other service/product oriented thing that has a large base to begin with so you can actually get some sort of feedback. But, this isn’t digg, or slashdot. There’s no userbase and you might get one single post to have a lot of votes over time, but not most posts. Being such, I think that space is better used without the voting.
Comment by darkmoon — March 23, 2007 @ 9:31 am PST
Firstly, thanks for the nice comments.
Second, this is not intended to be a pat me on the back thing, although I suppose some could see it that way. I hope most don’t feel that way
It’s also not intended to bring additional traffic from other places as it’s not using a third party voting system (digg, reddit, etc). It could prove to be an additional way to sort data in the future, perhaps in the growing search that might prove helpful to other readers. You see that’s a very real problem for this site with over 4,000 posts we’re going to have to start thinking about some mechanism to better organize the archives. I’ve been thinking about maybe buying the Google Mini.
Ouch, “no userbase” What about the 2+ million visitors that have stopped by as well as the RSS readership? While this site doesn’t have a registered user base — just not something that has been pushed to build here (yet) — I’d disagree that there still doesn’t exist a userbase
As far as “it’s not like you’re going to change your writing style” — yes that’s absolutely true, I’m not. However, I am looking at ratings based more on the CONTENT, not on my writing style. That’s what you are grading, if I didn’t make that very clear above. You aren’t grading me really (with some exceptions perhaps like the Hmmcasts), you are grading what I’m writing about. I assume regular subscribers won’t use the function that much, but it could be a good way for folks to signal me on specific content when/if they don’t have time to leave a comment.
Bottom line, comments like the one you just left are much more valuable and telling to me than a numbered rating, but some people won’t leave comments. This gives those people another option to tell me how they feel about the subject matter. I hope it’s used that way at least.
Time will tell. Thanks for taking time to leave your feedback.
Comment by TDavid — March 23, 2007 @ 9:47 am PST
Of course the title does say “go ahead and grade me” — I guess maybe that should have said: “go ahead and grade the content” — doh!
Comment by TDavid — March 23, 2007 @ 9:49 am PST
Ahh… but see… content and writer go hand-in-hand. I might disagree with you, but you make your points. So would I say… no… this post sucks ass, or .. yahh… this is a great post, I disagree. From my pov, I’d say.. this is a great post. But from an average user? I’ll tell you that it goes way far the other way. They don’t separate either.
From my POV, comments are probably the closest you’ll get for feedback if people feel strongly about it. Or am bored like I am and comment. Either way, the real estate can still be better used I believe for other things. Unless you were pushing some content like Perez Hilton or something. If you’re running super amounts of readership a day, then I’d say.. go for it. Otherwise, from my pov, it’s not worth it. You’d be better off looking at data analysis of readers.
Outside of your content thing of course.
Comment by darkmoon — March 23, 2007 @ 9:53 am PST
Yes, content and writer go hand in hand, but it’s possible to like Stephen King and dislike when he writes about vampires (Salem’s Lot). His readers can send him a message by not buying Salem’s Lot in as many numbers. In the case of post views, we already have that data but since everything is free here to read I don’t have a metric beyond “views” and “time on page” that tells me if posts about plugins that can be added to blogs are more interesting than whether Lindsay Lohan should button her shirt (an unpublished post, BTW).
Well in the case of this post the content is about adding first party rating scripts and their value. A topic which has really only been covered once before. It’s becoming harder finding topics like these, but I tend to favor posts that are on less travelled topics. What I’m saying is the review system might help me determine if my own feelings about content selection agree with readers.
I’d also like to compare the time on page and post view data to something else that readers/visitors control. Time will tell how this turns out. I hope you’ll take a few seconds and vote for the content that you dislike as well as like. I won’t take it personal any more than I’ve taken your comments above personal
Comment by TDavid — March 23, 2007 @ 10:12 am PST
Geez… you took that personal? Don’t make me talk about your mama! :p
Comment by darkmoon — March 24, 2007 @ 10:07 am PST
LOL darkmoon!
Comment by TDavid — March 24, 2007 @ 10:19 am PST
I just realized something. If you’re REALLY going ahead with this voting thing? You really should put it on the index page of makesyougohmm. The fact that someone has to click into an entry to vote, would deter them from voting. A lot easier since you can vote on the main page and read all the content. The reason I say that is that the only reason individual entries are even needed right now is to comment. That I can tell anyways.
Comment by darkmoon — March 24, 2007 @ 9:33 pm PST
darkmoon - that’s a good suggestion however the home page aside, stats currently indicate that the individual entry pages tend to get the most visits over time compared to the outside pages (category, archive) and in many cases the comments add additional insight to the posts (as this one does, thank you again for taking time to comment), so if somebody is rating the overall entry page maybe they will take into account the comments as well. When third parties link from inside post or articles they almost never do so to the home or archive pages, RSS readers clickthru to the entry pages and search engine traffic is primarily to the entry pages.
My preference would be to make this change conditionally based on votes too rather than show a bunch of “hmm, no votes yet” posts on the outside pages, so if the change is made it would likely be after a couple weeks of data have transpired (see the second to last sentence in the post above, as perhaps you missed).
Then again, maybe people would be more likely to rate a post if they see there are no ratings yet?
Also, I’ve been contemplating whether or not to change the full content on the pages for some time. Unless I hear many objections, the next template upgrade will probably remove full posts on the pages and category pages so the only page with the full text will be the entry pages.
This change would be made experimentally at first and give readers a chance to echo back if they liked or disliked the change. I also would like to use the main pages and category pages a little differently. Someday perhaps they will spotlight heavily visited pages, commented posts, highly rated (and maybe lowly rated too) posts. This would give new visitors a better thumbnail sketch of just how deep the content is at this site. There are some very active archive posts — still getting comments and regular visits/reads — that are more than one year old that new visitors would have no idea about unless that’s how they entered or revisited the site (possible).
There are couple reasons I’d like to make this change:
1) page loading speed. In the case where there are a few really long posts with lots of pictures, the overall page size can grow larger than 300k (slowwwww on a modem) and I think this hurt first time and repeat visitor experience to the outside pages that are on slower connections.
2) it has always seemed redundant having the category and home pages with full text too.
The downside of making this change is it would remove having web pages where readers could read through the posts without additional clicking. That seems like a benefit to keeping pages with full posts. I read a number of blogs this way and frequently clickthru and read the comments on the entry posts of interest. The way it is now with full posts you can read the site like reading an RSS reader with a river of news style. I like having the full posts formatted this way and it’s the reason it’s been this way for so long, unchanged.
Interestingly, the group blog that I contribute to we had this same discussion recently and it was majority voted to leave the full content on the pages (category, home, archive). I’m not sure how readers would feel about it here, but at the very least it is worth experimenting with a change in a future template upgrade.
What do you think? Would you see removing the (longer) full posts as a detriment to the web experience? Or would it not bother you to clickthru a little more?
If by making this change it would better organize the pages, give readers a different, more summarized view of recent content overall on the site that they can’t get anywhere else on the site (or in RSS) it seems to make good sense to do so.
Comment by TDavid — March 24, 2007 @ 10:54 pm PST