How to Rate a Message?

Hey Erich,

I voted for a rating scale. At first I was leaning toward the "one good, one bad" option, but I think this would allow a better sense of the value. I would almost say that instead of "poor" to "great" it might make more sense like this (and I know this could probably use some refinement):

1. Incorrect or misleading answer
2. unclear or ambiguous answer
3. Neutral
4. Good answer. At least leads people in the right direction
5. Great answer. Full detail or completely relevant link provided

Of course that brings up the question of how to represent the results, and how to weight them. Does a rating by a member with lots of points in that area carry more weight than a rating by a newbie? Does a rating by and EMC employee outweigh a rating by a customer or partner with lots of point in that field? If so do you weigh by total points or by points in a specific topic (So a Grandmaster in Documentum doesn't outweigh an Expert in CLARiiONs in the CLARiiON forum). Nothing like making more work for you, hey? *lol*

I like option 2. It is something that I see a lot when looking at product reviews. It's simple and not subjective, either it helped or not. I'm not sure if I would put a value on the points if its rated helpful or not unless done by the person who actually opened the thread.

Hi Erich--I think either a helpful/not helpful flag will work. I've found, through responding to solution comments, that getting people to add comments to explain their rating choice, just doesn't seem to happen very often. Most responses just list a number with no comment to explain their choice. This can become very frustrating from the owner's point of view......My 2 cents.

I would go to just helpful - period. Sometimes, often actually, level of knowledge by original thread owner will be different and what he might not find helpful will be seen helpful by others and vice versa. If people do not mark it as helpful this should be taken already as sign answer was not helpful (actually, it might be not answer but rather information contained within answer). To implement this you would need to enable helpful button for each post within thread visible to all users with permission to access such forum. As for points, I would simply drop them and leave status level to be determined by number of posts.

Oh btw, will new forum allow signatures? I've been planning some time to put sig with link to my linkedin profile stating if you find my post useful make a recommendation then please... I guess it works much better for my ego that way

At first I thought a binary option was sufficient, but then again: some answer could be helpful when it's not conclusive, not 100% sure.

Did it help you ?
- No
- A bit, you got me in the right direction.
- Yes, I now fully understand !

I agree with you Allen. I've found something similar elsewhere. And in my opinion it works. Everyone can contribute and give feedback on any content.
But we have to stress even more that user feedback, even if not stritctly "required", is vital for our forums.

I like a lot of the comments coming in. I would still like to keep it very basic; either helped or didn't help but I would agree that a comment saying what was wrong is very important to help us improve the quality of our forums.

My first thought is to make is very basic (helpful / not helpful), because most often we receive just the rating and no explanation or comment. When we receive a low rated solution feedback most often we receive negative comments. As I have mentioned to Erich before I know that people in social communities are a different breed and if a negative comment were to come along I think that we as a group would keep people in the positive. Long story short, my vote would be to have a rating of helpful / not helpful and ability to add a brief comment.

I would vote for a single marker, "helpful". Anyone, including the original poster, could vote the individual response helpful.

A small number shown beside the response would show how many people had voted it helpful.

This keeps it as simple as possible, avoiding the current confusion between correct vs. helpful on responses, and the even more confusing difference between marking an individual response correct and marking the thread itself correct.

It also addresses the loss of meta-data we have today, where many people (beside the original poster) benefit from a response, but that information is lost.

I like the Amazon type feedback where forum users can mark a response (in Amazon's case a review) as helpful or not helpful so that its value over time can be. If 10 people mark as response as useful you know it must be reasonably good; if 2 say it is good and 2 say it is bad you know to take the response with a pinch of salt...
One thing that I do find a little worrying is that you sometimes see questions asked where a very newbie user has marked a response that is patently wrong as being correct (or even marked a RTFM response as correct) - it would be useful to be able to flag disagreement with the correctness of a response and I think it would be sensible to restrict this to users who have given over a certain number of responses (100?) or points?

Vote for a single marker, "helpful".

Erich,

My vote is for One positive flag (e.g., "I like this!")

Ellen

Test reply. Please ignore