Laura White
Journal Entries for Laura White
HUGE MISTAKE DROPPING THE RATINGS
November 12th, 2007 7:42 pm MST
Dear URNOTALONE AUDIENCE Its been exactly 12 days since the ratings were dropped and the only thing that has dropped are the number of comments and visits to my site . Everyone with a IQ greater then a ripe summer squash did realize the falacy of thinking that winning the monthly contest actually meant anything . However , the ratings were a catalyst for activity . True , a few magots seemed to get their rocks off posting "1"s and spoiling the temporary high . But after all , We all live a little bit of fantasy that could certainly survive a few idiots .The down side of eliminating the ratings is far worst . Laura White
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Sorry you feel that way Laura, but far more eMails and Comments have been more along the line of "It's about f***ing" time you dropped the Ratings"... so, we'll have to agree to disagree, but we think it was long, long overdue.
We have some ideas in the works, for example the ability to leave Comments on Pics and things along that line, that will be a much more valid way of measuring what people think than the Ratings were.
Right now we're concentrating on finishing up the ModelTS Section of the site and shutting it down for good, implementing a Single, Integrated login, so you only have to login once even if you have a Profile and a Subscription and a few other things that have to be ready for the turn of they year.
Once that's all in place, you'll start seeing the ability to leave Comments on Images, improvements to the Places and Events sections of the site and lots more.
Now that ratings are gone Laura, we can let you in on a little secret. People could vote all the "1's" they wanted. They weren't counted, they never were. In fact, we didn't count votes less than 5. Anyone who was voting people down was wasting their time.
Maybe the traffic is down from useless twits, but we think it makes the community strong. It's no longer about looks and popularity.
Oh, and one more thing I forgot to mention that Dan's working on... tracking the views on Profiles. We tried to roll this out once before but it killed site performance, Dan thinks he has a solution and if he can make it work without killing performance, it will be a good way to judge popularity of profiles without ratings and we'll be able to list most viewed profiles which will be a way to get some attention. So that might go part way to getting back some of the benefits you found with the ratings... that is, getting profiles noticed.
Of course there are lots of ways of getting your profile noticed:
1. Spend time in Chat. People check out your profile when they see you in Chat.
2. Keep a Journal. The most recent Journal Entries are posted under the Pink Journal Posts bar on the Main Page and lots of people, including myself, check them out.
3. Leave people comments. Everybody looks at comments and then they check out the profile of the person who left the comments.
4. If you have Videos on YouTube, MySpace or Google, post links to them in the Videos Tab of your profile.
5. If you know of Events in your area, post them. People will see you as the person that posted the Event when they look at the detail of the Event. It's actually a 2 Step process. You first go into the Places Section of the Site (under the MAIN menu) and Submit a Location and then go into the Events Section of the Site (also under the MAIN Menu) and Submit an Event. Once we approve it, it will be listed under the Pink Events Bar on the Main Page.
Just thought I'd throw out some advice on how to get noticed. There are a ton of profiles on URNA, so it can be hard to get yours found. Doing some of the above will help quite a bit.
I hear what you're saying, but do you have any idea what it's like having to say just that to 20+ people a week bitching about the ratings? We made it pretty obvious that they were voluntary, yet we still fielded a minimum of 20 eMail a week ranting and raving about how the ratings sucked, etc.
Remember, it's more than that... people were figuring out ways to cheat the system and there were some pretty creative methods used to do it. It took up a ton of Dan's time to track down these cheaters and it's time much better spent actually working on the site. Everytime we'd catch a cheater who was at the top of the Ratings right up until the end when we caught them we'd be accused of "fixing" the ratings. It got to be pretty tired after awhile.
Anyway, we realized there are people who like them and people who don't, but, we field the eMails and we know that the vast majority did not like them and they caused many people to leave URNA and when we see people leaving and stating the reason for leaving as being the Ratings, that makes us stand up and listen.