X-Message-Number: 23969
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2004 11:55:12 -0700
Subject: new "rating" system
From: Kennita Watson <>

Not a rating system, but a classification system.  And a flawed
system, because a single item can have multiple classifications.
Many is the message I have seen that is insightful, interesting,
informative, and offtopic at once.  Or redundant and funny.  Or
informative and flamebait.  Or... you get the picture.  I had
expected the rating to be from 1 to 10.

On the methods:  I'm not fond of needing to open a browser
window to do ratings.  What if I could cut and paste the Cryonet
headers into a message to "" and
append a number (or letter, or number-letter combination,
depending on how complicated you wanted to make it) in angle
brackets (which aren't used in the headers yet) for the messages
I wanted to rate?  Like so:

     #77777: Message Subject #1 [Joe CryonetUser] <5>
     #77778: Message Subject #2 [Jane Cryonetist] <5>
     #77779: Message Subject #3 [Jim Cryoneticist]
    ...

Even if we kept the browser window, an eleven-digit rater code
seems excessive.  A four-digit number would allow for plenty of
growth (and I would have a chance of remembering it).

All in all, I rate the rating system a 2 (I'm sure there's a worse one,
but I can't think of what it is).

On further reflection, I think the whole rating system is a bad idea.
It seems to be an obtrusive, blanket, omnipresent solution to an
intermittent annoyance (I don't consider it serious enough to
merit the term "problem").

Kennita

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