Thread Star Rating

I just noticed that a thread I'm participating in has 5 stars

Made me wonder where that shows up, as I hadn't remembered seeing it before.

It shows up in the Forum Index (Edible Gardening), but I think the reason I don't remember seeing it before is that I tend to use the New posts, Today's Posts and Search lists. I am not seeing any "stars" on those lists.

I'm not bothered, personally, but I raise it because it occurred to me that:

A newbie doing a SEARCH on a particular problem might benefit by then selecting threads that have more stars (separate the wheat from the chaff ...)

It might benefit me in the New Posts list - e.g. lets say there is a thread which has a title that doesn't seem interesting to me, but if its gets a high star rating it would draw it to my attention.

(I appreciate that "voting" on things is subjective, but if I hover my mouse over the stars I can see the number of votes, so I can attach my own significance to 5-stars and 1-vote compared to 4-stars and 100-votes )

I'm just thinking out loud ... I have no idea how easy, or otherwise, it would be to display the Stars on those lists.

 

Kristen if you look at the top of the thread where the thread tools, search thread boxes are you'll see rate thread, as far as I'm aware it's the readers that rate the thread, so I suppose if you found something really interesting or informative about the thread you could rate it with 5 stars, if it was bad then 1 star, I've never really placed any weight to the stars on forums as a lot of people don't 'vote' on many threads and it's generally left out. Basically it's totally the readers rating of the thread, post, etc; so yes it is very subjective as what is interesting or would get 5 stars from one person would maybe only get 1 star from another.
Hope this helps, but I'm going to give this 5 stars as it's interesting

 

Well done Katherna, nicely explained :thumb:

We had a similar feature on the old software too:thumb:

 

Thanks Katherna, yes I had spotted how to rate a thread, my point was that the rating, once given, only seems to show up in one place (the forum index) and a Newbie who did a search for some specific issue wouldn't see the star ratings on the search results.

Try doing a search on "Thread Star Rating" for example, or using "Quick Links : Today's Posts", and in the list of threads the Stars don't show, but if you look in the Index for this forum:
http://www.gardenerscorner.co.uk/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=11
the stars show there (and I think that is the only place they show)