Tuesday, June 12, 2012

The Rating Game

I turned the Community Color Rating Engine Back On.

Originally, I worked with some people who were adamantly opposed to login screens. So the rating engine accepted anonymous reviews. This was a big mistake! Spambots kept flooding the system with fake reviews.

I tried manually reading and removing the spam and finally capitulated by turning the engine off.

I really miss the rating system. The ratings program helped direct traffic to the best sites.

The Internet works on positive feedback. If you link the the best sites, they surface to the top.

I designed the rating system so that, when you give a site a positive rate, it gets an extra link!

If you went through the directories and gave good rates to the top sites, they would get more traffic.

As I no longer have a prohibition against requiring a login, I am turning the ratings engine back on for registered users. I will delete the reviews for any user that is clearly spamming the system.

Your Community Color User ID and password works for all sites in the Community Color family. I would really appreciate folks trolling through the Community Color Sites and rate the best local sites. Right now I have directories for communities in Utah, Colorado, Arizona and more.

A rating will stay active for 600 days (sites and businesses change every year or so).

The Ratings by Community Report shows a summary of recent ratings by community. It is super small right now because I just turned the rating engine back on.

PS: I will rate a bunch of sites under the user name kevind and yintercept just to test to make sure everything is working. While I am testing, I might accidentally break the screen, because I am engaged in the time honored tradition of cowboy programming. Yep, I program in production because I am one person with no financial resources.

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