Quoting TheMovieman:

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Quoting Kathy:

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I think my stars are because of my cute baby panda. 

So I guess I should change mine to a kitten? 

I guess it couln't hurt! 

Rory

Quoting Kathy:

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I think my stars are because of my cute baby panda. 

Damn, I knew I did something wrong. 

Quoting Grendell:

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Personally, I don't like "post voting." It tends to favor "friends of friends" and such, and encourages people to go out of their way to ask for votes. It turns the forums into a competition.

It is entirely possible for an extremely friendly and polite person to contribute a lot and post occasionally, but have no stars, and that might eventually turn the person off from contributing.

A "flag this post" option would be better.

I agree. We can give green/red arrows fro contribution notes and for contribution votes, but not for contributions as such, and that is what this is all about!

I don't like the post voting either.
I've been a member here for some time now and haven't been even near the one star rating.
Although I have contributed a lot. But not in forums. It takes too much time for me to sit here and write stuff just to get "stars".
It's like rating a person's blog efforts. Or whatever.

I bet it's nice and a boost for those who almost constantly have 4 or 5 stars. But I can absolutely believe that it puts a lot of us others down, who still are doing OUR best, but never get any star ratings.

The worst place that I'm a member of, however, is blu-ray.com.
When I post there, in like 95% of the time, in the news discussion boards, I get a vote down. Not because I write nonsense or anything. But people there don't ever seem to agree with my thoughts.
That if anything is putting me down and even make me hateful.
The people there seem to be as mature as the people on Facebook or even worse; Youtube.
It's not places filled with love, so to speak.

If there was a petition for removing the voting system here, I'd be all for it.
Either we ALL are contributing, or there are a few individuals who are doing the opposite. That's the only distinction I need to see.
Psychologically and in general, people have a hard time giving respect and words of encouragement and appreciation to others. Whilst it's very easy to be intolerant and treat people like they are morons and don't have a clue.

I would prefer a "this user finds this post hopeful" type system.

Quoting surfeur51:

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... From my experience, 50 greens on 20 posts will not give you a star, but about 15 greens on the same post can be sufficient. ...

I think it's a mixture of both. I also got stars for things with just single greens if the amount was high enough.
Perhaps it's an over-all count of positive ratings. (of course with the time factor that's in)

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... Then I spent hundreds of hours to build the site, and share more than 12000 photos, but got no star  since each post during this time got only 2 or 3 greens.

For me this is a typical place where I throw in my positive ratings:
- Things that need work and helpful for many users: Screen-Caps, headshots, BYs, plugins, ..
- Helpful posts
- Good contribution votes
...
-> Often just to say "Thanks".

I'd like to see an easier way to rate contributions. The current rating feature (rate the contribution notes) is not used very often, but the work some spend on their contributions would be often worth the greeny.

Quoting Astrakan:

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Yeah, the stars are related to forum posts only.

To get stars you have to create a huge virtual collection. Then vote yes to each and every contribution, but, and that's the important thing, with a remark like "OK", "Oki", "Good", "Very good", "thx", "thanks", "thank you", "nice job", "excellent job", "good job again", "looks fine", to activate the clickable rating symbol. The stars will come from their own.

Please be creative, you can also do combinations, eg "Oki good job thx". Just don't bore the contributor.

Quoting Grendell:

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Personally, I don't like "post voting." It tends to favor "friends of friends" and such, and encourages people to go out of their way to ask for votes. It turns the forums into a competition.

It is entirely possible for an extremely friendly and polite person to contribute a lot and post occasionally, but have no stars, and that might eventually turn the person off from contributing.

A "flag this post" option would be better.

I'm the opposite.  I'm fine with stars from our forum posts.  They're just a silly little thing and don't cause much harm.

But I'm not as much of a fan of contributions being able to earn stars.  I don't what to see a system where people who contribute a lot get stars and those who don't contribute don't get stars.  That would lead to competition and to some less scrupulous users manipulating the contribution system to earn their stars. For example breaking up a big contribution into many tiny contributions.

Also, there are more ways to contribute than just profile contributions.  Some people contribute profiles.  Others contribute links, plug-ins, help in the forums plus other helpful things like sites hosting data others may wish to grab.  And let's be real here.  I'm sure a huge percentage of users (myself included) help out the online database tremendously by NOT contributing profiles!