Issues with the "Rate this member" feature...

[TbirdJayC]

Anyone can just indiscriminantly go around lowering honest traders ratings. I understand most people simply rely on heatware, but a low rating number on your profile looks bad. Now i turned mine off when i realized the feature existed, but i guess thats not really fair either. The other side of the coin is, that someone can log in as a different name and just hype up their own rating. At least with heatware there is some record of who posted the rating, here there is no such record. I think at least this aspect should be addressed.

 

[Hossenfeffer]

I'm guessing that since this feature is rarely used, if at all, that's it's just not the highest priority. In that most in the FS/FT forum are familiar with heatware gives fuel to the fire of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". I'm with you to a point. It's there, so I want to use it and I try to be as honest as I can.

Sure, someone can hype their own rating or give someone a "1". The place where this tool "can" shed some light is when you have a large number of people rating a user. The effect of a single "lowballer" is nearly shmooshed (highly technical term). The same could be said of someone who was trying to artificially rase his or her rating. The more people who rate the user, the less weight any single vote will carry.