Lately users on my site have been discussing the issue of the Users titles and the Stars. I turned off the stars as they became useless. About 2 weeks ago I went in and changed all my users's titles to "member" so every one is the same.

I offered people to leave me notice as to what Titles they wish, then that got in to a whole discussion of the titles should mean something about the users expertise. In general Non technical forums titles are a whimsical vanity and adds levity to the forum but for a technical forum where people wish to converse with the brains of the group - some people just don't get it.

Any way my suggestion is this Since stars are useless and people still want to know about the rating of a member I would suggest a system similar to EBAY's feedback. Add a link on every post. where people could leave feedback positive / negative / and a short statement. Then the system could change users titles based upon their score of feedback not the number of posts.

They could click on their title Under their name to view the feedback. And you can only provide one feedback per post. and perhaps a system that check to see if the same user rated someone more than 3 times in a row it will prevent them from rating someone until 2 more people have done so. this would prevent abuse.

How does this sound

Hum...
I really like the idea of rating [positve/negative] on the posts themselves... This affecting the "user's rating on quality of content".
Good idea.

Exactly

The star's themself sometime are a nuisance as many people like to play with that feature in itself.

Maybe a little rating toggle near each post.

I third that motion. And have the person's vote be weighted based on a complex formula involving average posts/day, average length/post, total posts, rank, etc. But seriously, weighted would be good. A mod rating on a post would carry more weight than some n00b.

The one that I (and my users) liked is the DCForum one (www.dcscripts.com). Basically, you give either positive, neutral or negative rating (1,0,-1) and that's tallied up. You also get a textarea to leave your reason for it, which really built up a sense of community and gave people something to read as to why they were rated.

Would love to have that in UBBT.

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I have a Word Count setup in place and a Words Per Post count which indicates a users participation. I also use the rating system, but have been thinking about playing with a stat that uses the number of replies for any post started by a user as a way to gauge a users rating.

http://www.viperalley.com

That would be nice, though I'm still more thrilled at the ability to rate individual posts, and this affecting the user individual rating. Basically, because a user with many words is not necessarily a better user. The one invites users to post a lot, the other to post quality.
I have some users that post thousands of words per day, but dont think they really are the best users... nor would most of the other forum members. The rating individual posts -affecting user rating, is the thing that makes most sense to me right now.

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