The following is an extended explanation of my idea in how the actual rating system can improve; the goal of this is to lower down the amount of threads at the forum complaining and asking why their skins got a low rating.

Stars 2.0

One of the common arguments about the actual rating system is the “why I got a low rate?”; right now when you submit a skin at any gallery your work will be rated by a moderator, this person will even decide if your work is good enough or suitable to enter into the gallery, in fact, this procedure is quite necessary and it doesn’t need to change at all, we can consider that like the “start point” to begin the rating. Now, how should we rate in the correct way? My idea is quite simple:

1. - Rate and add a comment.

To prevent skinners fury we can replace the little window showing the amount of stars to rate the skin with two things: at the top right side of the skinner description of the skin it could be a star-meter, just to show the rating the skin has. The other part is at the comments area: in there aside the guy/gal name it will appear the rate he/she gave to the skin and comment will be the reason of the amount of the stars he/she gave. Now, you will ask your self how in the name of God we can make that person to leave a comment and not just the rate? It’s simple, during the procedure of rating a comment it “must” be added a comment to apply the rate, if not it won’t let the user to apply any star at all. If a user rates any skin just righting some useless words or typing anything in a random way without any sense, the skinner can request to undo the rate and delete the comment. All this can be done just by making a pop-up window to appear (we can even add an edit button to leave the option open if the user want to change the rate or the comment he/she did). By doing this we can even prevent other users to spam or put a low rating just to damage the skinner work.

2.   - Hide the troll.

A plus to this idea is to add a “hide” button in every comment that can be use only by the owner of the skin, this is to leave the option of hiding useless comments with a low rating or other kind of comments that the skinner might consider unnecessary.

3.   - Flaming stars!

Other thing that it might be good is to give to the skin the honor of “flaming star”; it is something like a popular skin thing. A skin can get the title of flaming star when it gets more than 20 or 10 five star ratings (given by users).

4. - Who can rate?

I don’t remember who are able to rate and who doesn’t, but to me, the only ones who must rate a skin are the Master Apprentice, Journeyman and Masters. Why of this? Not only because they are at certain point experts on what they do, they also make a great effort to make this site even better in many ways.

And that is all.., I really hope my idea(s) could be considered and be applied…