Ratings

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Tips and Travel Forum replies are rated on Helpfulness. Ratings are meant to recognize the good information that members share with each other. They also help to ensure that the best tips are given priority and are made easily available to anybody seeking information about a destination. All ratings are provided exclusively by VT members and reflect their opinions.

If you're new to rating, you might start by rating pages about your home town or some place that you know well from your travels.

Many people have their own criteria for rating, but a general rule of thumb is to rate honestly and fairly, based on the helpfulness of the tips.

If a tip is helpful to you personally, rate it well.
Most importantly, enjoy your time at VT. Many people work hard to create thorough and accurate tips, you can encourage those folks by helping to make sure that superior pages get their due.

*Remember to Rate honestly. Rating patterns are analyzed on a regular basis and fraudulent ratings will be flagged.

Ratings are used to recognize good, accurate information and to encourage members who take the time and effort to share tips. VT Ratings are used to rate tips individually so that the most helpful, most accurate tips can easily be found. They are also used to determine the Top 5 pages for a location, and they are also used to determine VT Rank.

Only VirtualTourist members can rate VT Tips, Deals, or Travel Forum postings.

Rating a tip is easy. Members just click on the rating scale from 1 to 5 to indicate how helpful the tip was. Your rating is automatically recorded.

On Travel Forums, the ratings, are helpful or not helpful.

Rating Tips uses your opinion to help make the best and most accurate information available to others. A good way is to choose a location that you know well from traveling or having lived there. Cruise through the tips and rate what's helpful or not. That way you can set the record straight on places you really know about. Of course, you can also just look at pages of members you've noticed and see what they have. The only real rule is just to rate fairly and honestly.

Rating fairly and honestly helps improve VirtualTourist. It's important to rate both positively and negatively so that accurate, well written tips are rewarded, and inaccurate, or poor tips are less visible. A simple rating guideline is as follows.

· 1 Star: The Tip is not helpful, off-topic, inaccurate. (Inappropriate or copied tips can be reported to abuse@virtualtourist.com)
· 2 Star: The Tip is incomplete and offers little or no insight.
· 3 Star: The Tip is average.
· 4 Star: The Tip is thorough, accurate, and helpful.
· 5 Star: The Tip is superior, offering excellent advice and insight.

Yes, you can change a rating for a tip you've previously rated, but it only counts for one rating. Repeatedly rating a tip does NOT increase its score.

A complex formula is used to calculate VT ratings. The formula is not disclosed in order to discourage manipulation of the ratings. All ratings come from your fellow VT members and are based on Helpfulness. There's also a time element to ensure that tips stay fresh and accurate and so that newer tips can be seen along tips that have been rated a lot already.

Top 5 tip makers are determined entirely from ratings to a member's tips. Status takes into account not only the number of ratings, but more importantly the quality of ratings.

It's a little like my friend who graduated #2 in his law school class. Impressive!? What he doesn't tell you is that there were only 3 people in his graduating class. Same thing with the Top 5. If there aren't at least 6 members who have made Tips, and have had those tips rated, then you can't be Top 5.

Yes. Rating is anonymous. The reason is so that you can rate honestly and fairly based on the page itself without worrying about what someone else might think. It also removes the phenomenon of 'social rating.' That is giving an inflated rating that isn't relevant to the tip just as a way of saying 'hello.' There sure isn't anything wrong with saying hello though! You can always attach a comment to a tip or write email to the person who created it. Ratings should reflect the quality of the tip, and not the degree to which you are friends with someone.

The best way to get good ratings is to simply fillout the tip templates as thoroughly as possible based on your experiences. Your fellow VT members will appreciate your efforts and will let you know!

Yes. Definitely. There are 2 main reasons why this is the case.
1. In Ratings, Rankings and Top 5's,. the Quality of your tips is more important than the time you've spent on VT.
2. The default setting for viewing Travel Guides is to show the newest tips first. That keeps content fresh and makes sure that older tips must stand the test of time, and not simply rely upon how long they have been at VT.
3. Ratings have a half-life. After a long time, they decay, unless they are still held to be relevant and helpful.

Many people work hard to create thorough and accurate tips, you can encourage those folks by helping to make sure that superior Tips get their due. Additionally, Rating is a great way to sort tips so that the most Helpful, most Accurate tips are more easily found, and readily viewed.

There are several ways. First, when you receive a rating, you'll recieve a notice. Additionally, the comments and emails you receive about a page is a good indication that the tips are being rated. Lastly, you'll see your ratings reflected by the number of stars your tips receive and your progress in the Rankings.