User Content Ratings

Important: Content Ratings must be enabled by site administrators and community administrators before content can be rated.  Not all tools may be activated to support rating.

Content Rating allows community members to evaluate content items and provide feedback by assigning a value from 1 to 10, based upon it's overall quality.  A value of 10 indicates highly rated content, whereas a value of 1 indicates very poor quality content.  The average of the combined member ratings is then displayed for the respective item in the community.

Note: Content Rating differs from Stars of Excellence, which are used by the founder, administrators and moderators to assign a level of approval to content.  Stars of Excellence do not represent an assessment by other community members.

Community administrators have the option of disabling content rating for each supported tool type within the community.  The following community areas support user content ratings:

Rating a Content Item

To evaluate a community content item and assign a rating to it, locate and select the content's "Rate It" icon.  For most tools the "Rate It" icon can be found by selecting an item and accessing its detail view.  If a content item has previously been rated, the average of each member rating will also be displayed.  In the image below, the current member rating average is 9.0.

 Note: The Noteboard tool is an exception.  The "Rate It" icon for each Note appears on the tool's main page.

Icon used to rate community content

After selecting the rate it icon, a pop-up will appear with the numbers from 1 to 10.  A value of 10 indicates highly rated content, whereas a value of 1 indicates very poor quality content.

Pop-up for selecting a rating value

Upon selecting a number, the icon will change to indicate the rating has been committed.  The rating average will be immediately updated to include the new rating.

Note: Community content items can only be rated once by each member of the community.

Icon indicating content already rated

To view the rating summary of a content item, place the mouse over the rating box. and a pop-up will appear.

Summary of rating for a content item

Rated Content Items in a Community

Once a content item has been rated, the current member rating average will immediately be displayed on the item's detail page.  The average rating will not appear anywhere else in the community until the minimum number of members have rated the content.  This minimum number is selected by administrators at the community level, however the default is 3.  Once the minimum number of ratings have been received, an average rating icon will be displayed in each area of the community where the item appears.

Note: The community founder, and administrators, have the option of hiding average rating icon's on the "What's New" page.  Also, the average rating icon does not appear on the Most Recent page of the Media tool, as this page places focus on folders rather than content.

Content item with average rating icon displayed

Discussions, Mailing Lists and Databases

Discussions, Mailing Lists and Databases are parent content items and are not able to be rated directly.  If sub-content items have been rated, the parent item will display an average of the combined ratings for each sub-content item.

Average rating displayed for a  parent content item

To view the rating summary of a parent content item, place the mouse over top of the rating box and a pop-up will appear.

Rating summary of a parent content item