Ratings and comments
The way users rate files has been changed. You must now provide a comment with your rating detailing why you rated the file as you did. You will be able to view the comments left with each rating on the relevant "file ratings by user" pop-up window.

Yeah, used it this afternoon. Its a good idea. It'll be interesting to see how it affects things. I'm right behind anything that discourages snap voting, hype or sabotage.
I've noticed the comments are supposed to be added to the file's comments list; but mine wasn't. Shame cos it was fascinating. Ahem...


EDIT; Ah, hang on. Can the author disable comments for their files? I've just noticed there are no comments for any of his files and the 'leave comments' link doesn't do anything. The 'view comments' link leads to



If that's the case its a shame because I left him a really positive comment.

Good idea! You might also consider changing the default rating from 1 to 10 (the one selected without the user doing anything). Looking through the ratings of my mods and other mods I noticed a large gap. Take my 'Bravil Sea Domes' for example. From 125 ratings hundred and thirteen people voted 10, two voted 9 and three voted between 5 and 8. But seven people voted 1. Since I hope that it's not a hate vote they gave my mod I guess it's because they thought '1' is the best rating possible (at least some of them). One guy even made me a big compliment in the comments section, but voted 1.

The number one is generally a positive rating, in the school system (at least here in Germany) and almost everywhere else as well. Some people don't take the time to look what other possibilites are there and just pick the (number) one vote, which leads to wrong ratings. You can find quite a few 1 votes in the ratings of almost every mod that has a constant and large number of positive ratings.