• What is the goal of the rating system?
• Who is allowed to rate posts?
• What exactly am I rating about a post?
• What is the best way to go about rating a post?
• What makes a good or a bad post?
• Am I meant to rate depending on if I agree with the post?
• Can I rate my own posts?
• Are my ratings anonymous?
• Do I get FXperience if my posts are rated positively?
• What do I do if I think a post has been rated unfairly?
• I don't want my post to be rated, can I make it exempt?
• Where have I seen this system before?

If there's something else you think should be in this FAQ please email us

To promote quality posts and discourage unhelpful posting. And for fun :)

All Gold Users can rate posts.

You are rating how useful you think the post is to the community, not just to you. You are not voting about if you agree or disagree. Its more to do with the validity of the post, is it good, bad, helpful or unhelpful?

Don't rate messages just because the author is your friend or has helped you out in some other way. This is misleading to other users and destroys the whole system. The rating is designed as a way to highlight good posts.

The real goal here is to reward people who post interesting stuff. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up.

Good posts are insightful. You read them and are better off having read them. They add new information to a discussion. They are clear, hopefully well-written, perhaps amusing. These are the gems we're looking for, and they deserve to be promoted.

Average posts might be slightly offtopic, but still might be worth reading. They might be redundant. They might be a 'Me Too' article. They might say something painfully obvious. They don't detract from the discussion, but they don't necessarily significantly add to it. Most posts will be like this, and generally shouldn't be rated either way.

Bad posts have nothing to do with the topic they are attached to. They call someone names. They ridicule someone for having a different opinion without backing it up with anything more tangible than strong words. Bad posts are repeats of something said 15 times already making it quite apparent that the writer didn't read the previous posts. They use foul language. They are hard to read or just don't make any sense. They detract from the topic they are attached to. These posts should be rated down and will eventually be removed by a moderator.

No, that isn't the right idea. People are allowed to have differing views, see above to see what you should be rating.

No, this isn't really fair and could be used to cheat the system. You have to rely on other people thinking your posts are useful.

The community will not know exactly who rated what (they will know who has the power to vote). But all forum moderators will know who rated and we will be keeping an eye out for people rating things unfairly. We will revoke rating priviledges in these cases.

If you are lucky, yes. The ratings will be tallied up every week and the people who have made the best contributions will be awarded FXperience.

Come and talk to us, we will look into it. But rating is a very subjective thing, and it's often hard for it to be 'wrong'.

No, if you want to post on our forum you have to play the game. Even if your post isn't rated people will still mentally decide if it's bad or good, this is just a way to share ideas. If you don't want people to rate your post then don't post it.

If you are truly adverse to the rating system you can turn it off via your 'forum options', people will still be able to rate your posts but you will no longer see these ratings.

The ratings idea was originally based on a moderation system at slashdot. We have tweaked it to suit our needs, but it seemed like a nice starting point (all code is written from scratch).