Half stars in review

[jcdesign]

Now there is 1-5 star to choose between when making a review. Sometimes I wanted to rate for an example 4 1/2 star. That would be awesome in future update.

[SJ77]

wouldn't that essentially be like a 10 star rating system?

[Lindy]

Could you please clarify that you mean display half stars? I don't think rating half stars is particularly common. We are considering dropping 10 star reviews for 5 stars for consistency with ratings which are 5 star only, but introducing half star display. I think most can agree 10 is just ... weird and takes up too much space. 

So, under the proposed change, if the average rating comes out to 4.5, you would see 4 1/2 stars instead of 4. 

Does that work?

[Adriano Faria]

When making a review is weird. Half star should be used to display the right results. Example: a file has two reviews; one with 5 stars and other with 2 stars. As a result, it should display 3 and a half star, not 3 or 4 as happens on IPS4 (not sure how it rounds the result).

[jcdesign]

I mean when hover over the star, were it if it is possible to choose even half stars.

[Lindy]

14 hours ago, Adriano Faria said:

When making a review is weird. Half star should be used to display the right results. Example: a file has two reviews; one with 5 stars and other with 2 stars. As a result, it should display 3 and a half star, not 3 or 4 as happens on IPS4 (not sure how it rounds the result).

Yes, that's what we're discussing here. In your scenario, a future update would show 3.5 stars instead of 3 or 4. 

We've approved this internally. It's part of a larger change and it's believed it would break certain third party apps, so we are waiting until a major release to incorporate it and allow third parties time to update, if necessary.

12 hours ago, jcdesign said:

I mean when hover over the star, were it if it is possible to choose even half stars.

This is not up for consideration at this time - I'm not aware of any major service that allows for half star ratings and I think there's limited use in selecting half stars. What we'll be doing is displaying half stars to make the displayed ratings more accurate. 

[Square Wheels]

Or, just have the stars as an overlay.  The rating would be below and would simply display like a progress bar, filled to the exact vote count.  The the stars are laid over that and display the voting beneath it.  This was you can use 5, 10 or any number of stars and it will show partial stars.  Seems like an easy solution, but I' not a programmer, so what do I know.

[Action_Builder]

I have seen other solutions where the rating system is completely open to customization. For example, the ratings can be based on 0 to 100%. Or 0 to 10 stars. Or just about anything you can image. And there are multiple criteria for each review.  I have used a something called JReviews for Joomla and WP. I am wondering if the IPS platform is big enough to entice the Jreviews developer to make it available for IPS4.

I really like the idea of being able to rate something as a percentage. Then members can rate something based on the likelihood of success. This will be great for custom fields and pages.

[jcdesign]

It´s nothing wrong with this rating system: http://gauge.wpengine.com/titan-fall/

Hover the mouse over the field on the rating system on the right side. When rating is done there will be i big number like 4.2

 

[Vikestart]

I agree with the way @Lindy describes it for the upcoming changes. Displaying half stars for average ratings is good, but it's absolutely unnecessary (and clutter-ish) to be able to select half-stars.

[Lindy]

We don't need to overcomplicate -- we'll just do 5 full stars for selecting and display ratings in half stars 1-5. 

[chilihead]

(How did this post become so long? )

Rating full stars and displaying halves is a basic way of doing it. It will be interesting to see where you round up, as a half star does not represent half, but represents "not enough to rate full star." I'd probably tip it to a 5 star review at 4.90, and show a half star starting at .10 up to that.

But using the font awesome stars (as you do) you can also use javascript to display a more fluid representation of the votes. So a 4.75 shows as 4 stars and a star 75% filled. This is a post by someone on font awesome.

See third post down: https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/4147

And the code linked to: http://codepen.io/denwo/pen/azjXzL

Does that look like something IPS could do? Or if you do half stars, does that code look like something we could customize to work with IPS? Looks like we have to code for each benchmark we want, I'd probably only go as far as quarters for better accuracy.

==

I know I will probably have to resort to paying a developer for this but it would be great if members could also rate with more that 5 for the 5-star setting, and rate more than one row of stars (suggested here). In fact they don't have to be stars, as choosing a half star is tricky, but you could simply pick the numbers. 3, 3.5, 4. 4.5... which could be outputted as stars for display only.

With 5 stars, you have 5 choices, in percentages, that's 20, 40, 60, 80 ,100. So if you don't feel a product is perfect, you jump down to 80 which is quite a jump. That's like an "average" in school. A 4.5 would be 90 and a logical choice for an excellent but not perfect rating. Some sites even allow quarter ratings like 4.25. Like BeerAdvocate, where when rating beer you choose numbers, and rate different aspects of the beer; look, feel, taste... Stars of course could still be the display of any type of rating system whether it be letter grades, numbers, or percentages when rating.

I understand if you think this is marketplace idea but just throwing it out there. I know you want to keep it simple but I'd love a robust review engine with choices for detailed review databases.

On 3/2/2016 at 5:28 PM, Lindy said:

We are considering dropping 10 star reviews for 5 stars for consistency with ratings which are 5 star only, but introducing half star display. I think most can agree 10 is just ... weird and takes up too much space. 

So, under the proposed change, if the average rating comes out to 4.5, you would see 4 1/2 stars instead of 4. 

Does that work?

IMDb uses 10 stars but most use 5, true. I agree I don't like the look of 10 stars, it is clunky on sites like this, and with stars, most people are used to 5 being best. But I can't rate a 3.5. The overall can be calculated to 3.5 but I can't rate it with a 5 star system, with 10 I could rate the equivalent (7/10 would be 3.5/5). So please don't remove 10-star, it gives us more rating options, a 10 step scale instead of 5. Maybe you can change the output to a metered type output with skinny bars, or a number/percentage, or merge this into the 5-star system so it still outputs as 5 stars but you have 10 steps of rating.

So a user chooses to use the 10-step not 10-star system, you have 10 choices of numbers, but it outputs as 5 stars. Those that choose 5-step have the stars when rating and displaying, 10-step rates with numbered steps... 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5... I think that could work. The 10 steps are important for detailed reviews though.

Thanks!

[chilihead]

4.1.12

• Ratings now show half-stars for the average (for example, if one user votes 3 stars and another 4, it will show 3 and a half stars) and there is now an indication if you have rated something.