scott_j

Brian, Thanks for the response. I guess all we need now is a way to slice the "sum" results by category to elemenate unwanted categories such as nudes, etc.

Althought this subject has been beaten to death, and considering the newly revised and improved Photo.Net site this subject remains one that Photo.Net has not answered with appropriate changes in the software. There is my complaint and now my suggestion. -- As a user of the system I am interested in a means to find really talented photographers by category(s) (Nature, People, Digitally Altered, etc.). I am not interested in a solution that finds a single great picture, I'm looking for a means to pick by the photographers "total body of work"; This is important. I would like to see criteria like greater then x number of pictures of ratings greater than y/y. Or even ratings that includes x pictures over y/y ratings spanning across at least z months.

 

These should be easy metrics for the site programer to capture and make available for seaching. This would be most helpful in finding great sites to learn from, instead of the ratings game red-herrings.

 

I hope this helps. As of today it is difficult to gather good photographers to follow.

Brian and All,

There is considerable interest in this problem evidenced by the book written above. To say this has been this way for so long and being happy with the status que is sad. I want a site that wants to improve, to find ways to be better. Consider what might be! PN could be much more successful. Many of us say we are not concered with ratings, if that were so, none of them would have written in responses, we are all impacted by the nonsense, some more than others. But, what is important it is impacting PN.

 

Number one rule about customer comments is you only hear from about a few percent of those actually concerned about an issue. That implies there is a much larger population on PN that are concerned about this issue of false ratings.

 

PN should consider what could be, this is an easy issue to fix... So I make my recommendations: a.) if a rating of less than 3 is entered, a critique is required. b.)The rater must be identified and PN contact information provided. In this way a dialog can be generated between the receiver and sender for the purpose of photo improvement.

 

If this is to much of a hassle to the low raters then their rating is not worth the bits and bytes of memory. Those honestly rating are likely and pleased to link a low rating with their critque. I would say this should also be true for ratings of 7 as well.

 

The code is not so difficult to write, so what is the honest resistance to this on going issue. To be the status que photo site, no I think not, so what is it, budget, staffing, know how, profit, lets put the real issue on the table. I hope for a PN site that thinks about what it can be.

Regards,

Scott Jenkins

Being a newbee to PN, I have little expereince as per the discussion. However, it would seem to me if this is a problem, that the membership is troubled with, it is certainly possible to add more qualitative ranking criteria to the scoring of photos. The results of finer granularity of questions that sum into the two final scores used today would be more helpful to the member who asked for a critique and would also go to qualifying out-of-range scores from dishonorable scorers. This would require some software coding, but, nothing out of the capability of the PN site.