Free accounts shouldn't rate

Yes, we know the rating system is broken.
Yes, we know this is being discussed and worked on.

In the meantime people are hugely exploiting free accounts to rate. While we work on fixing the rating system overall, can we please remove the free account's ability to rate?

Abuses that will be solved:
1. People using free alts to neg rate spam.
2. People using free alts to boost their own ratings and their friends.
3. Immature people just trying the game, neg rating people just because, then leaving and the neg ratings never going away.

I imagine this would not be a difficult change to make. This would be a temporary solution until the ratings system is overhauled.

-Hiro Pendragon

I never rate anyone anymore because it all won't matter when the system is overhauled.

I've been waiting for ratings to be "overhauled", aka removed for over a year (at least for any link to CASH, which now means real dollars).

Rantings; BOO! Stipend is bad enough, but one can justify it due to paying to play (incentive to actually sign up). Giving money away is stoopid. It's even stoopider that this has been gamed for so long yet it's still a "feature" in SL.

Boo!

THe ratings system is borked.

I have given up trying to avoid getting rated, and am now actively going to random concentrations of folks and triple-positive rating them, while ranting about the ratings system.

If everyone does this sort of drive-by-ratings, we might get some sort of Linden response.

ALso, I agree, trial accounts shouldn't be allowed to rate at all until they fix this broken, stupid system.

LF

There are no free accounts, unless you're talking about the one-week free trial. Then yeah, perhaps that is a problem, but at the same time, I received the vast majority of my ratings while I was in free status. I made my first scripted attachment while I was in free status, and in fact won some L$ at a show 'n tell for it. I won a clothing contest, where I received and gave many ratings, while I was still in my free trial.

The problem is that someone comes in to the forum and says something like "free acounts aren't fair, and they're being so abused!!" When, in fact, it's maybe happening once in a long while.

You know what, stuff does happen. People do use alts and free accounts to neg you. So what? You can have the chance to 3neg both that person and his alt.


If we're going to fix ratings, here's what I'd do (this idea is partly stolen from another thread):

1. Limit ratings given out to 5 a week plus some extra number based on the users's aggregate positive ratings. Maybe 1/10 of his total positives. This gives incentive and more power to people with high positives.

2. For every negative rating a person person has, reduce their rating limit by one. Since it's unlikely that a neg-rater will get many positives, and a triple neg will almost certainly cause a reciprocal response, people who triple-neg on alt accounts will quickly lose their power to do so.

3. Roll ratings off after time... maybe 30 days. This means a person will have to continue to work to keep their ratings up. It also means we can re-rate someone who comes up with new and interesting ideas.

4. Allow you to click on the "you've been rated" notification. Maybe have it pop up at the top, like the Linden dialogs or script dialogs. Clicking that dialog should allow you to rate the other person without having to hunt them down.

5. No demo accounts to any active SL subscriber. There's no reason to give a demo account to anybody that's currently actually in the world. I would use the CC# and CC billing address as confirmation. (Not just the CC#, but use the address too). This will help prevent someone from creating a new account just to harass other people. However, if they pay the $10 for a lifetime account, then they have the same rights as any other Lifetime member, including the right to be a prick (and yes, there is a difference between being a prick and violating the TOS).