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Oh, if we’re defining design features, the option to order links by ranking is essential to me. Right now the order appears random.

On reviewing my last post, it occurred to me that the ability to flag a link as spam would be great too. That way subscribers, or moderators can remove bogus submitted links with out the admin getting involved.

For my purposes allowing only registered users to be allowed to rate would be preferred. I don’t want trolls messing up the utility of the voting for my subscribers. I don’t charge for membership, so anyone can vote who wants to, but at least I’ll know their email address.

Having any kind of upvote / downvote type system is important to me as I hope my link library will grow larger than I can curate myself. Aside from blocking any user who decides to spam the library with ad links, I’d just as soon not have to devote a lot of time to maintaining the library once related categories are established.
A five star rating would be fine. I prefer that over a single up/down vote as I’d like folks to be able to express how strongly they feel about an up or down vote. Stars are a bit confusing though, as how few stars constitute a down vote? Does a link with three 1 star ratings rank higher than a link with no votes at all? Having positive and negative points removes that ambiguity. If using five stars, I’d define a three star rating as neutral, with 1 and 2 stars being the worst, and bad respectively. That way a link with an average of a 3 star rating would be roughly equal to one with no votes, maybe slightly higher as it got some attention.

In thinking a bit more about this, a 1-5 ranking wouldn’t work well to reflect votes from many users. A sum of total ranks, say allowing each user to assign a number between -5 and 5 for each link, and then rank the links by the total of all. Maybe allow admin to skew things a bit by having a wider range of vote values.

I too would like to allow users to rank links, and have each category sorted with highest ranked at the top. How large a donation would it take to see that feature in a few months?