yellow stars

The "star ratings" you are talking about are strictly an artifact of Google Groups. That's your brief answer, but to really understand, some background is necessary to get to a full answer...

This group, and all of Usenet, have been around a long time. For more background, the Wikipedia article on "Usenet" is a good start.

Then, Google came along and bought some archives from Deja News (or rather, they bought Deja News, or some other company that owned Deja News, I forget the details), so now they have the largest collection of stored messages from a very large collection of Usenet groups. (Usenet itself is a distributed database, which by default ages out and discards older messages).

Then, Google decide to try to make money on this by setting up their own "Google Groups" (similar to Yahoo! Groups), and burying Usenet groups somewhere within -- hoping, perhaps, that people would think Usenet was a Google product.

Now, anyone can view Google Groups (including the Usenet section buried within) if they visit Google's ad-supported site, and with a Google login, they can also post to such groups -- for many, this is a convenient and cheap way to get Usenet access, which normally must be paid for via your ISP or some other service.

From Google help:

"What do ratings mean and how do they work? "Ratings help indicate which posts you find most helpful. When you're browsing a group, you can rate a post and your rating will become part of that post's overall rating."

So, other Google account users can rate posts (not the poster) and that leads to the "star" ratings. But they have nothing to do with the Usenet audience at large, and many people reading and posting to the group have no idea about any star ratings.

-Mark Bole

sandybeth wrote on [Wed, 14 Nov 2007 07:37:22 -0600]:

I don't see any star ratings. I use a real newsreader

Maybe, but I doubt it. As Mark posted, it's purely a Google interface issue. But, when I'm at a public computer and look at this newsgroup, I've seen some of my best posts with only one or two stars, and others with higher. All in all, I'd say to just ignore it. If you frequent the group for a while, you'll sort through the wheat and chaff. For this group, consensus is usually a sign of the best advice. And this is one of those places where when I find people disagreeing with me, I actually go off and reconsider my own thinking. JOE

For a fee, I'll gladly rate your posts 5 stars everytime.

I think I first saw this in auction sites like Ebay. They decided there were insufficent resources for top-down policing (save for very egregious criminality) and would defer to "community policing" of buyers rating sellers, etc. Then over the years almost every interactive website added rating, with various degrees of use.

Oh goodie, I got 5 stars after my original post! Thank you interfacing, Yahoo, whatever... SandyBeth