The migration from my style/not my style voting over to our new 5 star rating system is almost complete. A few things might be a little broken while we complete the transition. If you run into something, please drop us a note at beta@eduStyle.net and we’ll try to get it fixed up. For those interested we thought we’d post some of the rationale for the move and how this will affect some of the rankings.

Why are we changing?

Over the almost 4 years of running eduStyle we have noticed a few things about how people use the site. Having only two choices has led to a common dilemma. If I think the site is ok, but not great I have 3 options:

1. Vote my style and potentially dilute the votes on the truly great sites
2. Vote not my style and risk giving the impression of a more negative view than I actually have for the site
3. Don’t vote

Unfortunately none of those options really reflect how I feel about the site. This most often leads to the 3rd choice. We think this is broken. Two choices just do not give you a very precise way to register your opinion on a site. For a review focused site like ours this is not good enough (the case maybe different for site with a different focus).

There some other situations around abuse and protest voting that we are trying to correct as well but we figured the move would bring benefit all the way around and give us a chance to rebuild some of those 4 year old systems.

What happens to all my old votes?

They have all been migrated to the new 5 star systems. What that means is if you voted “my style” that will be moved over as 5/5 stars. If you selected “not my style” that becomes the lowest rating of 0.5/5 stars. With the new freedom of having 5 stars to choose from you may want to go back and amend some of your previous votes.

I liked the old system, can we go back?

Sorry no, we’re moving forward not back. Just limit yourself to voting either 5 or 0.5 stars it is pretty much the same.

Last thoughts

I don’t have any, but if you do leave them in the comments. Now go vote, the place is pretty useless without it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 16th, 2010 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.