01 January, 2004
  • ArtWanted.com Staff
  • 2,872 Views

Disabled Ratings/Comments

With regret, we have turned off our ratings, comments & top artist features of our website. This is only temporary and it should be back up next month, once we have found a system that most of our members can be happy with.

The biggest reason for this is that most of our day is spent investigating voting patterns and artist inquiries about low votes. All of the time that we have to create improvements and fixes to ArtWanted have been spent looking into ratings issues. Almost half of our message board postings are about ratings and the rating system. We simply just don't have any more time to investigate these issues and continue to neglect the website for much needed improvements.

We will be turning back on the ability to leave comments on artwork this week, but the ratings will remain hidden until we come up with a new system that is planned to be launched in February.

We have some of our best and most active members of our site threaten to leave it unless something is changed, so we have turned off our ratings to show to our members that we are listening. We have already had some people leave our website due to the ratings sytem, that would still be paying members if we had not added the ratings feature in October.

When we launched our new rating system in October, we had no idea of the backlash it would create. All of a sudden we had mad people all over the place upset with low votes on their artwork when it was undeserved. Our message boards were filled with threats and complaints that all tied back to the rating system. It's unfortunate that a small group of voters had to ruin it for everyone else.

We know that this will upset some of our members by this decision, but it was the only way to get some much needed work done to the website and take a break from the ratings issues. We encourage everyone to fill out the survey on the rating system inside your members area if you have not already done so. This will give us valuble feedback on how the new system will be created.

Thanks for your membership and participation on ArtWanted.com and please continiue to send us your suggestions on how we can improve it.

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