lackattack wrote:Hmmm edbeard you might be influencing me. So instead of allowing retroactive rating of people you left feedback for, we just showing a frozen view of old feedback (link on profile) eh?
I'd be alright with that if we only showed old feedbacks that are less than 6 months old, so the old stuff would wither away and I can scrap it entirely after 6 months.
Folks, what do the rest of you think of this?
OK, some thoughts on the whole "thing". It's a bit biased from a behind the scenes perspective, but hey, what can I say

Positives of keeping the transition period:
1) lose some/a lot of the old, but get rid of the old system completely, all it's flaws, problems and work.
2) You start most people out with at least a few ratings - this means that negs are more likely to average out and people are less likely to complain/feel hurt in the early stages of the system (from Jan-March of 2008, only 6.6% of ALL feedback left was negative so people will start off with a generally positive rating on average) <---BIG plus for me.
3) Retaliation from old feedback
probably wont be that rife - For the same time period (jan-march) we deleted 0.82% of total feedback (or 13% of total negatives). Lets assume that all of that was because it was retaliatory (even though it's not) and then double it for retaliatory
ratings based on negative
feedback because there are 2 people involved and we are at a whopping 1.64% of
new ratings are going to be retaliatory. Even if you calculated it as ALL negative feedback left will get a retaliatory rating that comes out to a MAX of 13.2% of the new rating system is retaliatory (if we assume all negatives were one sided and for every one negative there will therefore be a new retaliatory rating...which we all know isn't the case, but hey, it's a worst case calculation). Really? We're going to scrap the transition period because of a worst case abuse scenario or 13.2% and a likely abuse of 1% (18% of negatives were complained about. that means ~1% of
total feedback was complained about. Lets assume every complaint was about or leads to a retaliatory rating giving the 1% abuse).
Positives of keeping feedback viewable at least for a little while.
1) reduce the possibility of retaliation - retaliation could start us off with a wave of "he left me a retaliatory rating - delete please" and we can only come back with "sorry, we don't do that, it will average out in the long run if you behave well...or use the mutual withdraw"
2) You save the majority of the information from before that you would have lost...but you still keep the old system with all its flaws (if we wanted to make it disappear, it would probably make more sense to have it removed once someone drops off the scoreboard for the first time. At current attrition rates, the only people left with old feedback would be the die hards who are probably going to want to keep it anyway...and in 6 months or a year when they have 300 ratings, it might not matter so much anyway and we can be rid of the system finally then.)
3) no need to pre-populate the wall and we can really push the "the wall isn't the new feedback" that seems to have been lost in the conversation. (this would be the main reason to keep viewable feedback rather than transitions for me.)
I also think a lot of the people who read this thread early on and said or thought "ooh, transition, nice I like that" and then never came back are going to be a bit surprised if they find that it's suddenly changed.