TAG :: Toronto Area Geocachers » ratings

There’s an interesting thread that popped up in the Groundspeak forums today. We’ve known since the November site update that cache ratings are on their way. Now, we have a date – Dec 31.

In the feedback system, a quote was made by Jeremy Irish, that indicates we’ll be seeing a form of a rating system by the end of the year

We will complete our first attempt at a rating system by the end of the month. In lieu of a generic (and IMO unhelpful) 1-5 star rating system we have decided to let people rate a percentage of their finds as their favorites.

This favorite count will then be displayed on the cache listing. The beta feature will initially be introduced to Premium Members but will eventually opened up to all users.

We will also be exploring other ways to identify the best caches to encourage quality. Quality of the game is one of the major themes for 2011.

Now, this could be seen as a rushed response to Garmin’s 1-5 “awesomeness” rating system. It will be far simpler, being the Groundspeak equivalent of a “Like” button. You can favourite a certain percentage of your finds, and the number of “Favourites” will be visible on the cache page. No word about being able to filter on this yet.

One thing we do know from the November release notes is that this was planned before the Opencaching site came out of the woodwork. At the end of the day, it’s the geocaching community that will win out.