Originally Posted by Lykofos
If you really want a rating system, then take a look at Slashdots comment rating system.
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I think that's a great idea too, and I'd like to take another stab at explaining what I was trying to get over before, because I don't think I explained it all that well.
Basically, a staff member would have a bunch of "tags" at their disposal, these tags would be things such as "Ease of Use", "Intuitive", "Well Designed", "Responsive Developer", and the likes. The tag system would have a private aside page for the developer, where if an editor didn't award a tag to a developer, they could tell the developer why and offer their advice. For example: "I found feature X in your mod very confusing because description Y seems to imply, perhaps if you changed this to this, it would be easier for new users to understand.". The developer could then act on that and possibly get a tag out of it from that staff member, or ignore it and not get the tag.
The only catch-22 with this is that the people who handle tags would have to be very, very carefully picked, they'd really have to be paragons of the community and Cairenn and Dolby would have to watch what they do carefully to ensure that the system is remaining fair and that as little bias as possible (preferably none) is getting mixed in.
Then, when a person looks at a mod, they may see something like:
Ease of Use x 2
Responsive Developer x 4
What the tags would be and how the advice handed out should be handled should be discussed
at length before it's implemented though, there should be a very tight ruleset explaining to everyone handing out these tags what, exactly, merits the awards of a tag and how they should approach those who hadn't earned their tags.
A good mod would then be obvious, because it may have a full selection of tags from every staff member. It would mean that the mod is good at doing what it claims to, it's well designed, and
most importantly the developer was willing to listen to constructive criticism.
It might also be advisable to allow users to approach editors in regards to a mod so that an editor could bring a problem to an author in a more responsible and respectful fashion.
I'm not sure whether this is a good system or not... but I just felt that the last time around I explained my thoughts really poorly, so this is stab two at it.