There has been lots of interest in our new ratings system after yesterday’s post. There were also a lot of questions. Let me try to address some of the most common questions I’ve been hearing:

Why do I have to have a NewsGator Online account to rate posts?

If we didn’t require registration, it would be too easy for someone to spam the ratings. As it is, it’s still possible if someone were to create a number of online accounts, but at least it’s a small barrier to having someone rate a post a “5” hundreds of times to get it pushed to the top of the ratings pages.

Can I programmatically access the ratings data?

Yes!  Well, not yet…but we’re designing an API as we speak to be able to save and retrieve ratings. If you build an aggregator or a publishing tool, and you’re interested in integrating our ratings with your product, please contact me ASAP.

If we can all share one rating system, I think we all win in the end, since we’ll have more complete data to work with.

But then doesn’t NewsGator own all the data?

Well, we indeed store the data – yes. But it has to be stored somewhere. And our intent is to programmatically expose this data to those who are interested (within privacy and other constraints). The API isn’t written yet, but this is definitely the intent – it will be coming soon.

In a nutshell – if you build a product that uses our rating system, and you want aggregate data to do some cool stuff for your users, we’ll provide it to you as best as we can.

I added the script to my template, but it doesn’t work. Why?

Well, I don’t know…but if you post on the NewsGator forums about it, we’ll try to get you squared away.