World of Warcraft®

As part of an ongoing series, we'll be highlighting some of the new World of Warcraft community site features. First on the list is the new rating feature available for both forum posts and comments on these front-page blog entries. Let's explore the ability to judge others' posts, shall we?

By rating a post you can like or dislike it based on the content. In order to post, and similarly rate a post, you'll need to be logged in and have a World of Warcraft license attached to your Battle.net account. (It will also be necessary to log into World of Warcraft and create a character if you wish to post.) When mousing over a post or comment you'll see thumbs-up (Like) and thumbs-down (Dislike) buttons. Clicking the thumbs-up is pretty obvious; you like what that post has to say. You either agree with the comment or like the content. In this way you can help promote like-minded comments without having to make a supporting post of your own.

If a post accrues a high enough ratio of thumbs-up ratings, it will gain a Highly Rated status. A Highly Rated post or comment will gain a brighter background, a green Highly Rated tag, be more prominent through use of the search feature, and (for forum posts) will contribute, among other factors, to the thread showing in the Popular Topics list.

Of course, the pendulum swings both ways and the thumbs-down button looms ominously above posts and comments, threatening to drag them into the murky depths of obsolescence. When you click the thumbs-down button, you'll be presented with a few options: Dislike, Trolling, and Spam. Very similar to clicking the thumbs-up button to like a comment, these choices move the post in the opposite direction. With enough down-votes from choosing Dislike, Trolling, or Spam, the post is dimmed, the colors become muted, and the post fades into the background making it easy to ignore in contrast with more well received posts.

A high enough ratio of Dislikes will bury a post. A buried post is completely hidden and a link has to be clicked to reveal the comment. By using Dislikes, unhelpful, incorrect, trolling, spamming, or content-devoid posts can be hidden so that the more constructive and highly-rated posts stand out.

Even though these ratings allow forum posts and comments to be hidden, that doesn't mean they should be used in lieu of moderation for posts that violate the Code of Conduct. This is where the last option in the thumbs-down button comes into play. By clicking on Report you'll be presented with a field where you can describe the violation and report the post to our moderation team for review.

Through this rating system, we hope we're providing a tool that the community will embrace and use to create a high-quality, informative, and friendly environment where productive and positive discussions can occur centered on the common ground of Blizzard games.

With great power comes great responsibility. You only have one vote per post; use it wisely.