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Thanks for feedback James.
Other than the recommendation ratings is there anything else that would improve the profiles in your view?
Also profiles suck balls now :(
Well I was ranked #51 so you know where I sit on this.
I stopped using the site when my hard earned rankings vanished. I came back today hoping they were back. Until they are back I have no interest in responding to forum questions or sending potential employers here.
I'd go with restoring the old ones. I don't think recommendations "expire" on any other site.
Okay - we're strongly considering bringing back some form of recommendations. A big point of debate is whether we import the data from the old system. I suspect those who had high ratings from back then would be keen for us to do so, but how relevant are they? Because there was no date component to them some of them will be over 5 years old - how useful is that to people looking for a well-regarded Rails developer today? Obviously a good developer 5 years ago is probably still pretty decent (or indeed, even better) but are they still active on the Rails scene? We could start afresh. Or perhaps we could show the old rating, but also show a new rating, based on everybody starting from zero. Thoughts?
I returned to check out the site after a long hiatus and was confused. The ratings were gone, no contributions, no recommendations, links are broken, etc. No explanation or roadmap posted anywhere.
Two things your should consider: 1) at the bottom of every profile page, there should be a notice. Something like "WWR has re-launched with a new format. Please read our announcement which covers these changes." 2) Notice on the home page with the same
Then there needs to be a post explaining what you changed and why you did it. I couldn't find anything except "And we're back" with some technical reasons, and a few complaints in the forums.
Yes ratings and rankings were criticized, but frankly it was one of the only reasons your site was relevant. For people that were ranked well, they proudly linked to your site. For those that were unhappy with their rankings, they asked friends to recommend them. Now there's not much here worth looking at.
If I wanted to find someone based on skills, Linkedin is ok. But this site was nice because it was ratings of ONLY Rails developers, recommended by OTHER rails developers. LinkedIn can not do that. This was what made your site special, and you have drawn the wrong conclusions by looking at LinkedIn in this way. Consider your niche: Rails!
Thanks for the thoughts Matt.
The problem with the whole recommendations and ratings system was that we were very heavily criticised in some circles for the ease with which someone could grow their own profile and rankings. A further concern is that these days that market, at least of recommendations and endorsements, is pretty much sewn up by LinkedIn.
If you can think of good ways to overcome these problems, i.e. make the system more robust and do something from LinkedIn then we'd really love to hear your ideas and we'd definitely try to implement them.
We're not ruling out anything at this point (except the spam) so any further thoughts are welcomed.
Will you be bringing back the recommendations that existed? It was nice to be in the top 100, but far more important were the comments people left about me, and me about them. It was a way of documenting a year or so of conference and client hopping. I am very fond of those memories, and of the few times it came up and I was able to run down those lists again.
I'm glad the site is being relaunched, but I'll be very disappointed if the existing data doesn't come back.
