Ah, I know what you mean. I have seen some users who have been on Fanpop for more than a year and haven't rated a single thing. It makes my soul hurt.

I have made a number of graphics, written articles and made picks in various spots about rating. I try and tell people how I rate and why rating is important and I am proud to say that I have influenced a few people (muhahahahahaha!). I have found that the best way is to not talk directly about rating, but sneakily mention rating and that way people seem to ask more questions about rating.

Also, whenever I see someone has commented on something without rating it, I will also comment, reminding them to rate too, but people do not often go back to look at the image again and see the rest of the comments. I have often thought about messaging people like that, but I would spend half my life doing that.

So I really don't know how to get people rating. The thing is, I think most people know about rating, because lord knows people always want their stuff rated, but people seem unwilling to return the favour. Of course, some people genuinely do not know what rating is or how to do it, but I think the majority do know what it is, but they are unwilling to put the time and effort (you know, those arduous seconds that it takes to contemplate a rating on a 1-5 scale and then click the mouse) to at least rate what they view.

One thing that I did think of was like a Rating Day/Week, where we do mass rating promotion. But that runs the risk of people only taking notice for a week and not really taking on board the message that you should rate as much as you can as fairly as you can.

So, to conclude the life-story that is this answer, I don't know how to get people to rate consistently, fairly, or even at all.

I was thinking about the possibility of standard user recognition for good rating, something like a badge they are awarded for rating, as an incentive, or perhaps (because people like to be competitive) a leaderboard for numbers of ratings over a given period (a week or a month, say). But I'm pretty much exhausted at trying to do stuff like that all by myself, and for whatever reason I haven't been good at getting others to participate in such Fanpop "events" in the past.

I know what you mean! Yeah, I have noticed that a few people have really gotten into the spirit of reaching rating milestones. For example, in this spot, a number of people will post screencaps of their rating trophies on their profiles when they reach 1000 ratings or 100000 ratings and son on. So even without an actual 'reward' for rating people are embracing the concept of being a rater. So I definitly think that an official reward system would motivate people to rate.
So I think that both the 'badge reward' and the leaderboard ideas are great and I would fully support implimenting something like that!

If only there were ratings still, then we could petition the Fanpop staff to create new "caps" for ratings...

Caps for ratings would be such a good idea! People would actually make an effort to rate some things! It's really sad to see spots with 40,000+ fans, and all the content is unrated!

Caps for ratings is my nightmare. Personally, I would hate that.

Dave said link that "your ratings trophy will be resurrected in a new form like a phoenix from the ashes" - which sounds like they're going for the cap thing. *groan*

But I don't want ratings caps. Don't they know that its my way or the highway, yo?

But a ratings cap would require *ratings*. Just a reminder: Ratings don't exist anymore.

Saying that you are a "fan" of something is COMPLETELY different than rating something, and having a cap for fanning stuff is an incredibly terrible idea. I recently derided such an idea as "Promiscuity Caps" in the Fanpop club.

Well, I guess I still call it rating because I'm only fanning stuff that I would have previously given 5 stars to anyway. To me, its still rating, because if I think if it as "fanning" my soul aches.

well we do have to remember that rating did become a whoring thing (like medals). MOST people didnt put a lot of consideration into rating (OOH MY FAVE SHIP I 5* THIS HOO CARES ABOOT CREDIT N KYWRDS) so i get why the system was removed. i will only, like missy, "fan" things that would have deserved 5*.
ratings were never..sadly...an orientation for me because of what i said above. 4.9 didnt tell me if the content was good.

i have a question: when was "rating" ever important when you cant MAKE people rate fairly? it never provided a guideline. so all i can think of is medals...

(also can i just say that 90% of fanpoppers these days wouldnt be able to follow this thread even if they tried?)

Well, I for one was actively promoting my style of rating. I had converted a large chunk of the House MD spot, and those people in turn converted people in other spots. So for a while in a few isolated spots, the bulk of the members were rating according to how much they liked the content, plus credits/keywords/titles etc. But that was just my philosphy on rating that I shared with others and a lot people thought it was logical and so adopted it. In the House MD Spot, it worked brilliantly, as bad content got such low ratings it deterred people from posting crap again. People learned more actively about how keywording etc is important for the running of Fanpop. Yeah, it was pretty much bribing people to add their content in a more helpful way (ie "Add some keywords and I'll rate this higher."), but that is kinda how the world works anyway: you do a good job, you get rewarded. I would argue that there was a period of time a while ago when people were taking a lot more pride in their uploading and were getting rewarded with more ratings and higher ratings because of it. Then again, that might have just been the bubble I was living in. But it was happening, almost without exception, in the House MD, which is one of the biggest spots here.
Once "fanning" came into effect, the good uploading continued for a while, but as new people came in, it became much, much harder to convince them that crediting/keywording etc was a good idea. Some would accept the arguments, but more often than not, they wouldn't care, because ratings didn't matter because people either fanned it, or they didn't. People just don't care about fanning in the way that they did about ratings.