In search of...Wordpress star ratings plugin

[app103]

I need a good simple 5-star ratings plugin for Wordpress, to allow visitors to rate posts without requiring that they sign up, log in, leave a comment, etc.  Something that they can just click and go.

I used to have comments open on the blog but found that most visitors responded better to a simple star rating widget, requiring nothing more than a single click to leave feedback. After reviewing a few years worth of comments and finding that 95% of them were spam and the rest useless, I closed comments and hid all existing comments on posts.

I am currently using an old offsite 3rd party service (JS-Kit) to insert the ratings system into the posts. JS-Kit was sold and they no longer offer this service to new blogs. I don't have much faith that this service will continue in the future and I'd like to find a replacement for it, that doesn't rely on a 3rd party offsite service.

Do any of you have any experience with any of the many plugins available, to guide me in the right direction to a plugin that works well, is actively developed and supported, in which documentation, faq, bug reports, etc. are not hidden behind a paywall? Bonus points if I can manually set the initial ratings level individually for each post (about the only way I could possibly import existing ratings).

I was considering trying GD Star Rating, till I noticed that the developer deleted his site and the original free user forum with all the documentation for it and hid most of the content behind a "pay for support" forum, in which you can't even gain read-only access, without paying. From what I understand, it's a rather complex plugin and not documented very well, difficult to get working properly without having access to the additional material that used to be available for free on the developer's site. Sure, I could access some of the original content on archive.org's Wayback Machine, but there is no way of knowing if any of the info is outdated or still applies to the current version of the plugin. Also, any documentation of newer features would not be there. For this reason, I have low confidence for this plugin and will not consider it.

[vlastimil]

I am afraid, my reply won't be helpful, but have you considered using something simpler than a 5-star rating system? As recently mentioned on DC https://www.donation...topic=32014.msg29749 people have problems rating on a 5-step scale. Facebook's Like is a friendlier alternative, even youtube dropped star ratings and adopted   I have used a 5-star rating system on my web for years and there are indeed problems with it - each person uses the scale differently - some only give 5 stars and 4 stars, others only give 5 stars or not rate at all, trolls just give 1 star to everything they see, others give random number of stars...  If I had the choice now, I would choose a simple like button instead (and possibly also counted number of impressions to be able to compare likes/impressions ratio).

[rgdot]

I only tried it to test, didn't actually use it on a live site

http://wordpress.org...gins/wp-postratings/

[app103]

I am afraid, my reply won't be helpful, but have you considered using something simpler than a 5-star rating system? As recently mentioned on DC https://www.donation...topic=32014.msg29749 people have problems rating on a 5-step scale. Facebook's Like is a friendlier alternative, even youtube dropped star ratings and adopted  I have used a 5-star rating system on my web for years and there are indeed problems with it - each person uses the scale differently - some only give 5 stars and 4 stars, others only give 5 stars or not rate at all, trolls just give 1 star to everything they see, others give random number of stars...  If I had the choice now, I would choose a simple like button instead (and possibly also counted number of impressions to be able to compare likes/impressions ratio).

-vlastimil (August 25, 2012, 04:09 AM)

First of all, this isn't for visitors to let me know if they like my posts or not. This is more of a book review system, where they are rating the books, for the benefit of other visitors. Personally, I could care less what they rate them, the info isn't for me. I tried allowing visitors to leave book reviews as comments, but that didn't work out well. I think I only had one actual review in the 6 years the site has been running on Wordpress. Nearly everything else was spam, requests for pirated books, and thank you messages.

While it might be true that people may have trouble rating on a 5 step scale, they have even more trouble bothering to write a paragraph or 2 to express their thoughts and feelings about a book. 

It's also kind of hard to move from a 5-star system to a thumbs up/down system, transferring previous stats to a new system. It's easy going from stars to stars, though, which is what I wanted to do.

I only tried it to test, didn't actually use it on a live site

http://wordpress.org...gins/wp-postratings/

-rgdot (August 25, 2012, 04:59 AM)

Thanks! Gave it a try and it seems to be perfect. Less than a minute to install, configure, and add it to the template...and a settings tweak allowed me to be able to attempt to duplicate the old ratings/number of votes before commenting out the JS-Kit code. Now as long as it doesn't break every time I have to upgrade/update Wordpress, I am all set.