A Suggestion about New Compositions (not scans) and Ratings

[jeff_harrington]

I've recently received a number of one star ratings to 4 or 5 of my compositions which are tangos. I've received one star ratings before and it never bothered me, but these appear to be the same guy in a kind of 'driveby' manner meaning 'I hate this guy's approach to the Tango'.

I've been debating about what is appropriate to do... and I'm kind of at a loss. It's not cool that my new solo cello tango, got a one star rating as it has already garnered a significant bit of public recognition, having been transcribed by a great bass player to be premiered next month in Texas and the solo cello tango itself will be premiered by a great cellist in the Fall. I've had one of the greatest cellists in the world say it's wonderful, publicly on Twitter so this is, to put it kindly, a BS rating. The rater enjoys an anonymity that is inappropriate for this level of dismissal.

http://imslp.org/wiki/Tango_del_Aquelarre_(Harrington,_Jeffrey_Michael)

Now the ratings serve a healthy purpose when it comes to scan quality but when it comes to new music and the nature of new music criticism online I don't think the same type of rating system is appropriate. One minute it's a visual quality statement, the next it's a musical quality statement.

I've had a number of ideas:

1. Selectively allow for the composer to turn off ratings piece by piece (like YouTube comments).
2. Allow the composer to ask for a rating reset. This is to prevent trolling behavior.

Other than that, I see no other recourse except to ask for my friends to rate my pieces, starting a ridiculous ratings war and that's just going to produce another level of counterproductive behavior.

[kalliwoda]

Unfortunately, even for the scan quality, there seem to be a lot of rating-trolls underway.

If you want to reset ratings on a particular piece, you already now have that possibility by uploading a new version of the file (click on the file number next to the download arrow).

[jeff_harrington]

Will that reset the download count?

EDIT: Apparently so!

[kalliwoda]

No, it does not reset the download counter!
The download counter reappears without reset once the new version has been approved in the copyright-review.

[perlnerd666]

I actually really like the idea of "reset" and "disable" buttons for ratings.