I still want to say that there needs to be a quick, simple way for the general user to show their appreciation, or dislike of a certain addon in a way that is quick and simple for other users to see and understand. A 5-star rating system is perfect for this, except for a couple of caveats that come into play:
- You can't let everyone rank, or let anyone rank the same addon more than once. The users who can vote should have met some kind of criteria - such as registering, or being a member for more than 24 hours, or something, otherwise, you open the door for people to spam-rank, and stuff the ballot, so to speak.
- You want to have a large number of votes coming in. While I like the concept of having a committee of people who pick certain addons to rank in some way, unless that committee is made up of a lot of people, it's not going to really show the right data. Plus, it opens up a whole lot of other potential problems: what if, over time, half or more of the committee gets busy with other things and stops rating? Or some of them show a bias for certain types of addons (maybe it just so happens that most of them are hardcore raiders, and the others are hardcore PvPers, so addons that are specifically for roleplaying, or solo play either get ignored, slip through the cracks, or get bad ratings, even though they might be decent). Serious consideration would need to be done before this type of system could be implemented. The Pick of the Week sort of already fills this function, however, it seems like there are far more addons that are worth trying out than the PotW writers have time for...
Now, I don't know that I have any solutions... in my previous post, I tried to come up with something to 'fix' the problem, but now I think it's best to break it down into pieces.
Like I said before, when I first started using addons, and even now, when I'm looking for something new, it would be imensley helpful to have both a rating that I can see at a quick glance, as well as any reviews, or 'badges' or anything like that, in one place.
For instance, if I wanted to find a good map mod, and I'd never used one before or heard of one, the first thing I would do is go to the AddOns page, and the Map category. Right off the bat, I would be confused. There are a ton of mods for maps, and probably 90% perform a fairly small, specfic function. Which is fine, so I would want to try to find the ones that have the best rating, right there. Lets say that there are 2 that have a 5-star rating that I find: Cartographer, and Mapster. I should be able to pull up Cartographer's page, read about what it does and see the screenshots, but other than the 5-star rating, and without trying to find the comments that aren't questions/bug reports/etc, I wouldn't really know why this one has a 5-star rating, and how it compares to Mapster.
So I think that there needs to be another tab for each addon that allows users to actually write why they like/dislike an addon - call it 'reviews' or something like that. I also think that the users that have the ability to write addons should have to meet some type of criteria, such as a committee, or x posts in the forum, or whatever. So, the reviews could have a place to give specific ratings: ease of use, simplicity, design, concept, execution, etc, and give a percentage rating: 0% - 100%, which are all averaged to give an addon an overall score. Cartographer might have a 70% ease of use, a 30% simplicity, 80% design, 90% concept, 80% execution for an overall score of 70%. If multiple people review the same addon, their scores would all average together into a number that can be displayed next to the rating, so you would have 2 values to judge an addon on... sort of an overall community ranking, and an analysis by respected members of the community.
A system of 'badges' could also work very nicely - an addon that has ever been featured as a Pick of the Week could get a badge that is a link to that PotW's post, so you can quickly see what it said about the addon... you could have a badge that's given out by some people of the community for things like: "Quality Code", "Simple and Clean", "Must Have", etc. Each badge could also have a date built into it, so that you can tell if an addon was a "Must have" 6 months ago, before the Wrath Beta, and now it has a lower rating, since it's not used as much, or something like that. Speaking of... decaying ratings might be a good way to ensure that an addon is currently just as good as it was before, and that no one stuffed the ballot... I'm not sure how that would work exactly, but say I rate an addon today, and give it a 5/5. Someone else rates it next week, and gives it a 1/5, so it shows 3/5 or whatever. In a month, assuming no one else votes, it will show 1/5 - because my rank would have decayed - at least for a week, until the second rank decays. again, it might work, but it would need a lot more planning...