Beginning today, we’ve made some important changes in the Review/Rating system here on Tasty Kitchen!

As many of you know, Tasty Kitchen was launched less than a year ago. It’s been just wonderful watching so many of you join, participate, and share your best dishes with the community of awesome folks here. All bias aside, it has seriously become my new go-to recipe source whenever I’m in search of something specific.

Of course, all new sites are works in progress and I knew from the get-go that I’d need to continually tweak things here and there to make everything work perfectly. One of the most important areas that has needed work—and the number one source of concern from the community—has always been the Ratings/Reviews system for recipes. As many of you pointed out, it was a little too easy to click on the red mitt rating system and assign arbitrary ratings to this recipe or that, and many who submitted recipes found it frustrating (rightly so) that anyone could click on one or two mitts and lower the overall rating of their recipes. Also, it was a little too easy to accidentally click on the wrong mitt rating—and with no way for this to be undone, the rating stuck.

Another common complaint: the Reviews section. The “Reviews” were actually more in line with a regular “Comments” section—while there were many legitimate reviews from folks who’d made the recipe in question, there were also just general comments relating to the recipe, things like “This looks yummy” or “I make something similar to this at Christmastime every year.” Both categories of dialog are absolutely welcome and an important aspect of the community—but we realized over time that it was important for Reviews and Comments to be separate.

So here are the changes, which just went into effect today:

 
REVIEW:

COMMENT:

1. On recipes, Reviews and Comments will be in separate (tabbed) sections. You must be logged in to leave either a Review (feedback if you’ve made the dish) or Comment (general discussion/remarks)

2. In order to leave a Rating (1 through 5 mitts), you must also leave a Review. Assigning the mitt rating is part of the Review dialog box.

 
 
These changes should really make a difference when it comes to searching for tried and true recipes. You can read honest Reviews from those who’ve made, served, and gobbled down the recipe, and you can read general feedback from others in the Comments. Best of both worlds!

A few important things to keep in mind:

* All Reviews posted before today will automatically revert to Comments. There really wasn’t any way for the system to discern the difference in past Reviews/Comments, so to be on the safe side, we’ve made them all Comments. If you have tried and reviewed recipes here on Tasty Kitchen and would like your Review to be included in a recipe’s overall rating, feel free to go ahead and leave a new Review.

* All Mitt Ratings before today have been erased. We realize this is a radical move and will mean that we are all, in essence, “starting from scratch” with our recipe ratings. However, we felt that it was important to the overall integrity of Tasty Kitchen’s ratings system to begin with a blank slate and remove all ratings from the old system, which was fraught with error. Don’t worry, though—I intend to make my way through many of my favorite recipes I’ve tried and bring the ratings up to date. In no time, the ratings will be built back up again.

* You will not be able to review and rate your own recipe.

* You can only rate and review a recipe once. If for any reason you want to change a review or rating that you’ve made, you can now delete your review AND rating, and leave a new one.

* If you’re used to sorting recipe searches by rating, keep in mind that the pages will turn up empty/scarce while the ratings being to repopulate throughout the site. To help with that process, we encourage you to go back to the recipes you’ve tried and review them.

And that’s it!

Implementing these changes ensures that all ratings are based on reviews left by those who have actually tried the recipe. So while it may be painful to see everything reset to zero, in the long run, this will make the recipe ratings a more reliable gauge of people’s actual experience with the recipe.

I LOVE YOU, MAN!

Thank you for being patient, not only throughout this post…but during this small adjustment period! I’m confident this new change will be a super improvement for the recipe community here on Tasty Kitchen.

Ree