From: Mark Bole 
Newsgroups: misc.invest.financial-plan
Subject: Re: yellow stars
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2007 09:35:07 -0600
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sandybeth wrote:
> Maybe I'm an idiot, but I don't understand what the star rating means
> next to some posts...can someone briefly explain?  Are they rating the
> post or the poster?  The interest of the post or how many replies or
> what?
> SandyBeth

The "star ratings" you are talking about are strictly an artifact of 
Google Groups. That's your brief answer, but to really understand, some 
background is necessary to get to a full answer...

This group, and all of Usenet, have been around a long time.  For more 
background, the Wikipedia article on "Usenet" is a good start.

Then, Google came along and bought some archives from Deja News (or 
rather, they bought Deja News, or some other company that owned Deja 
News, I forget the details), so now they have the largest collection of 
stored messages from a very large collection of Usenet groups.  (Usenet 
itself is a distributed database, which by default ages out and discards 
older messages).

Then, Google decide to try to make money on this by setting up their own 
"Google Groups" (similar to Yahoo! Groups), and burying Usenet groups 
somewhere within -- hoping, perhaps, that people would think Usenet was 
a Google product.

Now, anyone can view Google Groups (including the Usenet section buried 
within) if they visit Google's ad-supported site, and with a Google 
login, they can also post to such groups -- for many, this is a 
convenient and cheap way to get Usenet access, which normally must be 
paid for via your ISP or some other service.

 From Google help:

"What do ratings mean and how do they work?
	
"Ratings help indicate which posts you find most helpful. When you're 
browsing a group, you can rate a post and your rating will become part 
of that post's overall rating."

So, other Google account users can rate posts (not the poster) and that 
leads to the "star" ratings.  But they have nothing to do with the 
Usenet audience at large, and many people reading and posting to the 
group have no idea about any star ratings.

-Mark Bole