[siliconjon]

I'm all for a greater product yields a greater reward in the way of revamping the system. The thing I like great about other site systems is the community reward. I look for great deals and share them in exchange for others to do the same for me. As a consumer this can easily pay more than $1 per deal. A great Deal site also requires more than just thank-you replies to register the users' thanks for such contributions, which we do have here, but there's a more complex issue with it.

A more complex rating system would be great. First, I think the ability to rank a post negative is nice, even if a bit hard to take for the thin skinned. I also like the ability to have a categorical "why" value for the ranking provided by the user. One thing I haven't seen at the few sites I frequent is a more powerful voting value. FW & SD allow only a single up or down vote, or abstain from voting. This works well enough since they have a very large voting audience, but for a site with a smaller base of readers/participants something a bit more powerful may help. Perhaps something like a -3 to +3 (Horrible, Bad, I've seen Better, [Average] , Better than average, great deal, Unreal Deal). Then the question would be how to display this graph - would it be a three-dimensional representation of the number of participants giving each rank, emphasizing the median or mean value (I like fancy), or display only the aggregate total. Once the site grows in participation this system will still work very well for deal rating.

It really isn't all the different from what's already implemented here, except we've moved the 3-star value to Zero, and added one more rating on each end. This accomplishes a greater feeling of control for the voter, and slightly more detailed feedback result for the shopper, but in an easier to guage format than the star rating.

Also important is the ability for the community to flag a deal as dead, even though oversights can cause good deals to be flagged as dead by not reading the instructions on obtaining some unusual deals. Such deals can be taken out of the "live deals" area for improved search results.

The more information the better ability to provide the quality information that allows a deal site to provide immense value to its members. Give the members of the community the ability to best provide each other the profit of savings, and the system will pay for itself and thrive.