# Designing a "community rating" system **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [November 11, 2009, 2:16am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/designing-a-community-rating-system/178770 "2009-11-11T02:16:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2009, 2:16am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/designing-a-community-rating-system/178770/1 "2009-11-11T02:16:08Z")
I need to build a rating system for a project. The idea is that a number of different user actions within the system will contribute to an individual’s standing. Creating one kind of thing, reviewing something that someone else has done, participating in an activity…basically there are a set of disparate actions that will all add up to rank a user. I’m thinking that I’d like to accumulate these actions in a table so that if I need to tweak the ranking algorithm I can do that based on the existing data. My question is, what is the best way to mesh this into my application? Certainly I could add logic in each controller action as appropriate, but that is messy. I’d like something that has some separation from the main structure of the app. Joe ---
**Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2009, 3:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/designing-a-community-rating-system/178770/2 "2009-11-11T15:32:14Z")
Joe wrote: > I need to build a rating system for a project. […] I think there are plugins to do this; have you looked at them? > Joe ## Best, Marnen Laibow-Koser [http://www.marnen.org](http://www.marnen.org) removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid ---
**Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2009, 7:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/designing-a-community-rating-system/178770/3 "2009-11-11T19:42:14Z")
Joe wrote: > I haven’t seen any plugins that do this sort of thing. acts\_as\_rated? ## Best, Marnen Laibow-Koser [http://www.marnen.org](http://www.marnen.org) removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid ---
**Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2009, 8:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/designing-a-community-rating-system/178770/4 "2009-11-11T20:55:20Z")
That is something different, for a given type of model users can rate it. So for a blog system other users could rate each post. I need something more advanced, ratings (community standing, more accurately) are driven by how a user behaves in the system. For example on Yahoo! Answers you get points for signing up, for answering questions, having your answer selected as the best answer, etc. Joe On Nov 11, 10:42 am, Marnen Laibow-Koser \ **Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2009, 3:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/designing-a-community-rating-system/178770/5 "2009-11-11T15:55:01Z") I haven’t seen any plugins that do this sort of thing. I’m aware of things like communityengine and insooshi (railsspace) that provide a larger social networking site, but I need something that I can add to an existing application. Something “AOP-like” maybe? In a Java app I worked on we used JMS for communication across the tiers and it was convenient to then just persist the appropriate messages for this sort of thing. On Nov 11, 6:32 am, Marnen Laibow-Koser \ wrote: > Joe wrote: > > > I need to build a rating system for a project. ---
**Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2009, 12:30pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/designing-a-community-rating-system/178770/6 "2009-11-12T12:30:04Z")
Just riffing here… I would do this as observers on the models that when created increase my rating. In that I would save some form of rating event model that encapsulates the events. Having the models around would allow you to rerate everyone if you found that your weighting of events needs to be adjusted. Something along the lines of: [gist:232816 · GitHub](http://gist.github.com/232816) I would work it out first with an observer or two and then refactor down to a root observer that can be parameterized to do the right thing. Mark