what are the stars for?

We are pleased to bring you more exciting innovation from our team here at myLot! We have developed a new algorithm that now ranks a myLot user’s reputation. The myLot reputation rating takes into account various factors including discussion ratings and is based on a scale of 0 to 10 stars with 10 stars being the highest. These stars currently appear next to usernames in discussions. At this point, you may be asking yourself “What about the user rating number that appears next to everybody’s name? Isn’t that for ranking a user?”. The user rating that you are familiar with ranks the level of a user’s activity on myLot. For example, a user with a rating of 1,500 is fairly active on myLot, but the rating really tells you nothing about the quality of the user’s activity or how the user is perceived by the myLot community. The new myLot reputation algorithm ranks the quality of the user’s contributions to myLot, as perceived by the myLot community. Users with a user rating of less than 100 will not yet have myLot reputation calculated, and will therefore have no star next to their name. myLot reputation updates once per day, so most users should see their reputation appear shortly after reaching a user rating of 100. Remember, myLot reputation is determined by the myLot community, and it is cumulative for all user contributions. Therefore, myLot reputation can fluctuate even without a user participating on any given day. In addition, you shouldn’t think of a particular myLot reputation level as necessarily being “good” or “bad”. It just means that a user with a reputation of 8 is generally more highly thought of by the myLot community than a user with a reputation of 5, and so on and so forth. It doesn’t mean that 8 stars means “good user” and 5 stars means “bad user”. Both are valuable members of the myLot community. As you might have guessed, the best way to increase your reputation is by contributing quality topics, responses and comments and avoid posting low-quality content or items that violate the myLot community guidelines.