Over the weekend, we had 2 different VAs to take it upon themselves to try and get in the Top 5 list on the home page. While being on this list is good for you VA, the way in which they tried is not acceptable. Each VA had a member vote their respective VA with a 5 rating and then turned around and rated the remaining Top 5 VAs with a 1 rating. This serves no purpose other than to try and benefit themselves. Each VA was notified and a few members rating privileges were taken away.

The rating system is supposed to be a simple way for other to see how people view your VA. The problem is that when people take it upon themselves to trash other VAs for no reason its takes away from the other VAs. Should we remove the VAs who are doing this from the site or just ban their members? Should we give them warnings? Should we just ignore it as turnabout is fair play? The current stance is that if you are caught, your rating rights will be removed. We have close to 500 registered users now and so far 3 have had their voting rights taken away. While that is a low percentage, its still disturbing that people feel they can rate others poorly just because they can. As I have mentioned before, if you do not know anything about a VA, how can you honestly rate it.

I have been given several suggestions as to how to make the rating system better but all of them require more time and overhead than I feel is needed. If people would just be honest and vote for VAs in an honest manner, we would not need to revamp the rating system. I would like to think everyone is honest and has honest intentions but our rating system shows that both VA members and VA CEOs will rate other VAs simply because they can and they use their own criteria to do so.