How do you know the advice you receive in these forums is good advice? You don’t. This is just a place for people to throw out ideas.
HOWEVER, if people took the time to rate threads and give reputation to other community members that help them out, it would be easy to spot people that have good reputations.
Here are the rating/reputation indicators in use in these forums and anyone that is logged in can participate:
THREAD RATINGS:
As you are looking at a forum, you may see a few threads with gold stars by them. This is the thread rating ranging from 5 stars (excellent) to one star (terrible). It’s a quick indicator of how useful the thread is to the community. It just takes a few seconds to rate a thread by clicking on the rating once you are inside a thread.
USER TITLE:
The user title is something we have fun with…it changes with level of participation. Of course there are some special titles like “Global Moderator” or “Administrator” or “Novell Knowledge Partner” that set these folks apart.
PARTICIPATION GRAPHIC:
See the small geekos under someone’s title? That’s just a graphical representation of their amount of participation. It’s based purely on the number of posts they have (not the quality).
REPUTATION:
As you’re looking at a message, you may see one or more small green indicators on the right side of the header block. This indicates the amount of “reputation” that user has earned from other users. You can give someone reputation points by clicking on the REPUTATION button in a message header.
The more the rating and reputation indicators get used, the more valuable they will become. I’d like to encourage you to take the few seconds it takes to participate. I wonder what rating this thread will get?.. 