I fully understand the frustration the authors may feel when a troll with nothing to prove their expertise starts giving bad ratings or irrelevant advice.

I have pulled some data from the gallery database and currently there are 5504 reviews. 4349 of them were written by people, who have also uploaded at least 1 icon or cursor set, 1155 were done by people, who never uploaded anything.

Overall, the number of stars given to a set does not seem to differ too much between authors and lurkers. Authors have given 41% of 5-star rating and 8.8% of half-star ratings. Non-authors are actually a bit more generous - they have given 48% of 5-star ratings and 8.2% of half-star ratings.

The final rating of a set is computed as a simple average of the individual ratings. This probably is not the best way, some ratings are obviously more representative and should be given more weight. Though figuring out the right formula may be tricky.

An alternative would be drop the star rating system and replace it with a simple Like button or maybe with Like/Dislike options. Then the number of Likes divided by a number of page views would be representative of the set quality and could be expressed by stars. But I do not have the page view statistics on hand - I have added a counter week or two ago, but it is unreliable - you can see the number of page views when you hover your mouse over the download counter.

Always nice to know you are on the job!
& sorta good with the figures!
I prefer the stars, personally, to the like button..
and I would much prefer the like/dislike to a simple like button, esp if it involves FB likes.

I, more or less, was venting and reminding others (as well as myself) that we need to try to be fair in rating -- especially when you have nothing to show that you understand what may go into the creation process somewhat.

I like how you have the website set up. I don't think there is much room for improvement, but there is always room for improvement I believe in anything.

Thanks for doing the math for us and keep up the good work!

For any who find this of interest, I have mellowed with a few years and over 100 icon sets under my wing. We all need to blow off a little steam once in a while. I still want fairness but realize that it will not always be present. No one likes a bad review, no one likes to see others treated unfairly but it happens. It is best to make the best of it and simply move on, don't let it worry you. Keep trying, keep producing works of art and soon you will find that a couple of bad reviews is a small price to pay for dealing with the public at large.

Also, in the interest of fairness, it isn't very fair of me to judge all non-contributors so harshly. There are plenty of non-contributing members that give very thoughtful good reviews and I believe we need their input.