The rating plugin that I’ve used on my site is provided by GD Star Rating (link HERE). It’s a powerful, free plugin for wordpress that “allows you to set up an advanced rating and review system for post and comments in your blog using single, multi and thumbs ratings.” More information is available on the wordpress.org web site HERE.

A summary of features is detailed below – but one of the really useful and perhaps underplayed features that is included within the rating system is the ability to record IP addresses of the visitors that vote on the various posts. A quick lookup using http://whois.domaintools.com revealed some interesting facts for me, when I was looking at the latest batch of votes… all of which occurred within minutes of each other today, and all originating from my ex-employer’s IP address! Surely people have better things to do than visit my personal web site and try to rank down my own posts?! But apparently not…

Anyway, for those of you genuinely interested in my posts and the features of this WordPress plugin I’ll go on…

It’s an extremely versatile plugin, offering a range of features, including:

  • Options for displaying the rating stars
  • Adding widgets into the sidebars for displaying the top ratings
  • Various other statistics can be displayed in the widgets too
  • Support for multi-ratings
  • Tech features include the use of caching and dynamic loading of data using ajax.

WPpluginreviews has posted a video review of the plugin on YouTube:

You can either download the plugin from within WordPress, using the install plugin options – or go HERE and click on the download button.