I mentioned last week that I added a "rate this post" feature to my blog using the Drupal fivestar module.

There is a serious usability issue with this module. If you don't show the rating widget on the article teaser then visitors probably won't know there is a rating feature, and so there may not be a lot of rating activity. (The teaser is the first few paragraphs of the entry, displayed on the blog page.)

Comments work similarly to ratings. You have to click through to the full article to leave a comment, just as you do a rating. This, however, doesn't present the same problem as article ratings. First, visitors tend to know that if a blog supports comments, you have to click through to the full article to access the comments. Article ratings aren't a common feature, so visitors don't expect them.

Moreover, the Drupal content system puts a comment link at the bottom of the teaser. That indicates to visitors they can leave a comment, and takes them right to the place to do so. There is no such function for ratings. The only way a user would know that an article can be rated is if they click through and scroll to the bottom.

I thought that if fivestar had the ability to display a rate link below the teaser, it would help encourage article rating. I put together a small patch to add this. That's why you should be seeing rate links on all the teasers on my mail blog page.

You can find the feature request and patch for this here: http://drupal.org/node/203286