New Community Star Ratings Features for LaunchBox 7.15

[Jason Carr]

Hey all, new with LaunchBox 7.15 (which should be out early next week) are community star ratings features for LaunchBox and Big Box. These features will allow the community to share what the best games are for every platform. You can download all the community's ratings for your games by going to Tools > Download Metadata and Media in LaunchBox, and then you can sort and filter by the ratings in both LaunchBox and Big Box. Your ratings will also optionally be submitted to the games database for other users when you rate your games. Check out the screenshots below:

There are many pieces to these new features; ETA Prime will put out a tutorial video shortly after the 7.15 release next week, but we can use this thread for discussion in the mean time.

There are a few related settings you can tweak under Tools > Options > Search:

They should be mostly straightforward and obvious; the minimum number of community ratings setting will allow you to specify how many community ratings are required before they are considered valid and show up in filtering and sorting (for games that you have not personally rated).

Remember that you have to download the ratings via Tools > Download Metadata and Media before any community ratings will show up. Enjoy!

[Lordmonkus]

Just so I understand it correctly and can answer people when they ask, checking the "Upload Star Rating" box will automatically upload your rating to the database and nothing else ? Also you don't have to upload anything else like the cloud saving or anything correct ?

[Jason Carr]

1 minute ago, Lordmonkus said:

Just so I understand it correctly and can answer people when they ask, checking the "Upload Star Rating" box will automatically upload your rating to the database and nothing else ? Also you don't have to upload anything else like the cloud saving or anything correct ?

That is indeed correct. The only information sent up is a user identifier (just a random ID to prevent you from rating multiple times), the game ID, and your star rating value.

If you are logged into the cloud in LaunchBox, then that ID will be tied to your account and your ratings will also show on the LaunchBox Games Database website for you as well. If you're not logged into the cloud, then all we know about you is that you're a random person with ID "323DF-E2353-FDSEF-ERES43-34225" for example. (And of course that you rated Super Mario World at 3 stars. Shame on you.)  

[Lordmonkus]

Cool, good to know.

I don't use any of the cloud stuff at all but I am interested in sharing my ratings.

[dov_EL]

Jason pls create Shutdown button in Home screen , example enter function, press a button (10 sec) to Shutdown

[Retro808]

3 hours ago, dovella said:

Jason pls create Shutdown button in Home screen , example enter function, press a button (10 sec) to Shutdown

In the meantime a user wrote a useable AHK to shutdown from within BigBox you can try out. Here

[dov_EL]

4 hours ago, Retro808 said:

In the meantime a user wrote a useable AHK to shutdown from within BigBox you can try out. Here

ThankYou

[Jason Carr]

On 12/8/2017 at 11:55 PM, dovella said:

Jason pls create Shutdown button in Home screen , example enter function, press a button (10 sec) to Shutdown

Good to know @dovella. Probably won't get that in before the release, but maybe we can put it on the poll.

[dov_EL]

Thank You !!