Your ratings are valuable even if your contribution is not immediately evident. Please consider the following:

• Before the community rating is displayed with a message it must be rated by at least three people. If no rating has been given, you see "Not yet rated" next to the message, if only one rating has been given you see "1 Rating," if two ratings have been given you see "2 Ratings," and if the message has been given three or more ratings, you see the average rating for that message.
• Keep in mind that your rating is combined with all the ratings made by other members of the community. For this reason, it might not be immediately evident that your rating was counted in the overall rating of a message. However, you can be assured that your rating was saved and used.

Consider this example. If five people rated a message, each giving it 3 stars, its current rating would be 3. If you then rated the message 4 stars, your single rating would not have enough weight to move the overall rating from 3 to 4 stars. However, if other members give 4 or 5 star ratings, their ratings in combination with yours, could eventually make the difference and improve the overall rating for that message.

Please also make sure that when you give a rating, you are clicking the scale below the message. To rate a message, mouse over the grey stars that appear just below the message text. As you do so, they turn red and display the label showing what each star represents. When you decide on the rating you want to give, click a star and a button to save your rating appears. You cannot change your rating after it has been saved.