User-defined Skill Rankings

[Brandon Strader]

Hi.

I thought this would be useful.. if you could set the skill level for your instruments listed in your profile. If you're set to collab and you list instruments, you could also list your skill level. Maybe either as a star level (1 to 10) or word-based (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Professional etc).

This would be useful to help you find collaborators. People would set their own levels, like I could set my flute level at beginner, mandolin at intermediate, ukulele at beginner, and say death growls at professional

Then if someone decides, hey, I need some ukulele in this mix. They can check the people open to collab plus their skill ranking. Say either "I need a pro ukulele player" or "my song isn't overly advanced, I could probably use an intermediate ukulele player."

There's a lot of people around OCR with skills we're not even aware of. I'm hoping V6 makes these features a little more refined for users' profiles and collaboration..

A couple other things that would be great, perhaps a place in peoples' profiles where they can list what equipment they use (microphones, etc) which would help determine recording quality.

[djpretzel]

Good idea, no reason to oppose it OTHER than the technical limitation, at present, of these fields being handled by your forum profile.

Neither vBulletin nor any other forum software I'm aware of would allow for typed/quantified selection of picklists necessary to support skill levels in X number of instruments, technologies, etc.

In order to do this, in other words, we'd need to code it ourselves and integrate it in with other data.

I SUPPOSE we could do something kludgy like listing the same skill three times Trumpet - Beginner," "Trumpet - Intermediate," Trumpet - Advanced" - but that would make the list very long and would look kinda goofy... however, that's the only way we could do it easily and keep it part of the forum profile.

Anything else would be custom dev, i.e. time/money... definitely a good feature request but probably more like a v7 type of thing...

[Rexy]

See, with features like this there'd be abuse to come with it. You may list yourself as instruments with that kind of skill level, but what if you don't have the evidence to back yourself up?

Like, say someone signs up to the forum and marks themselves as an advanced violin player. You want violin in your mix. You ask the person, and it turns out they're not really the 'advanced' player they technically marked them for. This may sound extreme, but I can see people making themselves feel bigger than they actually are through this feature.

On the flip side, in the past we've had people asking to try out certain instrument parts (or even vocals) regardless of skill level / experience. Those kind of dedicated newcomers will be given the shaft if they're too honest and mark themselves down as a "beginner" when they really, REALLY want to contribute towards the site to some degree.

I'm not here to belittle Brandon's idea, but if you want my take on this, people have the right to collaborate with others regardless of skill level. We're not in the age of select snobbery anymore, right? Then I'd say keep things as it is, though I've got a strange feeling I'd be the only person that may say that. *_*

[Mak Eightman]

See, with features like this there'd be abuse to come with it. You may list yourself as instruments with that kind of skill level, but what if you don't have the evidence to back yourself up?

Like, say someone signs up to the forum and marks themselves as an advanced violin player. You want violin in your mix. You ask the person, and it turns out they're not really the 'advanced' player they technically marked them for. This may sound extreme, but I can see people making themselves feel bigger than they actually are through this feature.

On the flip side, in the past we've had people asking to try out certain instrument parts (or even vocals) regardless of skill level / experience. Those kind of dedicated newcomers will be given the shaft if they're too honest and mark themselves down as a "beginner" when they really, REALLY want to contribute towards the site to some degree.

I'm not here to belittle Brandon's idea, but if you want my take on this, people have the right to collaborate with others regardless of skill level. We're not in the age of select snobbery anymore, right? Then I'd say keep things as it is, though I've got a strange feeling I'd be the only person that may say that. *_*

You not the only person.

The idea(itself) is great, but it works if OTHER ppl will give you a rank.

I'm with Rexy. Don't go in this direction. Less of two evils, imo.

[Brandon Strader]

If people were dishonest that would become apparent as soon as they sent their recording. Then you'd just look for someone else. Not a huge deal.

[Mak Eightman]

If people were dishonest that would become apparent as soon as they sent their recording. Then you'd just look for someone else. Not a huge deal.

Still, I can't rank myself:whatevaa:

[Jamphibious]

There are plenty of classification systems out there that use the honor system. I'm sure I've been asked my skill level for various things both online and on random forms in life. Not everyone in the world will be honorable, but we don't live in a perfect world.

I like the idea but I get that it would take some time and effort to code. I wouldn't be opposed to the list containing 3 levels of each instrument though like David said, honestly. It wouldn't be that big of a deal to scroll through, and for collaborations it would be nice to have at least SOME indication of what people think their skill levels are, even if they may not be 100% accurate. It'd be more accurate than just saying that I play the Trumpet without any indication at all. I'm all for it personally.