How ratings work

The whole method, in plain English. If anything on this page stops being true, that is a bug in the product, not in the page.

The scale

Half a star to five stars, in half-star steps. Stored as whole numbers (1 to 10 half-stars) - never rounded, never rescaled.

The average

A title's community rating is the plain arithmetic mean of all current ratings: the sum divided by the count. No weighting by account age, no decay, no trust scores, no exclusions except the ones listed here.

What is excluded

Ratings written in sealed (private) mode stay private and are not part of any public number. Nothing else is excluded.

Corrections

Changing your rating replaces your previous one in the average - one account, one current rating per title. The history of your own changes stays in your own diary; it never multiplies your vote.

The distribution

Every title page shows the distribution alongside the average - how many of each star level - so a divisive 3.0 and a unanimous 3.0 never look like the same film. There is no fresh/rotten cutoff.

Check it yourself

The ratings live in a public database on the ITZA chain. The app's console ("show the query") runs your own SQL against it, free, no account needed - the same numbers this page describes, recomputable by anyone.