MRH Donation is More than Money Well Spent

I've contributed my share just like a subscription because MRH has and continues to be an amazing publication and I for one have no problem paying an annual subscription amount or even a monthly amount.  Joe's staff has been contributing to my enjoyment of this hobby since their first issue in 2009.  I would not want to see the demise of MRH and we should all realize that nothing in this world is free.

Bad file

The landscape with media file seems to be corrupted.  I downloaded it 3 times and each time Winzip declared it corrupted.  I tried the portrait version and Winzip opened it with no problem.

rating system

Your rating system is very logical and gives readers valuable input. But when this shows up in the magazine, although I understand that "my rating" is blank till I enter a rating- however the other column indicates average. In the case of one article last month, there are five stars in gold, with "average" 4.8 (68 votes.) So to be sure, is 4.8 the rating for this article overall, and average indicates neither useless nor essential, or  is the 68 votes an average amount of votes, or am I misreading this? 

Thank you!

la.484.sp

Total number of votes

The 68 votes is the total number of votes. Most articles get very few readers who vote, so the ratings need to be taken with a grain of salt. Most likely, those who vote are on the polar extremes -- either they really love the article so they vote, or they really hated the article so they vote very low.

The most useful is to compare the votes of any one article against how articles tend to rate overall.

4.5 or more means an article is well liked. Between 4.0 and 4.4 means the article is okay but not great. Anything under 4.0 means the article didn't reasonate with very many readers. A rating of 4.7 or more means the article really connected with readers and they loved it.

To avoid embarassing authors, we only publish the top 5 ratings. That way articles that get 3.xx ratings never get publicly embarrassed. We use those stats, however, to indicate to us if an article didn't work so well for readers.

This all said, we take the ratings with a grain of salt ourselves. Just because an article gets a 3.xx rating may not mean we will never run another article like that. Some articles need to be published for the good of the hobby even though we suspect they will rate low.

Correct!

I agree with you, and guess I'd better get off my wallet and donate some money too.  This is about the only model rr mag I still read (along with the Gazette, of course).