I’m not entirely sure why, but netflix’s star ratings really bother me. It drives me crazy when I go to rate a movie “I hated it” by giving it a star. I do understand how the system works — one star is the lowest you can go — but I can’t help but think back to 3rd grade when getting a gold star is a GOOD thing. You never got a star for doing bad work, only good work, so it pains me every time I do it.

I decided to remedy the situation and write a Greasemonkey script that replaces all the star graphics with new graphics of my own creation. Here’s a screenshot of how I see netflix now:

Letter grades seem to make alot more sense to me, and I feel pretty good about giving a movie an F.

The script needs quite a bit more work, it doesn’t work right when you mouse over to set a rating, and I haven’t quite figured out how to get greasemonkey to change the contents of an externally called javascript file. I’m not even going to bother posting it since it’s not really all that functional. Hopefully I will figure it out eventually.

While I was digging around trying to figure out all the places I needed to replace images, I found a few interesting things:

1) even though your ratings are always shown with yellow stars, and you can only select whole stars, there are graphics for partial stars: Perhaps there will be partial star ratings in the future? More likely they just generated all the stars from a photoshop script or something.

2) there are quite a few different type of stars:

I’ve seen the red ones,
the yellow ones,
the silver ones,
and the purple ones…
but have you seen the light purple ones,
or the funky red ones
or the funky yellow ones
or the grey ones?

Defined tags for this entry: greasemonkey, netflix