"People helped" in listener profiles
Where does that number come from? Because I used to think it was the number of members a listener had 1-on-1 chats with, which would be quite misleading tbh because I've talked to many listeners that didn't help me one bit. But now I've seen a few listener profiles that had a higher number of ratings than of "people helped", how is that even possible? Is it 25+ msg chats for "people helped" and some members left (probably bad) ratings before reaching 25 messages?
@hereigoagain I'm not sure, but I think it is what you said, the number of guests/members with whom a listener has had 1-on-1 chats (and I know that's also misleading for another reason in my case because, for instance, I have one person who keeps coming back with different accounts, which inflates the number).
The number of ratings can exceed this because every time a chat ends a member or guest can submit a rating. My own experience is the other way, most of the time there's no rating left, but I don't nag anyone about leaving ratings. A listener who habitually reminds people to rate them and who has repeat "customers" will likely have more ratings than "people helped."
@JBlue
Oh wow, you can rate listeners repeatedly? I didn't know that, but I guess that explains quite a lot o.O Thanks for your reply!
No you can only rate them once.
@hereigoagain
@HalliwellSister As a member I seem to recall rating the same listener more than once, when closing out a chat. I can see reasons to do it both ways - maybe one time they really helped, but then the next time they did something awful - you should have an opportunity to offer a second rating to reflect that.
But... I could easily be wrong about what actually happens. If you can only leave one rating though, how can you possibly explain a number of ratings that exceeds the number of people helped? I suppose the site may have changed how that works at some point, too.
@JBlue
nah. You can leave just one. You can change your rating. The same one. And that just means that they didn't reach 30 messages.
@HalliwellSister OK, I knew I gave ratings more than once to the same listener. As well as reviews. But there's no way to see how the site tallies the ratings average, so from a user perspective it's not obvious whether the old rating gets replaced or the new one just gets folded into a running total.
@JBlue
they get replaced.
Yes, I agree that the phrase "people helped" can be very misleading. After all, people helped is the amount of unique members or guests that a listener exchanged 30 messages with, out of which at least 10 have to be sent by the member/guest and at least 10 have to be sent by thr listener (in short, the amount of users a listener had at least 1 chat point from) (25 messages is for group support rooms). Since it is purely based on numbers, we have no way to know if that member/guest felt helped or not. As j also indicated, if you have a long-time user who uses a new guest account every time, the amount of people helped will also be much higher. I do not believe members can rate their listener again. However, they can change the star rating they gave their listener and they can leave multiple written reviews (if I'm not mistaken). The single rating limit does not work with guests because they use a kind of new account every time
@Liz1000
Aah now I understand, thank you! Really looks like that number should be called something different though. And idk if guests should be able to give ratings at all, doesn't that make it really easy for listeners to give themselves ratings too? 
I've talked to listeners that really made me wonder where they got their good ratings from.....
@hereigoagain
hmm. Suspicious ratings gets listeners suspended:p
@HalliwellSister If they get caught, yeah. But it's not clear how anyone would know.
@JBlue
IP Addresss.
