A "rating" system has been talked about in the forums for about 6 years and more recently quite fervently. Now that the database has grown to over a million caches, people were looking for ways to separate the wheat from the chaff and also to reward cachers for a job well done and encourage better hides.
Groundspeak has come up with a system that pleases the vast majority. It's a reward system. Premium members get favourite points, 1 point for every 10 caches you log as a find. The 10% rule is turning out to be quite generous. Most people are pleased with having too many votes rather then not enough. In the last couple of days I've been going through my list of finds and have used 17 of my alloted 88 favourites.
I plan on going over the list again for good caches that deserve some recognition. I'm hesitant to bestow a 'favourite' on old cache finds (older then 2 years) that were great when I found them, but may have changed. As an example, about 5 years ago I visited a cache that was in a hollow stump covered by a coon skin cap. At first it looked like a sleeping racoon (or dead racoon). Gave me a start and even though I was pretty sure it was an animal skin and not a real animal I poked it with a stick first just to be sure. A fun cache experience. Last year I re-visited but the coon skin cap is gone and the container is old and battered. Now it's a more average experience and the CO isn't doing much maintenance so it's not something I'd want to reward with a favourite ribbon. So far I'm impressed with this new feature. One of the best things is that it's filterable. Do a search for a caches in a location then click the blue ribbon icon in the Favorites column to float the caches with the most favourites to the top of the list. Plans are in the works to make the FL filterable by pocket queries. FL PQs will be especially nice when planning trips to new locations.
You'll find the Favorite List discussion here:
http://forums.groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=265640
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