Confusion over listener profile pages
I've spent a lot of time recently reading the bios of listeners here and I'm A little confused.
I apologise if it's me being a bit slow mentally but I don't how the stats are worked out in regards to how many people are helped against the number of star ratings and reviews. Can listeners be rated (with the stars) more than once?
If someone would spare a few minutes to explain this to me I would be really grateful
Thanks in advance
@EllieD18 Its all new to me too. I just joined last Thursday and I didnt even know they had bios and blogs. Ill take a look. I dont know if I can get back to this post to comment but Ill try.
@RarelyCharlie do you know how this is all determined?
I think the stars is one per member (no way to keep track if a guest comes on as another guest account). I think the number of people helped is based on account. Not 100% certain.
I don't know for sure. I only know that the stats are difficult to interpret 
I believe you're right—a member or guest cannot contribute more than one star rating to any listener's totals. So the number of ratings does tell you how many people gave ratings. But some listeners ask for ratings and some don't. Some listeners specialize in certain topics and some don't. It's even been suggested that some listeners block people to avoid being rated if the chat has not gone well. All these variables, and others, might affect the star ratings.
The published reviews you see are only the positive ones. Negative or unclear reviews are not published. If you only go by our reviews, almost all listeners are truly wonderful 
I'm pretty sure the number of people helped is just the number of members or guests who have had chats lasting for at least 30 messages. It says nothing about how helpful those chats were. Listeners who specialize in long term support might appear not to be helping many people. Listeners who specialize in idle chit-chat might appear to be helping lots of people.
@AffyAvo
Thanks for your replies @AffyAvo and @RarelyCharlie
I was thinking it was something along those lines which is what brought on my confusion. I found someone with 650+ star ratings which is great but the number of people helped was only 29. It made me wonder if maybe listeners can be rated more than once by one member
@EllieD18 That sounds like something isn't working as it should to me. The number of star ratings shouldn't be higher than the number of people helped.
@Laura can you explain how that would happen?
That happened to me within the last few days. I responded to a personal request, and the chat only had around 25 messages. (I have a message counter that shows me the number of messages in real time.) I got a rating, but the chat didn't have the 30 messages required to show in my people helped count.
Members and guests can give a rating after only a few messages (10, maybe? —this has been controversial in the past).
@AffyAvo
I agree—that's strange. I suppose a listener could make a habit of asking for a rating early in the chat, and then ending the chat quickly before there are as many as 30 messages.
@EllieD18
@RarelyCharlie I saw this thread yesterday and spent a long time looking through profiles after reading the original question here.
I should point out that I'm a listener on here and only made a member account for the purpose of sharing my thoughts on this matter.
As I said, I spent a really long time reading through listener profiles. Listeners of all levels in their listener journey, from the beginners right through to those who have reached epitome levels. While I'm no expert when it comes to reading stats etc, I do agree that the profile stats brought up in this thread raises suspicions (and I'm really not normally a suspicious person)
I can't help but question whether the details here have been doctored in some way? The reason for me thinking this is because as well as a high number of star ratings, there is also a relatively high number of written reviews. Whilst there are listeners with higher ratings and reviews, their numbers do seem to tally up more realistically. I read that star ratings are automatically registered to provide a non biased view as opposed to written reviews being checked before being added on to a profile. However I'm personally curious as to whether the particular profile in question has, and I'm just saying this as simply as possible, but I'm curious to see if maybe this profile has been made up of a number of Fake chats to bump up the ratings.
Again I'm not normally suspicious like this but clearly I'm not the only one to be confused over this issue.
If it is the case that this has happened then I must say I'm disappointed as myself and so many fellow listeners here put in a lot of our time and effort to genuinely support others and the thought of others seeing it as some competition maybe, well, it's just a little hurtful and offensive.
Maybe this can be looked into somehow @Laura
@EllieD18
People Helped: 10 messages exchanged between the member/guest and the listener.
For example: If a member exchanged 10 messages with me, people helped would be 1 and this number will not go up after an exchange of another 10 messages with the same member.
@tazcares thanks for your reply and for clarifying this.
I see that I may have opened up a can of worms here by asking this but I also see that I'm not the only one puzzled by this from reading the response earlier tonight.
The stats show :
Star ratings 656
Text reviews 154
People helped 29
As a member here the thought of a listener potentially adjusting their profile makes me really uneasy as I feel a site like this relied upon a level of trust being built up and if this kind of thing is happening it sort of put doubt in place about how trustworthy listeners are and their status on here.
If there are certain accounts that appear to be untrustworthy, emailing community@7cups.com with the links would at least bring attention to them, I don't know if anything could actually be done or not.