One solution to potential issues with this would be to limit the visibility of the reviews/ratings to just the project owner.
There's two main benefits to reviews/ratings:
1. The project owner would get an assessment of his project
2. Potential users/committers would know the "quality" of the project
Making the reviews/ratings private would eliminate #2, but it would also solve most potential spamming, gaming, and stale issues caused by making them public.
In this case you could also just as well promote the existing message feature that's already a part of Github. Promote conversations instead of a one-way "rate this" system.
Comments
One solution to potential issues with this would be to limit the visibility of the reviews/ratings to just the project owner.
There's two main benefits to reviews/ratings:
1. The project owner would get an assessment of his project
2. Potential users/committers would know the "quality" of the project
Making the reviews/ratings private would eliminate #2, but it would also solve most potential spamming, gaming, and stale issues caused by making them public.
In this case you could also just as well promote the existing message feature that's already a part of Github. Promote conversations instead of a one-way "rate this" system.