[futureal]

A rating system would need to be adjustable as future incarnations of a hack arrive. If a bug-ridden 1.0 is replaced by a stable 1.1 (or whatever) then it may not deserve the potentially shoddy rating it received at the onset.

Feedback should be appreciated by any hack author (I know I appreciate any that I receive) but I am not sure that public critique is such a good idea (beyond the rating). If it were up to me, I would leave that private for the hack author. Having somebody put a lot of work into something only to see negative comments from experienced coders in public is not going to encourage them to keep working on it. Especially because something that takes me 20 minutes might take someone else 4 hours, or might take Chen 53 seconds, and so on. The chance of people thinking that other, more experienced hackers are "talking down" to them is high.

I think a publicly viewable stability rating (or whatever you want to call it) would suffice, along with private comments to the author about why such a rating is deserved and what he/she can do to improve upon it.