SharePoint 2010 Rating Feature Configuration - How to Activate? Fix Ratings not Updating Issue

Rating feature was introduced in SharePoint 2010, It helps to rate Lists, Documents, Pages on a SharePoint site.

How To Enable SharePoint 2010 Rating Setting:
To setup SharePoint 2010 rating configuration, follow these steps:

• Navigate to your SharePoint site and then Target list or document library where you want Ratings to be enabled.
• Go to the list settings, Click on "Rating Settings" under the "General Settings" section
  
• Enable "Allow items in this list to be rated" and click OK. This will add rating columns to SharePoint 2010 list/library.
  
• Now you will see two new columns: the Ratings (0-5) and the Number of Ratings under the Columns section of list settings.
  
• Go to the list items view, You can set the ratings inline or edit a list item/document and set the  rating for the item by simply mouse over the stars in the Rating(0-5) column and set the ratings as needed. (You need Edit permissions, BTW)

The next time the service timer job responsible for this social feature runs, the rating scale and number will reflect the results

SharePoint 2010 Ratings not working?
So you rated a List item or a document, but upon refresh, found SharePoint 2010 ratings not updating? Ratings not saved? But when you mouse over the rating icons, SharePoint gives the previously selected rating in tool tip. Well, that's confusing most of the users!

This is due to: By default the Timer Jobs listed below, related to Rating service is set to run for every hour!

Once ratings given to an item then it'll be stored in database. When the ratings are all gathered together it will show the average ratings, not just your ratings. When the page is refreshed, if the data hasn’t been analyzed yet by SharePoint via the below timer jobs, the ratings will be blank or old! This is how ratings work in SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2010 rating timer jobs
Rating values are compiled by these timer jobs

1. User Profile Service Application - Social Data Maintenance Job
2. User Profile Service Application - Social Rating Synchronization Job

By default, This timer job is scheduled to run every 1 Hour. You can Run these timer jobs on-demand by clicking "Run Now" or change the "Recurring Schedule" as required. Here is how - Go to:
Central Administration>> Monitoring>> Timer Jobs>> Review Job Definition>> and select the above timer jobs.

Click on "Run Now". our convenience and testing, schedule both these jobs to run every 1 min as shown below.


As you hover over the ratings stars they light up, and then you just click to select your rating and record your vote,  users can see the average ratings  (Blue Stars) after the timer job run.

If a user giving rating which he already given, then his previous rating will be discarded and new selection only getting considered.

SharePoint 2010 rating settings not available? Here is how to activate rating feature:
Don't have "Rating Settings" appear on lists/libraries settings? Enable Rating feature to fix SharePoint 2010 rating settings missing issue:

Enable-SPFeature Ratings -url http://site-collection-url