Quote:Original post by Oluseyi
I'm proposing the following modifications to the rating system, and I'd like to get community feedback:

1. Individual user posts can be rated up/down for their contribution to the community.


2. Sufficiently highly rated posts are automatically nominated for "permanence" - addition to a long-term record of "classic posts" containing particularly informative/helpful/entertaining information.


3. User ratings are normalized aggregations based on post ratings. Instead of unbounded numbers (how high can current ratings go?), they'll instead be a percentage which could be considered analogous to presidential approval ratings. [smile]

These are extremely preliminary and not at all official! What do you guys think?

I think you know that I explicitly support the second proposal (and by implication, some version of the first too) and have proposed it myself previously. As for the third proposal, it sounds reasonable to me. I'd like more visual indication of those who score highly though as I firmly believe in encouraging the better posters.

Quote:Original post by stimarco
It occurs to me that adding this feature could make for some really odd conversations. Perhaps a 'threaded' view option for forum posts might be necessary. Make it an optional feature. (I do miss being able to follow threads and branches in the old USENET fashion. But then, I'm old enough to remember Spry's Mosaic browser and the mercifully brief fad for the < blink > tag.)

My thoughts on implementation would condense killfile'd posts to a single bar that reads "This post has been killed by you" or something, with a link/button to expand it anyway.

Quote:In that case, might I suggest making it a bit more... fun?

That's an interesting idea. Get back to me on that, or start a separate thread so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle of posts here.

Quote:Since the world+dog seems to be moving towards widescreen aspect ratios, favouring a wider UI makes sense.

You've actually hit on a pet peeve of mine. The forum text entry fields are all designed such that copious amounts of screen real estate are wasted on either side. At a minimum, markup help could be displayed there. Ideally, the size of the textarea should be flexible, proportional to view with a minimum width. But I'm digressing wildly, now.

Quote:Original post by Colin Jeanne
Per post ratings are probably better. There are many times when I'm skimming a thread and right now I tend to look at names and ratings to judge whether I should read a post. For example, I'm skimming a Win32 thread I tend to look for Endurion and Lessbread since they both tend to have detailed and informative posts. I have probably missed some good information doing this. If there was a way that users could mark posts as helpful that would help me out while skimming.

I'm unsure about post rating as a forum browsing aid. If a bunch of beginners found a very rudimentary post helpful, would it not be visual/semantic clutter for a more experienced user to see that and similar posts highlighted as "helpful"? I can't think of a meaningful way to overcome this, because user ratings are not a reflection of technical sophistication, so even helpful post ratings from a number of highly rated users doesn't necessarily imply that a post is technically useful.

Quote:I do see the scenario that many good posts wont get marked as such unless there is a very easy way to do it. It would have to be inline like Amazon's rating system because nobody is going to want to go to another page to rate a single post.

There's going to be a broader adoption of AJAX-like UI and other "Web 2.0" goodness in many areas. We definitely want to cut down on full page refresh roundtrips, and eliminate intermediary pages that have no function other than to indicate operational success ("You have successfully rated this user!", "Private message sent!", etc).

Quote:Even then, if most people dont tend to use it how big of a success could it be? Per post ratings seem to really depend on the continued participation of a lot of people whereas the per user ratings only depend on occasional participation. I can go a long time before I see somebody do something that I consider worthy of rating them and I'm sure I'm not alone. This doesnt seem conducive to your much more finely grained system.

We have a lot of users, though, so what you and people like you do is not necessarily representative of what the community as a whole does. If the idea is well implemented, well explained, and the feedback is positive (ie, we present the results of your participation and you perceive it as beneficial), then participation will rise.

Quote:Original post by snisarenko
Instead of collecting all of the "classic/informative" threads into one big collection, could it be instead possible to have each forum list at the top "threads of the week"/"threads of the month"(based on post rankings). This way people who haven't visited the forums for a while can immidiately see the most important/informative threads in the recent past.

It's possible, but I'm not sold on it. You'll need to work harder to convince me of the merit of this.

The problem with it is an examination of how users actually use the forums. There are two main profiles:

1. Users seeking answers. They come to the forum to post their questions, and only occasionally search (unfortunate but true, especially for beginners). Having a readily accessible record of high-quality answers to common questions, as well as mind-expanding discussions, means that these questions can be answered with links to refined data, also introducing those users to the classic collection.


2. Users seeking questions. These users look for interesting thread topics with low reply counts so they can answer questions. If the reply count is medium-to-high, they may peruse the thread to see if the question has been answered adequately or if special considerations have been covered.

What's the profile of the user who would be interested in per-forum "threads of the week" that wouldn't be served by the classic collection and an RSS feed about recent changes to it?

Quote:Original post by superpig
Ah, good, so I can speak freely on this [smile]

You can always speak freely, even to call me a damned fool! (Just be careful about doing it to my face. [evil])

Quote:Note that this is entirely independent of the other proposed points. Building extra data about forum posts - specifically the 'value' of a forum post - can be used in a great many ways, from a "classic posts" gallery, to improving search results, to generating a forum FAQ, to calculating user ratings. It's actually a perfectly decent feature without anything built on top of it - people will like to see their posts get marked as helpful, even if those marks are not actually used for anything else.

True. Perhaps I shouldn't have tied the various proposed features together. Per-post ratings fundamentally provide us with metadata which we can mine for insights and leverage in different ways across the site and content areas. Also, we can apply the same per-item rating to other content than posts, such as articles and reviews.

Quote:I don't like this - you're mixing up a feature with our post deletion policy (which to date has been 'archive everything'). I'd drop the 'classic posts' idea and just stick with the "things that aren't helpful are liable to get deleted" policy. Also, if we fix things like the search then deletions need only be driven by hardware/software requirements.

Well, again, per-post ratings provide us with metadata which we can mine for insights. Admittedly, they are not comprehensive insights, but I hope I didn't suggest that per-post ratings would be the only input into content preservation worthiness. Search metadata would obviously be another, and data may only be deleted from the default working set for the site while archived in a larger set that we run long-term operations on.

Quote:Not sure about the best way to approach this - if it happens then we need to reconsider the way in which such values are displayed. Should they be displayed on each post? Should they be visible to everyone or just the user themselves? etc etc...

Good questions, to which I have no immediate answers. But that's why I started this thread: to get more input and diverse opinions.

Quote:Original post by Emmanuel Deloget
I don't understand how that would work. To create a percentage, you have to get a maximum bound. You can artificially set this max to a arbitrary value at the beginning, and after that how will it evolve?

How well does anyone understand the current ratings system? We know that regular users have a baseline of 1000, moderators a baseline of 1500 and original staff a baseline of 2000 (so you and I still have our moderator baselines of 1500 - no, people don't hate us that much! [smile]). This is all fundamentally arbitrary, and only about five people understand (and I'd say four of them in a fairly hazy way) how ratings changes are computed.

The precise details of how ratings are computed really don't matter to most users, mods or staff. What matters is consistency, in that similar actions produce similar results (being rated up should never result in a ratings decrease, even if it's by a very low-rated user, for example). So in a percentage based system, we could artificially cap the system such that the highest achievable rating is 95%, and the internal points basis can be recomputed once a day. Or not. Heck, we may ditch the percentage idea entirely and stick with everyone striving to hit 3000 points.

I haven't thought all these details through because, for now, they really don't matter. It's a successive refinement thing: does the top level idea work for people? If it does, then we can think about how to make it work algorithmically.

Quote:I think I have to remember you the threads/posts by Yann L. in the GP&T forum - using only the "classic post" classification wouldn't have much sense here, as much of his post in these threads satisfies the requirements (and a thread with more than a bunch of "classic post" (shouldn't these be "valuable posts"?) certainly qualify as a "classic thread" (or "valuable thread")).

Recall that the content editors would synthesize a record of a classic post from the entire thread, to ensure that context is not lost. Those Yann L posts would probably end up as a series of articles in a wiki, rather than just a single post.

Actually, let me elaborate on this. A "classic post," once processed by content editors and voted into the classic area, will not look like a forum post. It will look more like an article, or a Wikipedia entry. It will contain some meta information about who created it and when, and what prompted the outpour of genius, but it will read like a reproduction of a speech as printed in a magazine. This means that multiple related posts (successive replies to issues raised in a single thread, for example) could be made into one "classic post." Hopefully that mental image clarifies things somewhat.

Quote:This brings another question: how do we deal with post history? There are 3 millions of posts here - and some very old thread contains valuable information.

Make post history searchable, rather than browseable. Search results will draw from the forum working set, journals, classic area, articles and reviews - basically, all possible user contributions.

Quote:And should the system extends to journal posts as well?

Yes.

Quote:Original post by Alpha_ProgDes
A band-aid approach. Could we not compile threads (because compiling individual posts seem far more complicated) that the more experienced or staff and/or mods feel answer commonly asked question and put (group) links to them somewhere in the reply window? That way if someone wants to start a thread on pointers he will see a link(s) on pointers on the very page that he was about to compose his message.

If this is question is difficult to parse, then I'll try a graphical representation.

From the post directly below yours:

Quote:Original post by Oluseyi
Actually, let me elaborate on this. A "classic post," once processed by content editors and voted into the classic area, will not look like a forum post. It will look more like an article, or a Wikipedia entry. It will contain some meta information about who created it and when, and what prompted the outpour of genius, but it will read like a reproduction of a speech as printed in a magazine. This means that multiple related posts (successive replies to issues raised in a single thread, for example) could be made into one "classic post." Hopefully that mental image clarifies things somewhat.

That should help.

Quote:Original post by Kylotan
I think you know that I explicitly support the second proposal (and by implication, some version of the first too) and have proposed it myself previously.

In fact, I think the second proposal was inspired by your comments on the mods list.

Quote:As for the third proposal, it sounds reasonable to me. I'd like more visual indication of those who score highly though as I firmly believe in encouraging the better posters.

Yes. This would be the "merit badges" idea, where users who repeatedly have highly rated posts are awarded badges (perhaps on a per-forum basis, so you can earn a "Newbie Helper" badge separately from "Networking Guru"). Instead of having per-post ratings directly influence user rating, then, we can have badges confer a small ratings boost (5 to 10 points, maybe), thus keeping the two ratings systems technically separate but socially linked.