Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to have to browse a 100+ page forum thread to find relevant information? I'm sure you have. How do you find anything relevant in the nearly 800 page long CEMU thread other than the first post? Until now, this seemed like an impossible task.

But no more! Today, we are proud to introduce Featured Posts, a custom made forum add-on that we believe will help improve the quality of forum content by enabling a simple new feature. From now on, you will be able to mark relevant posts within your own threads to highlight the better content:

By the simple act of clicking this button (which is positioned next to the Like button), you will be able to build a list of posts within your own threads which will remain displayed on the first page below the first post:

Note that you can click the table headers to sort the list by number of likes, by date, or alphabetically. Every time you mark a post as Featured, the author's "Featured Posts" count will be increased by one:

When you look at someone's member card, the number of Featured Posts will be a good indicator of the quality of the content produced by this person. In addition to encouraging quality over quantity, we are convinced that this add-on will be used in a variety of manners, such as:
• Pointing out new release posts in a homebrew/translation/romhack/emulator project thread
• Marking a post as 'best answer' to a question
• Highlighting useful contributions in general
And much more... it is up to you now.

In order to prevent abuse, we have disabled this feature in the EOF and the introductions area. Moderators also have a 'Clear' button that will clear the entire list of Featured Posts in a thread if necessary. Please keep in mind that you shouldn't use this feature in opinion/debate threads to designate posts that best match your own opinion. Moreover, while you are able to mark your own posts as 'Featured' within your own threads, make sure you do this wisely and only when relevant. We will be on the lookout for abuse but if something slips past us, don't hesitate to report anything suspicious.

Thank you for being part of our community!
The staff @ GBAtemp

 

[Cyan]

I've already done something like this:
http://itrainapp.com/temp/

It didn't attract any mod attention though.

we did notice and talked about it on IRC. like you said, it requires constant updates to follow hacking progress and help users efficiently.
I found another website doing something similar, with full tutorial (a little like modmii questions to generate user's specific guides) for different consoles.
It could be nice to have something similar, but again it requires lot of time and dedication to keep it updated.

The idea sounds amazing, but I don't quite understand why can you only do that to your own threads.

I'd personally only let mods mark posts as featured.
I'm kinda afraid that it'll get abused by "like" trolls.

That's the main reason only the thread starter can mark posts as "best answer".
We already have/had "like" trolls, like Margen, which liked ALL posts he found, old or new, interesting or not, related to him or not, etc.

We would like to promote good and interesting answers with this system, but it will be in testing phase. It could be removed if users abuse it and are not using it for it's intended purpose.

@Davidosky99, we also thought about all that possibilities, but we need to try and see how users will behave first.
If a post is made by a 1 newcomer and get its answer quickly, the Featured post is not really required (as it's on the same page as the question) and it's easy to find and read best answers from the thread. It's harder when a thread gets 100+ page and this system is easier to "extract" useful information from it.
If the "OP" is missing, other users can always report a post to be marked as featured to help everyone (or vice-versa, remove an abused marked post by the OP).
Moderator have access to that option and can set/unset any of them.

That's right that users could mark old posts as featured, and would "unbalanced" the count for new users, but why would it be limited to posts created from now only?
Old posts are also interesting in a thread, for example CEMU because it was mentioned by Costello, and users have the right to easily find these OLD but interesting posts from big CEMU thread even if they were posted before the addon release. That's its initial purpose: make some interesting posts easy to be find and improve the quality of the answers. So users are encouraged to mark old posts as featured to help everyone. As a second purpose only, users get a "post count" of their useful answers as a way to tell if he is posting good information to the forum and helping other users.

And if you think of this system as a reward, then old users posting interesting information should also be rewarded for their participation and what they did to help other users. If you use this system to see if a user is useful to the forum, his old posts can be part of his current acknowledgment. I do help a lot of users, and if nobody mark my previous help post, then I would be "a bad user" on the forum because new comers would get "2" featured post while I have 1?
remember the first purpose was to highlight interesting message from big threads and make them easy to be found. That's up to each user to read that "featured post count" and interpret it as a trusting user or not. A user could be trusted in 3DS section but not in Wii section, it's only a global representation of useful answers posted on the forum and not a knowledge chart.


This is experimental, maybe we can "update" it, and keep only the useful posts in a thread to be easily found on first post without the "user reward and trophy" by removing post count in user's profile. Or it could be improved with a section chart (see which forum section a user get the most useful answers, etc.)
But let's see how it will be received and what "tricks" users will do (yes, they will) to abuse this system.

 

[p1ngpong]

If you guys got help in a thread you created in the past it would be nice community service if you went back there and featured a couple of posts that you found particularly helpful. The plan with this going forward is that it will increase at least a percentage of the posting quality on the site so maybe it will set an example for others who will follow its example.

This is a complete and utter mess.
Most of threads (in 3ds /wii u sections) are made by 1 post newcomers and those newcomers won't even bother marking as featured.
The other 20% of the demographic that even care or even participate in the community actively anymore will either up their own posts or the 5% will up ancient and old content from their own threads making it dangerous for newcomers, those same newcomers who don't even bother going to stickies , searching the forum and making just new threads and not marking useful posts.
Besides, what's the use of this of it being public in everyone's profile if this community is enormous and diverse in terms of sections?
This idea is just plain bad.
(Also, don't forget "like" dupes and trolls!)

There is always one, I beg you don't cry...

 

[Deleted User]

This is an excellent new feature to the site! I have been observing and looking forward to it all week; a hearty hats off to Costello for sure! (and perhaps tj too?)

Perhaps, in good time, we'll see a new "Most Featured Posts" tab on this bar...

...so we can actually list of some of the most helpful and quality users here! =)

 

[Davidosky99]

If you guys got help in a thread you created in the past it would be nice community service if you went back there and featured a couple of posts that you found particularly helpful. The plan with this going forward is that it will increase at least a percentage of the posting quality on the site so maybe it will set an example for others who will follow its example.



There is always one, I beg you don't cry...

Because most newcomers will surely do that and keep themselves in the community for the rest of their lifespan.
Most of them don't even bother to press the like button or even read the damn stickies or warns, would they click the feature post button for answers that would help them? No, they just get their answer and get out

 

[Costello]

Because most newcomers will surely do that and keep themselves in the community for the rest of their lifespan.
Most of them don't even bother to press the like button or even read the damn stickies or warns, would they click the feature post button for answers that would help them? No, they just get their answer and get out

we never said it would work for everyone, every thread, etc. it will work in a good number of threads, but not all, obviously.
as long as it doesn't make the site worse, I don't see how this is a "bad idea" as you say
be positive, try to use it to make the community better... you ain't going to get Featured if you keep complaining

 

[p1ngpong]

Because most newcomers will surely do that and keep themselves in the community for the rest of their lifespan.
Most of them don't even bother to press the like button or even read the damn stickies or warns, would they click the feature post button for answers that would help them? No, they just get their answer and get out

If they don't feature a post then they don't, the thread will still be there with all its information for people to search and use in the future and the n00b himself would have received the help he signed up for too. Nobody said this feature will be vital for every thread and we don't expect every OP to use it every time so chill your tits.

 

[netovsk]

Wow amazing feature to keep out of the radar useless posts like this one I'm doing right now.

 

[endoverend]

I think this is a pretty good feature overall. The fact that it can only be selected by thread starters hopefully will keep it from being abused.

I would, however, like to see the addition of a "reason" for each featured post. I can imagine that in big threads there might be a large number of featured posts and it would be nice to be able to mark which one is which so that you can jump to the relevant content more easily than clicking all the featured posts.

 

[Onepunchbruh]

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to have to browse a 100+ page forum thread to find relevant information? I'm sure you have. How do you find anything relevant in the nearly 800 page long CEMU thread other than the first post? Until now, this seemed like an impossible task.

But no more! Today, we are proud to introduce Featured Posts, a custom made forum add-on that we believe will help improve the quality of forum content by enabling a simple new feature. From now on, you will be able to mark relevant posts within your own threads to highlight the better content:

View attachment 63055​

By the simple act of clicking this button (which is positioned next to the Like button), you will be able to build a list of posts within your own threads which will remain displayed on the first page below the first post:

View attachment 63056​

Note that you can click the table headers to sort the list by number of likes, by date, or alphabetically. Every time you mark a post as Featured, the author's "Featured Posts" count will be increased by one:

View attachment 63057​

When you look at someone's member card, the number of Featured Posts will be a good indicator of the quality of the content produced by this person. In addition to encouraging quality over quantity, we are convinced that this add-on will be used in a variety of manners, such as:
• Pointing out new release posts in a homebrew/translation/romhack/emulator project thread
• Marking a post as 'best answer' to a question
• Highlighting useful contributions in general
And much more... it is up to you now.

In order to prevent abuse, we have disabled this feature in the EOF and the introductions area. Moderators also have a 'Clear' button that will clear the entire list of Featured Posts in a thread if necessary. Please keep in mind that you shouldn't use this feature in opinion/debate threads to designate posts that best match your own opinion. Moreover, while you are able to mark your own posts as 'Featured' within your own threads, make sure you do this wisely and only when relevant. We will be on the lookout for abuse but if something slips past us, don't hesitate to report anything suspicious.

Thank you for being part of our community!
The staff @ GBAtemp

I was thinking about this featuring post thing. Now I know what its for. : l

 

[Ray Koopa]

I gotta create a thread in which I fave all my own posts to get that counter high and look like a reliable source for once in my life.

 

[Deleted User]

Well, this feature is okay I guess but if the OP is not active or doesn't care, whoops nothing can be done! I thought users could vote on what could be a featured post, not just the OP. This is a feature that will probably be used very seldom.

 

[Kingy]

This is a great idea in concept and usefulness, but it definitely needs tweaking.

Well, this feature is okay I guess but if the OP is not active or doesn't care, whoops nothing can be done! I thought users could vote on what could be a featured post, not just the OP. This is a feature that will probably be used very seldom.

Like, for instance, what I have highlighted in bold. This would be a better use, and without it, it can be abused in an annoying way.

What I said last time might break this idea, but it would be better if you could place a reason for marking a post as 'featured', so people actually know why it is featured, like the edit reason.

But this is a great feature, but needs more to it, so thank you.

 

[gnmmarechal]

Huh. I seem to be able to mark my own posts as featured. Is this intended?

http://gbatemp.net/members/gnmmarechal.351419/best-answers

 

[Davidosky99]

Huh. I seem to be able to mark my own posts as featured. Is this intended?

http://gbatemp.net/members/gnmmarechal.351419/best-answers

Yes it is intended and at the same time a problematic thing for a certain demographic mm.

 

[gnmmarechal]

Yes it is intended and at the same time a problematic thing for a certain demographic mm.

Could it be made so when a user features their own post, it doesn't count toward the number of featured posts they have?

That'd be better imo

Sent from my Motorola DynaTAC 8000x using Tapatalk

 

[osaka35]

This seems like a pretty useful tool. It would be nice, though, to have a way to better illustrates when an initial post was edited. A necro thread is harder to resurrect if "last edited" wasn't super tiny at the bottom, and if folk know if a tutorial or something is not being updated anymore/is painfully outdated. Like a colour system for freshness? If a post hasn't been edited in at least a few months, mark it far more obviously? With Mod ability to mark as permanently fresh, or mod and OP abilities to mark as permanently outdated? I dunno, something so it's easier to know if a post is a dangerously outdated tutorial or abandoned project.

Or just make "last edited" much larger on OP post lol. I dunno. I throw ideas at wall.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

So...as a staff member...

What's stopping me from marking all my posts as feature posts

 

[Flame]

So...as a staff member...

What's stopping me from marking all my posts as feature posts

its the end of the beginning people.

feature post feature was so young when it died thanks to tom.



BURN THE WITCH CLOWN!

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

its the end of the beginning people.

feature post feature was so young when it died thanks to tom.



BURN THE WITCH CLOWN!

Shit this post was good I should feature all of Flame's posts now.

 

[mashers]

@Costello
Not sure if you're aware of this, but you get a notification if you feature one of your own posts. I don't think this is necessary.