My list of grievances and suggestions.

[Sonicslasher]

GBAtemp has grown leaps and bounds from when it was a small temporary ROM site. I recently checked out how many members have and saw that we have around 263,740 members now. A pretty large community if ya ask me, even if all of them aren't active. There is tons of conversation going on at any moment. Sure there's lots of conversation going on all over the forum, but GBAtemp also has a lot of knowledge held within it's servers. But it's every so often it is the case that intellectual posts are buried within the stench of ignorance.

Now I know that this has been talked about a lot, and shot down for good reasons, but lets try a different approach. Yes I am talking about a voting mechanism for posts. But the main difference between what I'm suggesting and from what others have said is that there would be no downvoting. Confused yet? Let me explain. There would only be upvoting so that the most helpful posts could be easier seen (with a arrange posts by rating option). This is similar to what Engadget has for their commenting system. It wouldn't be implemented in more opinionated areas of the forums like the "Other Discussions Area". And I think it would help out a great deal in situations like release threads where you have 40 pages of shit with informative comments lurking within them.

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I've got more things so say, but I'll just edit them in later.

 

[Rydian]

And I think it would help out a great deal in situations like release threads where you have 40 pages of shit with informative comments lurking within them.

This sounds good to me.

Yes you'd think with the speed of it that a post would only be on the last page long enough to get 2/3 votes, but those would push it near the top of the "highest-rated posts" view where people could vote more to categorize the helpful posts (for examples ones with clearer instructions getting more votes because more people understand).

Also it'd help point out later posts in news threads and such that explain things more clearly (for example if it's a legal thread or something most people don't understand).

 

[dice]

I'm always up for giving things a shot (i.e. doing this on a trial basis and going on from there) but it's just as likely that a useless (but entertaining) post is given the highest rating.

Whilst all suggestions are welcome I question the NEED for this one. I can't see how implementing this will improve the forum overall.

*edit*

To contradict myself it would be more beneficial to have an on/off switch for this feature for those who do/don't wish to have it.

 

[MelodieOctavia]

Instead of a upvote/downvote system, I propose a system more like slashdot, where individual posts can be tagged with words from a predetermined dropdown list. (EG: Troll, Funny, Interesting, Helpful, Stupid, Useless, Unintelligible, etc...)

The Topic creator can then determine what kinds of posts will rise to the top in their threads, and this information will be displayed somewhere in the topic.

E.G.: A user is looking for a certain homebrew that he deleted off of his SD card. He creates a topic looking for help, and he ticks off Helpful and Informative as the kind of posts that he is looking for. The community then uses a dropdown menu for each individual post to select which posts are Helpful or Informative.

 

[p1ngpong]

Instead of a upvote/downvote system, I propose a system more like slashdot, where individual posts can be tagged with words from a predetermined dropdown list. (EG: Troll, Funny, Interesting, Helpful, Stupid, Useless, Unintelligible, etc...)

I could see that feature being easily abused.

 

[Schlupi]

Instead of a upvote/downvote system, I propose a system more like slashdot, where individual posts can be tagged with words from a predetermined dropdown list. (EG: Troll, Funny, Interesting, Helpful, Stupid, Useless, Unintelligible, etc...)

I could see that feature being easily abused.

Seconded.

I don't like the whole "Like" "Dislike" button thing. AT ALL.

It annoys the hell out of me. Maybe just because I hate Facebook a lot of the times...

And the TwinRetro, I like the idea but P1ingpong has a valid point. What will stop words like "LOLWTFBBQ" or "Dicks" or other inappropriate words from being shown to the little kiddie's eyes?

 

[Zetta_x]

I'm always up for giving things a shot (i.e. doing this on a trial basis and going on from there) but it's just as likely that a useless (yes funny) post is given the highest rating.

Whilst all suggestions are welcome I question the NEED for this one. I can't see how implementing this will improve the forum overall.

*edit*

To contradict myself it would be more beneficial to have an on/off switch for this feature for those who do/don't wish to have it.

I like the idea. There have been numerous times I have found a topic I was interested in with +40 pages but only 5-6 useful posts. While posts that are not particularly useful has a probability of being voted up, a true post particularly useful should received more votes in a long duration of time. Each post can be voted once per temper per some given time and it would be highly beneficial if we can list the top X rated posts.

 

[Minox]

'Circlejerk' should cover the main issue I'd have regarding a system like this.

 

[MelodieOctavia]

Instead of a upvote/downvote system, I propose a system more like slashdot, where individual posts can be tagged with words from a predetermined dropdown list. (EG: Troll, Funny, Interesting, Helpful, Stupid, Useless, Unintelligible, etc...)

I could see that feature being easily abused.

Seconded.

I don't like the whole "Like" "Dislike" button thing. AT ALL.

It annoys the hell out of me. Maybe just because I hate Facebook a lot of the times...

And the TwinRetro, I like the idea but P1ingpong has a valid point. What will stop words like "LOLWTFBBQ" or "Dicks" or other inappropriate words from being shown to the little kiddie's eyes?

Because it would be a set list. A dropdown list of predetermined words. You wouldn't be able to add your own, and p1ng, how could that system be abused?

 

[p1ngpong]

Because it would be a set list. A dropdown list of predetermined words. You wouldn't be able to add your own, and p1ng, how could that system be abused?

You are giving people the ability to anonymously label someone else's posts with tags such as "troll, stupid, useless" and so on with this suggestion. Various people aren't exactly popular here for various reasons, whether they deserve to be unpopular or not. It would take a fairly small group of dedicated people to systematically tag all their posts negatively, thereby dropping their posts to the bottom of a thread. Regardless of the content of the post itself.

And even if all the options were just positive ones, which would make it the same as Sonicslashers suggestion, I would still be against this. I just don't think these voting systems are beneficial, reliable or really needed. But that's just my own personal opinion on the matter.

 

[Etalon]

And even if all the options were just positive ones, which would make it the same as Sonicslashers suggestion, I would still be against this. I just don't think these voting systems are beneficial, reliable or really needed. But that's just my own personal opinion on the matter.

I'd like such a voting system in the release threads. So trash like "loaaading now" would have no chance.

 

[SkankyYankee]

I like the up/down voting system idea for individual posts, but something like the one on urban dictionary with thumbs up/down being if this post was useful or not to them. it would theoretically free up the clutter of people thanking/criticising people repeatedly for a single post that gets pushed back in the pages of a hot thread about an important topic. Something like that wouldn't be affected as much by a popularity contest, but honestly you wont completely get rid of that in a forum as large as GBATemp.

 

[Deleted-188346]

I like the idea, but I also agree that it could be abused.
Perhaps having an option to disable/enable the feature would help?

 

[Guild McCommunist]

Unfortunately like every good suggestion the problem is people being dickheads and abusing the system. It's like on Youtube how you can like comments or how you can do the same on Facebook. Then those comments are the first things you see. And they can easily be something stupid as opposed to something with thought.

It's a good suggestion but if you really need to find a post relevant to your needs you use the "Search thread" function. Like say for example a big game gets released and you don't want to riffle through hundreds of posts to find a patch or fix for your cart. Just search the thread with keywords (like for an Acekard user like myself I'd look for "AKAIO fix" or something) and tah-dah.

tl;dr: Use the "Search thread" function if you want to find a good post that's relevant to your needs.

 

[Zetta_x]

Unfortunately like every good suggestion the problem is people being dickheads and abusing the system. It's like on Youtube how you can like comments or how you can do the same on Facebook. Then those comments are the first things you see. And they can easily be something stupid as opposed to something with thought.

That's probably because the majority of youtube videos don't even have a reason to comment. Every comment can be considered stupid as opposed to useful so no matter which one has the highest rating by default will be stupid.

However, in GBA temp, a large number of threads raise issues to problems with system X. Take into consideration of the Jailbreak thread when PS3 jailbreak was first released. There were some very knowledgeable posts about the subject that many people considered useful in regards to Jailbreaking a PS3. However, there were thousands of posts of people having random speculation. If a large majority used the voting system and the majority of them used the voting, the central limit theorem states that the distribution of votes will follow a normal distribution with the highest peak being at the mean (or the most helpful posts (which is an opinion on what is helpful))

 

[Nintendo_Chick]

If the up votes "expired" after a month or so, this could also help with the outdated stickies too.

 

[Overlord Nadrian]

If the up votes "expired" after a month or so, this could also help with the outdated stickies too.

Stickies are most of the times meant to last a very long time, and the only real 'outdated' stickies hadn't been updated since 2007 or so. Besides, most of them have already either been replaced or unstickied.

+1 to Sonicslasher though, it would definitely help to bring up the best posts in the topic and you wouldn't have to browse through the fuckload of shit that gets posted nowadays.

 

[Costello]

those are all interesting suggestions but the main problem is: abuse.

Now to solve that problem, couldn't we do something like a user-whitelist?
we would only allow a whitelist of people to use those systems (like the ones that were suggested) which would prevent those from being abused.

I don't see the problem with a whitelist other than the selection of people. People who wouldn't be included in the whitelist would feel left out...
Or we could include all long-time members in the whitelist, and all users that have a warning level above 0 are excluded? Then if someone ever abuses the system, they get a warning and are excluded.

how does that sound?

 

[raulpica]

Or we could include all long-time members in the whitelist, and all users that have a warning level above 0 are excluded? Then if someone ever abuses the system, they get a warning and are excluded.

how does that sound?

That one sounds good Costy, but will there be an history of the "likes" and the "not likes" so that we can track users abusing of the system?

 

[prowler]

The only thing I have against this if it shows how many likes you've got below your name.