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.

 

[Another World]

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.

_________________________________________________________________________

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

is this suggestion for a new section which would hold mirrored/dupe posts which have been "up voted"? because i don't want to see voted posts become the new stickies. some stickied information doesn't need to be sticked. what we don't need is a huge amount of stickied posts (50+) because users *feel* they need to be there. mirroring the data to a new section (without removing the original thread) would allow data to be organized and not force users to view a huge list of stickies. even a white list won't fix the problem of users voting to get something moved to the top. instead of a voting system i'd rather see a new staff position in charge of collecting the best information and hosting it all in once place. then again, isn't this what the wiki pages were intended for? sadly the wiki pages are 50/50 as new projects are not often updated resulting in lost information.

so why not implement a voting system which flags posts within a category. then allow users a way to search by the top voted posts in each section. this is the same thing as having "stickies", as the most popular posts are still tagged, but they are not moved and do not make sections more cluttered. this also fixes the problem of dupe posts (as i mentioned) or moving posts into a new section which takes them out of context.

-another world

 

[Costello]

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?

I guess the staff would be able to see who voted what in order to be able to exclude the abusers.
And as for whatever you voted, you could maybe choose to keep it public or private (depends on people)

edit: Another World's suggestion of staff handling that job pleases me too

if we get all the staff those powers, they'd be able to dig up interesting posts. Though it'd be hard for the staff to keep up with all the threads.
Better than nothing i guess..

 

[Another World]

edit: Another World's suggestion of staff handling that job pleases me too

if we get all the staff those powers, they'd be able to dig up interesting posts. Though it'd be hard for the staff to keep up with all the threads.
Better than nothing i guess..

then i added this:

so why not implement a voting system which flags posts within a category. then allow users a way to search by the top voted posts in each section. this is the same thing as having "stickies", as the most popular posts are still tagged, but they are not moved and do not make sections more cluttered. this also fixes the problem of dupe posts (as i mentioned) or moving posts into a new section which takes them out of context.

-=)

further more, the "tagged" posts could receive a new icon (like a gold star to the left in the forum view) and an option to sort the entire section (gbatemp & scene news, r4 flash kits, homebrew news, etc) by this new system (based on votes) or by the old post date system.

-another world

 

[Veho]

so why not implement a voting system which flags posts within a category. then allow users a way to search by the top voted posts in each section. this is the same thing as having "stickies", as the most popular posts are still tagged, but they are not moved and do not make sections more cluttered.

This gets my vote. Don't change the order of posts, but allow users to sort them by number of positive votes.

 

[Another World]

no matter what i don't see a way around having staff micro-manage the voting system. we don't want users to vote a post up, because its "funny" for example, if that post does not contain any useful information. this will be a HUGE task, to say the least, and i don't think the current staff should be forced to have more responsibilities. perhaps a new group of members should be promoted to maintain the voting system. they would have the power to take away votes which inflate the results and thus push a post to the top. they would also have the power to add/remove users from the voting whitelist. senior staff would have the power as well but not be obligated to perform these duties.

however, can you imagine the amount of work involved in checking every voted post? just take a look at how many posts are made daily! this system is a good idea, and with the right effort it could be a nice feature, but i'm not sure it will work as suggested.

-another world

 

[Phoenix Goddess]

however, can you imagine the amount of work involved in checking every voted post? just take a look at how many posts are made daily! this system is a good idea, and with the right effort it could be a nice feature, but i'm not sure it will work as suggested.

I'm with you there. Without the right dedication to take a look at each voted post(And there would be many due to people voting what they "believe" is helpful), it's more work than it expected. It sounds pretty handy, but people find the strangest things as helpful, sometimes.

 

[tj_cool]

Sadly the wiki pages are 50/50 as new projects are not often updated resulting in lost information.

The Wiki should probably be promoted a little more.
But there have been quite some great additions lately (The DSTWO skins page, the PS3 Jailbreak pages, ...)
I have already removed the most outdated projects (that were no longer of any use), but there might be some outdated stuff left.

Not to go entirely off topic.
If it were just a vote up(/vote down) system, I'd be against it. Not only for abuse, but also for people trying anything to get their post voted up. (Like "+rep me if it helped" on some other forums.)

A system I like better is allowing people to tag certain posts (the tags would be pre-defined). And the more the same tags it gets, the higher the posts lands when sorting by that tag. Of course it could still be abused (by deliberately adding the wrong tags), but it should be reduced.

 

[Veho]

however, can you imagine the amount of work involved in checking every voted post? just take a look at how many posts are made daily! this system is a good idea, and with the right effort it could be a nice feature, but i'm not sure it will work as suggested.I'm with you there. Without the right dedication to take a look at each voted post(And there would be many due to people voting what they "believe" is helpful), it's more work than it expected. It sounds pretty handy, but people find the strangest things as helpful, sometimes.
You're taking extreme examples as regular behaviour. Sure, there will be a few misplaced votes, but the vast majority will only vote for actually helpful posts. No point in making a fuss over a few isolated cases that will be drowned by the relevant votes.

EDIT:
QUOTE(tj_cool @ Oct 20 2010, 11:08 AM)

If it were just a vote up(/vote down) system, I'd be against it. Not only for abuse, but also for people trying anything to get their post voted up. (Like "+rep me if it helped" on some other forums.)

Make that a warning offence. Besides, the voting would be on individual posts. If you don't make the votes visible in the poster's profile (and you shouldn't), there would be no incentive to fish for votes. How would one show it off in that case? Put a link to a particularly popular post of his in his sig? "Hey look at this post I made it's popular go read it and make my ePeen bigger!"

 

[Gore]

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

Absolutely right +1000 wish I could 'Like' this

 

[tj_cool]

Make that a warning offence. Besides, the voting would be on individual posts. If you don't make the votes visible in the poster's profile, there would be no incentive to fish for votes. How would one show it off in that case? Put a link to a particularly popular post of his in his sig? "Hey look at this post I made it's popular go read it and make my ePeen bigger!"

I've been on a forum where they did that, so I wouldn't be surprised of anything...
But I'm not gonna compare that forum to this one.

Either way, I don't wanna get in a fight with you over this. We can't know before we try

 

[Veho]

Either way, I don't wanna get in a fight with you over this. We can't know before we try

I wasn't trying to fight or argue. It's my tone again, isn't it?

I'm sorry

And I think I misunderstood your post. I'd be against "up/down" votes too. I like posts in chronological order

Here's what I think would work.

You vote for individual posts.
One vote per person per post (duh).
You can't vote for your own posts (duh).
Votes don't change the post's order in the thread, they're just displayed next to the post.
Users should have the option to filter the thread by number of votes (only show posts with over X votes, etc), but that's optional (might be a strain on the server).
Votes don't show up in the member profile.


I think we shoud give it a try and see how it works.

 

[Sterling]

I think there should also be a separate section within the thread to show the highlight posts of the thread.
Also maybe a limit on your voting abilities if you get warned or have a certain warn percentage.

 

[playallday]

.

 

[Veho]

We won't know unless we try.

 

[Rydian]

I vote on having votes not publicly displayed per user because it's a vote on the content of the post, not the user.

It people can't get bigger numbers or a bigger bar by their name in general, they won't go to lengths to spam for votes.

 

[Overlord Nadrian]

I've seen many frequent posters who I'd never give a vote up, and I've seen many one-time visitors that actually know what they're talking about, and I'd vote their posts up as much as possible.

It's only the idiots that would vote eachother's posts up, really. Those that abuse the system can be banned for all I care.

EDIT: Rydian has a good point.

 

[alidsl]

Maybe a "thankyou" system where you can thumbs up a thread and it just has a little icon next to it with the amount of people who have thanked it (I've seen it on the SuperCard forum)

 

[Rydian]

That might encourage people to take stuff from main threads and make new threads about it, we could have 5 threads on the same thing because each thread creator wants to ability to be thanked.

 

[alidsl]

Yeah but this is like communism, it only works if it isn't abused
You have to choose the system thats least likely to be abused

 

[p1ngpong]

Right let me try and condense things down a little here to see what the general consensus of ideas is.

A lot of you want a voting system implemented. The majority agree that voting posts down is a bad idea. Also that showing a posts individual ratings is a bad idea. So why do we need a voting system at all if that's the case? Well even though we can not see how many votes have been cast, we should have an optional system that allows the top rated posts to be pushed to the top of a thread. This would allow us to find the best most useful posts far more efficiently.

I don't think anyone has considered the massive flaws in this idea, let me tell you what they are.

The first flaw is time. A post that has been around longer has more time to accumulate positive votes. An older post that was very useful a few days ago, may easily be redundant now. Now we may not show how many votes have been cast for an individual post, but its at the top of the thread. Which if anything is far worse than just showing the votes themselves. It would be the first post visible, and would have a far bigger advantage than any newer ones, and because its at the top of the pile, and seemingly very helpful, it would continue to get votes even if it does not deserve them anymore. Things can progress very quickly in the world of AP fixes and so on, the newest most up to date post are generally the most helpful. A voting system would not push them to the top straight away, and they may just stagnate at the bottom of the pile with the other new posts, while the older ones never lose their momentum.

Then we have the issue of order to consider. You are all arguing we should try this to make finding useful information far more convenient and efficient. But this could make finding useful information far more confusing. Imagine the highest rated posts at the top of a thread, with no chronological order, no relation to one another, just a jumbled confused mess of replies that when taken out of order and context may not be helpful at all.