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.

 

[alidsl]

Or you can just vote up a thread and keep the same order

 

[p1ngpong]

Or you could just have no voting system at all.

 

[alidsl]

And be like north Korea, no thanks

 

[Veho]

Or you can vote for individual posts and then have the option to filter them by number of votes, keeping the chronological order, but weeding out the "+1", "QFT" and similar.

Look at any new release or "dump anticipation" thread, 90% of the posts boil down to "nothing yet" and "HEY GUIZE R4 PATCH PLZ". Set the filter to only show posts with 1 or more votes, and you'd be rid of most of the clutter and still have a coherent thread with all the relevant info.

 

[Heran Bago]

Yeah dude I will rep this post of yours. Cool Thanks Thumbs Up ++
Also please check my tutorials out in my sig and vote them up thanks.

(this could be gbatemp)

(I wouldn't care)

 

[Another World]

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.

what you are saying is based on speculation because we haven't tried anything like this before. i could easily see people voting up a post their friend made and then someone comes along who can easily pick out the spelling errors, incorrect information, etc. a system like the one we are discussing should be for the best of the best and nothing else. otherwise we are just handing the ability to stickie any post to all normal group users, and they will abuse it, they always do.

based on many other sites i've been involved with i would speculate that users will abuse this system and/or the wrong type of posts (be it with good intentions) will be voted 'up'.

i think instead we should just have a new forum section where information can be mirrored. if you find a post you love because it has great information that truly helped you, you move that information (by permission of the original author) to the new section. however, we then run into the issues ping mentioned a few posts up.

-another world

 

[Rydian]

To clarify, I'm for voting of posts. POSTS, NOT USERS.

If a user has 25 posts that have +10 votes each, that should not show anything different on his profile or account info (to the left of a post) than somebody that has no voted up posts at all. This will stop people going to lengths to get "more rep" because there won't be "rep" for users.

This would most likely be helpful IN a large thread (not between multiple threads) where somebody can just choose to show the highest-ranking posts so they can get an overview of what's going on without having to read all 15 (or 25, or 50, or even 200+ sometimes) pages.

 

[Veho]

what you are saying is based on speculation because we haven't tried anything like this before. but i feel the need to remind you that the avg age of gbatemp users are under 15. i could easily see people voting up a post their friend made and then someone in their 40's comes along who can easily pick out the spelling errors, incorrect information, etc. that isn't to say that younger users don't have an education but experience and knowledge does come with age. a system like the one we are discussing should be for the best of the best and nothing else. otherwise we are just handing the ability to stickie any post to all normal group users, and they will abuse it, they always do.

Turns out we were talking about two different things. Sorry about that

I'm against voting posts up and/or down, or sorting posts by number of votes, and I agree that it lends itself to abuse too easily, and pretty much all the points p1ng mentioned in his post.

I am, however, all in favor of voting for individual posts, and filtering posts by number of votes, like I described here and here.

 

[Sonicslasher]

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.

Maybe something akin to a context button like on reddit would remedy this problem?

 

[dice]

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.

Or you could have said, "Just look at Youtube".

 

[Costello]

So admittedly a lot of people here made good points in favor and against a possible POST voting system (we are ruling out 'member reputation' system obviously).
We still haven't found the perfect idea, but I wouldn't be against picking one of the ideas and implementing it at some point on a trial basis.
I would like to see this happening, and after a fixed amount of time like a month or something, we could discuss the usefulness and the well-functioning of the system. If we come to the conclusion that the system should be disabled, then we will disable it.

Thats what I think we should do. Now if a good idea is presented I don't see a reason for not trying it out. We're just waiting for definitive and well-detailed ideas