New Improved Voting Released

JH
John Honovich
Jul 03, 2014
IPVM

You've been asking for it and now it's back and much improved.

Voting 1.0 was removed earlier this year as the simple up or down approach failed to give meaningful feedback about member's position.

Now, we have multifaceted voting available for every comment.

You can vote whether you agree, disagree, find something funny or insightful.

Try it out. Let us know what you think, either by comment or vote.

TC
Trisha (Chris' wife) Dearing
Jul 03, 2014
IPVMU Certified

Nice improvements!

John, speaking as a humble(d) veteran of Voting Wars 1.0, I would like to propose a mechanism often used on other sites to increase the value of votes themselves. Namely a limit upon the number of votes one can cast per day. This eliminates the natural tendency to automatically "support" those people we like, as well as the opposite, systematic downvoting. It also removes the inane voting on every single back and forth in a discussion. In those cases the total agrees and disagrees can end up being 10x of other more worthy discussions.

Just something to consider, while it is still early. apologies if you already have something implemented.

JH
John Honovich
Jul 03, 2014
IPVM

I agree. I've queued this up as a feature.

Question then becomes - what is the maximum number of votes one can cast per day? I'd suggest 10 as it's enough to let people vote on a few articles and should cover 90%+ of normal voting patterns. Thoughts?

Rv
Rogier van der Heide
Jul 04, 2014

I must say, I disagree on the limitation of votes.

The number of votes on a single thread shouldn't be much of an issue, and will later show that the discussion was considered to be quite intrested for the forum itself. A high value of disagree's isn't a bad thing, as it's just as informative as agree's are.

I see this system a bit in the same way as upvotes or downvotes work on Reddit. The votes just show the general opinion of the forum on the relevance of the posts for this forum. You can never prevent people from using the system to show their displeasement to certain individuals, even if you put in a limitation. You do however, stop people from showing their appreciation on certain posts which just happened to be posted late on a day and they already used up their quota.

From the way I look at it, limitation brings you little, and only limits the potential value of late posted topics, which can be quite informative.

JH
John Honovich
Jul 04, 2014
IPVM

Rogier,

Good feedback.

To clarify though, the goal is not to limit votes on particular threads. It is to stop a few people from overwhelming voting.

Even if we have such a limit, we can always easily adjust the number (maybe it's 20 instead of 10) or manually take action against rogue voting.

John

JH
Jerome Humery
Jul 04, 2014

Even though I agreed with the 10 vote limit, Rogier does make a good point. I'm torn on this issue since I too believe limitations are seldom great. On the other hand, I am also a bit apprehensive when it comes to mixing the nature of forums and human nature.

Perhaps it starts with 10 and in time a person can earn more votes with 'good behavior'. The opposite could be true too. You start with unlimited votes, but get reductions with 'bad behavior'.

Another thought is that I assume you guys (the moderators) will get unlimited votes since, after all, it is your forum. However, perhaps the established and well respected members could begin with more votes too. That might sound a bit autocratic, but in the end I rather err on the side of caution and have a stricter voting system that works than have a meaningless free-for-all.....like so many forums.

As for me, just go ahead and put me down for 10 votes since that's about all the insightful input I can muster in one day. ;o)

JH
John Honovich
Jul 04, 2014
IPVM

"Another thought is that I assume you guys (the moderators) will get unlimited votes since, after all, it is your forum."

We have not voted much and I don't see that changing. My philosophy on voting is that a comment should be extraordinary to warrant a vote. I don't see the point of voting on every comment.

JH
Jerome Humery
Jul 04, 2014

One last thought that popped in my head....

If you do restrict the number of votes, what's to stop people from simply hitting 'reply' and writing-in their votes manually? They could do this over and over and hence clog-up the forum with voting replies which is not good either. I guess you can always just keep restricting their privileges (incl. number of replies/posts) according to the degree of their naughtiness.

In the end, I really don't know to what degree voting abuses is/could be an issue in the IPVM forum to warrant the more severe measures, or any measures at all. Seems that on awhole folks are pretty civil here.

JH
John Honovich
Jul 04, 2014
IPVM

"what's to stop people from simply hitting 'reply' and writing-in their votes manually"

People could always do that, but they rarely do, even though we removed voting for ~6 months. Most likely because (1) it's far more time consuming to create a comment that to click a vote link and (2) they expose themselves to everyone else when making a comment.

JH
Jerome Humery
Jul 04, 2014

John,

In the context of IPVM discussions, is 'insightful' the same as 'informative'? I found myself voting 'insightful', but then realized that what is insightful to me (because I'm just starting out) might be trivial for the Big Kahunas ;o) of the forum.

I don't know the demographics of IPVM in regards to experience, but it seems that most members here are at an elevated level. If this is true then my 'insightful' votes will simply skew the results for the more advanced members.

If 'insightful' is to be reserved for truely enlightened statements, then should there be a vote such as 'informative' for the plebes of IPVM? On the other hand, if newbies are a minority at IPVM, I am all too happy to restrict my 'insightful' votes and defer to my more knowledgable comrades.

As for the 10 votes per day, I think that could be a good thing.

JH
John Honovich
Jul 04, 2014
IPVM

Hi Jerome,

That's insightful feedback! :)

I agree with you. We will change the term to 'informative' as it is more straightforward that 'insightful'. I wanted to have a category that allowed members to thank / recognize people for saying something really smart even if they were incapable of agreeing with them (e.g., because they do not know enough to agree or disagree).

RW
Rukmini Wilson
Jul 06, 2014

Or a way to recognize something as being insightful even though actually disagreeing with their position at the same time.

Although simple to use, your system allows for quite a wide range of complex expression, since four bits allows 15 different statements, some undoubtably more useful than others...

We have all values singly, (A)gree, (D)isagree, (I)nformative, and (F)unny,

then come the natural combos AI, AF, IF, and the sublime AIF,

followed by the less usual, but still plausible DI, DF, and the conflicted DFI,

and ending with the bipolar options of AD, ADI, ADF, and ADIF, aka 'Full-Tilt'.

JH
John Honovich
Jul 04, 2014
IPVM

One other thing, I plan to restrict voting to only comments made after July 1, 2014. The rationale is that people overwhelmingly vote on comments within a week of them being made. It would be confusing / misleading to have limited votes on older topics. Agree/disagree?

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