I guess I wasn't clear. The guidelines for admin negative ratings would be the forum rules. If an individual admin perceives a rule violation problem, he can easily flag the message with an "admin thumbs down". One of the benefits of such, is that everyone can see when a message has administrative disapproval - A sign that says "All or a significant part of this message should not have been posted". Much easier and much less messy than admin message responses to the offending message, admins needing to "hide" text, admins needing to add "off-topic" banners, etc.
I see, thanks for clearing that up. I could live with that. Everyone can clearly see what the rules are, and as long as we still have some way to publicly disagree with a bad rating I dont see any problems.
Maybe a thumbs up with the # of times it got voted good by members, and a simple red X over the thumbs up for bad message?
I am not sure what would happen if it got several thumbs up, but was determined by admin to be bad though, maybe when you determine it was a bad msg then any positive votes disappear and it couldn't be voted on? Just a thought.
"I hate to advocate the use of drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they always worked for me." - Hunter S. Thompson
Have you ever seen StackOverflow? I think vote up and vote down sites work great for when attempting to determine what is the best answer (wisdom of the crowd and whatnot). I personally don’t think it works well for discussions and debates. For myself, here an upvote only system for members seems best.
It might be interesting to add a critique system. Something along the lines of allowing member to flag feedback (informative, valid argument, PotM, etcetera).
An interesting variation for voting might be to have people programmatically declare sides and then only let them vote for people with similar enough views to their own.
At first I was a little bewildered when I saw cheers\jeers in place of like\dislike ...
... and then I realized that these terms more accurately described the way the buttons were used: to cheer for the home team and to jeer at the opposition.
As it sits, this would seem to be an indicator of (a) how many people you coddle to and (b) how many people you annoy (so if my "rating" gets above 7, then I haven't annoyed enough people).
But of course, I still think that a single button or check box for "good post" (isn't this what you want to know?) would be sufficient. If you don't like a post or disagree with it then say so, and say why.
Good post
This goes along with the old urban advise "if you don't have anything good to say, then don't say anything at all" ...
If you wanted to expand on this, you could have a feature where hitting the button would then open up a small form with check boxes to show why it is a good post:
Post of the Month candidate Well written Clarity of message Concise To the point other
Likewise you could have a button down with the and buttons that would open a window with some options:
Flag for response from: Flag for admin review
off topic abusive language spam other
This would create a flag similar to the replies and could be annotated below the replies in the same way:
Replies to this message:
Message 93 by Trae, posted 06-14-2011 8:07 AM
Admin has not yet responded
Flags to this message:
RAZD to Taz, posted 06-14-2011 8:10 AM
Taz has responded
Grumpy to admin, posted 06-14-2011 8:12 AM
Admin has acknowledged this flag
Where the flag would be treated like a response and show up on the members page as a yes with an arrow.
People will still vote as they want to vote. I don't think it is worth all of the programming trouble to make the changes you suggest.
Personally, I give a "+" mainly for exceptioinally well written posts or posts with exceptionally important content. And I give a "-" mostly for posts that are incoherent or that contain abusive language.
There's one exception to the above that I am experimenting with. And that's for posts in PNT. For a PNT post, I give a "+" for "please promote - this is an interesting topic" and a "-" for "I see this as a topic not worthy of promotion."
Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
And those that want to be partisan team players, that consistently cheer their "team" and consistently jeer any opposition, will continue to do so. That's why I've said that if my rating gets too high, then I am not annoying enough people .
I've been on partisan websites where similar ratings are used, but anonymous, and my experience was that a majority of the ratings were from lurkers, cheering and jeering.
There's one exception to the above that I am experimenting with. And that's for posts in PNT. For a PNT post, I give a "+" for "please promote - this is an interesting topic" and a "-" for "I see this as a topic not worthy of promotion."
I'm starting to get my doubts of the jeer system. I already stated this before a month or two ago. In light of my recent blunder using the system on foreveryoung, and his subquent jeer of my (somewhat clusmy written) post that went with my mishad, I began thinking about it some more. What motive did I have when jeering?
A rating system on a online message board should only serve to unemotionally state disagreement. Jeers do not. While a cheer as a sign of approval holds some merit, what do jeers have?
At times, it only expresses mild justified annoyance. But more commonly, I'm seeing jeering based on earlier conflicts, bandwagoning, a further seal of anger in a already heated aguments. I do not get a feeling that this add something. It seems foul. It seems to commonly encourage translating a surge of annoyance, justified enough, into the crude satisfation of planting a big red symbol of whoever is annoying you, and it also commonly results in counter jeering.
Nothing good ever seems to come of it, and in situations when it somewhat justified, like with foreveryoungs outleash, it just turns into a large bandwagon, and in a meta-sense, it seems to have been a red bull fighters cape to FY's rage, seeing everyone dropping big red -'s by his posts in droves. I did not jeer often, but yesterday I fell for the huge bandwagon temptation, and my clumsy usage of the system exposed my own shallow motives to myself.
In conclusion, I'm starting to think of the jeer side of the system to be mostly foul, and I think it should be removed, or radically altered into a form it can only be used as unemotionally. The latter seems unlikely, so a approval based score system(a score that slowly rises for every few cheers given) would suit this forum better, leaving the respect of those that have deserved it, but removing the consending and unconstructive nature of a low rating and constant pestering with jeers. Rating would be a good system if the conversation here was truly unemotional but that is far from the reality we all must be seeing
Although if somebody has a better opinion on jeering and rating, I'm all ears for how this system can be used better.
I try to keep to the same system as you do, nwr. Exceptional posts which make their point with clarity and intelligence are worthy of a cheer and if they include humour, so much the better (yes, Dr A, I mean you and your marsupials!).
It doesn't matter to me whether the post agrees or disagrees with my position, if it's well written it deserves a cheer.
I reserve my jeers for posts which include dishonesty, incoherence, ad hominems and totally illogical thoughts. It is a way of saying that the post doesn't make any decent argument, rather that a way of showing disagreement with the argumet.
Some, however, use the jeer button indiscriminately on those who they consider to be on the opposing side, regardless of the quality of the post. Granted, they are in a minority, but they work hard and it isn't uncommon to have a long sequence of posts jeered by one person who just doesn't agree with the position.
I don't know how easy it would be to implement, but I would suggest a wee dropdown menu for the cheer/jeer button where you could click on a reason for your choice, otherwise your choice doesn't register. It's only a 2 click process, rather than a one click process and might even go some way to helping us improve what we post by giving us a little bit of feedback on them. I for one would appreciate knowing what someone found good or bad about my posts, whether they were confused, or contained factual errors, or were well-argued or very clear.
Is it possible to find all of the posts that I've cheered and jeered? I'm much too nice to jeer people but I think maybe I did jeer somebody once - maybe I accidentally clicked the wrong button, yeah, that's it - and I'd like to undo it.
It's a nuisance to have to do an ID swap to give an up or down to a message.
Me too, but what's the alternative?
The only alternative I can think of is to count Admin cheers as their associated member's cheers instead. That is: if you are 'logged in' as Admin a cheer will show as Percy.
It removes some functionality, so it isn't ideal, but I don't think I've intentionally used cheer/jeer as a moderator so I know I wouldn't miss it.
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