New Feature: Message Rating System

I like the 3 button suggestion as well.

My additional suggestion:
-get rid of the numbers and descriptions. Make it simple, and obvious that it's only for flagging "good" posts:

1 star icon
2 star icon
3 star icon

Your averaging can still work the same way, each poster will end up with a rating of something like 2.15 stars or whatever. (I suggest 2 decimal places if going with a 3-point system).

Calling them "stars" just gets people into that feeling that it's only for "good" posts, not to identify negative posts.

Admin writes: By the way, the names "Hall of Fame" and "Hall of Shame" are just the names that happened to pop into my head. They actual names will be settable through the control panel. Using other names can change how they're perceived quite a bit. For example, what if the "Hall of Shame" were instead called "Whoops!" or some other capricious or whimsical name?

In allowing settable names, how difficult is it to allow additional categories for even more user-creativity?

That is, you could rename them to "Awesome" and "Whoops!"... or, if you allowed more categories you could have:

"Awesome!"
"Whoops!"
"Funny!"
"Perfect Grammer"
"Best Creationist Defense"
"Most Efficient Use of Text"

...I'm assuming that additional categories would be as easy as copying some code. That may not be the case. I'm just thinking that if this is easy and relatively not-a-memory-hog... freedom of user creativity is generally a good thing.

I like the way you show each and every post you enjoy reading. If you stopped, I'd probably think you left the community.

It does show that you're engaged in reading all over the webpage.

Tanypteryx writes: I apologize for screwing it up for everyone else.

I don't think Percy meant it in a negative way.
From a programmers perspective, this is just a fact that needs to be dealt with.

If votes do get taken into account... how to you differentiate between spamming and actual interest?
Should you differentiate between them?

If you're going to create a metric, these are just the things you need to think about.
I would even guess that Percy is thankful for the way you use the Cheers button so much. If nothing else, as a programmer... it gives him data to test his metric with.

Tanypteryx writes: Reading threads with nothing but cheer buttons is personally very unsatisfying. It would make just as much sense to only have a jeer button. ... This is a debate forum and I think we should be able to vote for a post that makes a good point or a post that does not.

I agree that this would be much more fair.
But the human beast isn't always fair.

A lot of people can't separate a judging system from their own personal viewpoints and how they feel as individuals.
A lot of people take those jeers/cheers extremely seriously and very personally... even if it's labelled not to be so.

That's just the way a lot of people are.

And, many creationists fall into that category rather than being able to look at things objectively.
(Let's face it... if they could use critical thinking to look at things objectively, they wouldn't be creationists...)

Which then drives this innocent cheers/jeers discussion into the age-old problem at EvC on how to keep creationists around. And whether or not it's worthwhile to do so.

There are ups and downs and people on both sides of that fence, but this is Percy's forum and he gets to decide what to do with it. From what I can tell, he's decided to cater as much as possible to the creationists in order to make things easier for them to stick around and debate topics here.

Therefore... no jeers

Personally, I agree with Percy's decision... but that discussion has another place.
I thought that place was here: Creationist Shortage
...but that's not the discussion I was thinking of. I couldn't find it either, maybe it doesn't exist and I'm just making this all up.
I thought there was a thread on "how to keep creationists at the forum" or something like that and talked about whether or not this site should even try for such a thing (is "bad debate" better than "no debate?").
But, I couldn't find it. So maybe I'm jumbling some things in my mind.

AZPaul3 writes: A simple show of ones feelings toward a specific post is a good thing for the respondent, the poster and the lurker. But building some "member rating" based on such responses is juvenile because the data input has nothing to do with good/bad productive/occasional member but only agree/disagree post and, too often, like/detest poster. Look at our Lovely Lady Faith. Her member rating was in the toilet yet she is a good, productive, fun (maddening) member of this community. She helps make this a fun place to play. She is a good member of this community and deserves better.

A good point.

Maybe we could keep + and - as it was before per message but member rating should reflect popularity and forum-usage.

That is, all my messages get lots and lots and lots and lots and some more +'s... therefore, my member rating would be a 10.
And, under the system I propose... Faith's messages may get a bunch of -'s... but her member rating should also be a 10.

Each message would show +'s and -'s from all the voters as they deem the message.
But the member rating wouldn't be so much a tally of those +'s and -'s as it would become what it's generally regarded as: a popularity meter.

I would be popular because everyone loves all my posts -> Member rating = 10.
Faith might be popular because everyone dislikes all her posts -> Member rating = 10.

Administrators would still have to actually read messages and make judgement calls to see if they should suspend members or not.
And member ratings would reflect "impact on the forum" rather than "liked by the majority".
Might even add a little incentive for posters who get a bunch of -'s to stick around...

AZPaul3 writes: Why do we need some "popularity" rating? What does it accomplish? Ego?

I dunno. I didn't invent the thing.

I think the explanation is something like this:

Percy wrote all the software for this forum.
At the time, Percy thought he would one day release this software for commercial purposes.
As part of the "commercial application" side of things... other forums seem to always include some sort of "popularity rating." Percy's forum not having one at all would be detrimental in the way of making sales.
Percy decided to add one as an option (administrator's choice, as displayed by The Moose) and our usage of such here is simply for testing purposes.

Do away with this member rating stuff via popularity, participation, + or -, secret ballot , dart board or any other way and all these problems with members like Faith and the inevitable and never ending questions "what's it mean?" and "what is fair?" all go away.

Meh. I think it's kinda cool, and adds something.
I also think too many people are too worried about it.
I would rather correct the system to something "more palatable for everyone" instead of getting rid of it altogether.

But, really, it doesn't seem all that important one way or the other to me... I mean... nobody's dying over it...

As long as mine is in the upper ranges near the top then who cares?

Certainly not me. I mean, as long as I'm ahead of you and your mama. Burrrrrrrrrrrrrn!!!!.

Admin writes: This *will* happen one day.

Do you have any evidence for this claim?
Just kidding. Seriously... good for you. I still think it's a good idea.
In fact, my wife mulls over starting a webpage/blog/forum thing up every now and then. If she ever seriously gets into it, I would like to purchase a copy of this forum software. As long as it's not, like, and industrial price of $1000 or something like that, anyway.

I actually have a little help now - someone is making minor bug fixes and looking into connections to social media.

Go somebody!

I will offer cheers! And I wouldn't jeer you, even if it was an option.
I will also offer much advice for things that will take months to program, and then I won't help with the programming in any way!!

ringo writes: That's what I would suggest. Then we can make up our own math.

That's actually a cool idea.

Sure, the board-administrator gets to set stuff up... but why not give some of that control to the user, as well? Especially for something like a rating system.

Simple: The user could choose to not display any rating system while they are logged into their profile.

Complex: The user could choose to have the rating system display something meaningful to them, regardless as to what rating system the administrator has incorporated. User wants to show likes as a positive? Okay. User wants to show a reverse rating? (a 1.2 would display for them as an 8.8). Sure. I know some of the against-evolution posters used the rating system like that anyway...

It's just rating-system. Maybe it should be user-controlled as opposed to administrator-controlled. Kind of like whether or not you want to display other people's signature lines when reading the posts.