GDO Updates

Is that just for rating up or down threads/content? What affect do the up/down have for the posts in the long run/viewing of them? I recommend adding a title tag somewhere in the widget that briefly explains what those buttons do.

Right now they don't do anything other than show the approval/disapproval associated with a piece of content. For example, people seem to like Josh's post. I hope that this will help to reduce some of the long painful discussions we have. Lots of times people don't leave an agree/disagree comment because they don't want the e-mail about it to go out and they don't want to appear argumentative. This lets those folks voice their agreement/disagreement very easily.

We have a bit of a troll problem in some of our groups. And I hope that the voting will play a part in helping to reduce that.

Longer term, my plan is:
1. Make them a bit more integrated into the design of the site. I asked around at the sprint and nobody was interested in this, so I just launched it hoping someone would help with the design after launch. Anyone want to help with this?
2. Next, I want to diminish the visbility of comments that have a strong negative score. I asked for help on that at the sprint and RealityLoop is working on it.
3. Finally, I want to provide an alternate view on the home page for "recent popular content" that uses votes as part of its measure of popularity.

(btw, I did mention this in this post which was on the front page of the site...)

Nice to see use of popular modules like this on GDO. I have been using the same widget recently on a client site.

A number of thoughts hit when I saw the voting widget. Same basic questions as others here about how votes will be used, plus some thoughts on various vote-based metrics.

First, it made me stop and think if I wanted to rate the post. I didn't feel the need or see much point in it. It was a year old question with no responses. The post was useful to me as a datapoint, but that's it. A rating would not help. It's most likely of little interest to most, but relevant to me this week and so I'm glad it's there. No need to make the community aware through voting.

I also wonder if +1 style voting wouldn't be a more suitable match to GDO community. It seems to me that non-constructive criticism has generally been discouraged here more than in many other tech communities. Not saying that is good or bad, but hard for me to see how anonymous thumbs downs is constructive on posts.

I recall a specific instance of this recently http://drupal.org/node/599506#comment-2208660

On the other hand, I like how StackOverflow combines voting, points and badges. They allow down voting, but at a cost in points to the voter. Plus they assign you a 'critic' badge.

Another thought was that I was more likely to vote up a post for it's conversation value. That means to me that my vote would generally be for entire conversation pegged to the original post, not to the author. Kudos to anyone who starts a good conversation, but that's a different metric and of minor interest to me. The communities' idea of high ranking conversations sounds a lot more interesting. So that makes me wonder: are we voting on posts and comments or will this also be translated into a user metric that will be displayed on profiles? Mainly just curious.

A related question: Do votes cast on both comments and posts contribute to some sort of user score? That would seem to be better than just posts if doing that sort of thing.

Voting comments up and down seems useful if tied to position or visibility in the thread. Seems like good conversations (or at least entertaining ones) would tend to rise up. This seems like a better source for both a post or user metric if going that route and allows users to both cast votes for commenters, while at the same time voting repeatedly for the conversation. Of the four (post user, post, commenters, post + commenters = conversation), the highest rated conversations seems the most interesting. More so than highest rated post or user.

Did the vote widget go from left to right within the last day (due to the overlap issue with ul/lis perhaps)? O..O

I never look at the front page, I skim the tracker. I think that's because the front page 'only' shows promoted content!

I get a "Validation error" when using the search box.

I've not looked at the vote up/down module in a long time so I don't know if what I'm suggesting is a simple config change or if a patch is necessary, but I think it would be much more useful to show the number of votes up and number of votes down rather than the sum of those.

for example, in a recent hotly debated thread in the NYC group, a comment that shows 0 points could have received 0 votes, or could have received 50 votes up and 50 votes down. Seeing that difference would be really useful for judging reaction from the community where the simple sum does not give much real info.

If people think this is a good idea, does anyone know how much work would be necessary to make this sort of change? I'd be willing to help work on it if a patch was necessary.

Thanks again for all the great efforts in keeping g.d.o such a valuable community resource.