Ratings and posting reports

[andre]

On the forum, there is a "Rate this up" button. Why not add a "Rate this down" as well?

Also, as I understand it, this rating works at the topic/thread level, not at the level of individual contributions. That makes it hard to defend against trolls or spam. Making is possible to rate individual postings down, or at least report them to a moderator as inappropriate, could be a needed feature. Currently, the DevNet seems to be quite low traffic and closed to a small group. If it is really started to be advertised more to the general public, it may see more traffic, and also more junk.

[mgran]

Hi, thanks for your feedback Andre.

To report a comment you can click the "report" link under the profile on the right, the team here will then be notified and do what is needed.

We have made a conscious decision to only have "rate up" and no "rate down". It's sort of an experiment since the user-base is likely to rate things up due to the point system and thus not rating something up can, given enough users, be considered equivalent to rating something down when it comes to the value of the content. It's only half the truth, since sometimes a piece of content definitely deserves a -1 vote, but we would like to see if this works out first. There is always the "report" link for the worst of it.

We are currently working on the Tag module (you have probably seen the dummy tags top right) and we want to combine tagging and rating to easily find highly rated relevant stuff across all types of content: wiki, forum, pages, videos, eLearning, books and groups. This is the "true" use of rating and doesn't need negative votes to work.

Being able to rate individual comments is also something we didn't want to enable, we believe the added complexity does not stack up to the added value.

The real test would be once we are out of closed beta. And if it doesn't work out we can always introduce negative rating.

It's all interesting topics that we have discussed at length here in the team. Should our assumptions turn out to be wrong (wouldn't be the first time) we are eager and able to adjust!

[andre]

OK, thanks for your explanation! It seems you have thought this all through; lets see if your approach works.

Sorry that I did not look carefully enough to spot the "report" link. For testing what it does, I will click it on your comment. Please don't be offended if that immediately sets of all kinds of alarm bells and whistles :-)

Edit:
OK, it seems it did not, I got a nice popup dialog that enables entering a reason. One small issue with that: the dialog is resizable, but the entry box does not resize with the dialog.

[secretNinja]

bq. We have made a conscious decision to only have “rate up” and no “rate down”. It’s sort of an experiment since the user-base is likely to rate things up due to the point system...

I don't know what was the situation almost a year ago as I'm quite new to the forum but I think it would be great to have a "rate down" button.

In another thread on the same topic Alexandra said:

bq. ..we believe in positive reinforcement. And I personally think rating up feels nicer than rating down.

Yeah ... but there're such threads lately that rating them up could be only for the points ( I'm not against these threads: everybody can ask, not everyone (including me) has enough experience to start a nice thread.) .

I like the point system ( in my dreams I see myself as a Scientist one day :P ) but I don't like the idea of liking every thread in the forum ( and achieving my dream in one day ... actually around 6000 point could be made this way ).

Definitely rating down shouldn't give points ... otherwise it would become like rating up: "Oooo...new thread...rate it up!".

[DenisKormalev]

I don't think that rate it down will be good (there were a lot of conversations about it here on DevNet). User arting system will definitely be better as another solution for "rate down" (there were also some conversations AFAIR and I hope it will be live some day)

[secretNinja]

User rating would be great ... I've read somewhere about it and I'm eager to see it in action.
I think it wouldn't be a solution for the users rating every thread out there ... but let's hope that there aren't so many points addicted people :)