Voting Posts Up and Down

This is a feature on digg.com that is used to hide useless, irrelevant comments and to promote beneficial, relevant comments.

The feature is simply a thumbs up or thumbs down button on each forum post.  If a post has a certain number of thumbs down, it will be minimized so that only the poster's name and the number of thumbs down can be seen.  If someone wishes to see what the post was, that person can click on the post to unminimize it.

If thumbs up is clicked, that post's rating will go up, drawing people to it.  This way, helpful posts can be quickly found while unhelpful posts can be ignored.

Sure, this is open to abuse, but the benefit of a better forum outway the costs.

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I prefer the slashdot system, where moderation is parcelled out to various members of the community at different times, rather than having it available to everyone all the time.  It seems to work to prevent abuse of the system to a large extent, imho.  You can read about it here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml

I appreciate everyone's comments, and I do agree that it could be used to "cause like minded people to stick together and other non-conformists to depart."

Still, the issue of threads being distracted from their primary topic by irrelevant posts remains.  Onosson's idea might work if only trusted people were given this power.

I am curious what erik and crew's philosophy is on this issue since this is the only forum I have seen that does not use moderators.

Take it easy, richie and oprah.  I don't think goose is trying to turn this into a totalitarian chess regime... just filter out unrelated and irrelevant posts. It seems like a great idea to me, whether the thumb, slashdot, or some similar method is employed.

I, for one, can't wait to "thumbs down" the "first" on the puzzle every day. (I mean, for goodness sake, at least solve the puzzle first.)

By the way, great thumbs up, TheGrobe.

Yogi Berra's too crowded?

The point is not whether the sites referred to are popular or important - we're just talking about moderation systems in place on those sites as examples of what such a system could look like here.

Gotgoose said it well in the first post: "helpful posts can be quickly found while unhelpful posts can be ignored" - it's about helping users navigate the forums.

OTOH, it is entirely reasonable to say that things have not become so crowded here on chess.com - it's actually not that hard to find what you want here, at least not yet!

Richie_and_oprah,

Why not trying being a little less cutthroat and rude?  By continually arguing, you're only making new enemies and more attention for a topic that you obviously do not like.

And theGrobe, he was referring to a classic quote from yogi.  Look it up on google, there's a bunch of good ones :)

-Wicksta85

No enemy here - I thought we were having a reasonably civil discussion, actually!  Surprising, given how often such things descend into flames rather quickly...

I for one wasn't supportive of the idea in "social network" terms, popularity contests, or anything like that - I just find it helpful (even when help comes in the aggregate) to have some level of filtration at times, especially when forums get very busy and one doesn't always have time to wade through everything.

I think the ideal system would be one where anyone could set their view level to include ALL posts, and remove tags or thumbs or whatever from being displayed - so those who want to use the system, can, and those who aren't interested won't even see it.

But, like I say, it's probably true that any such system isn't really necessary on this site.

IDK, like onosson just said maybe if there was another option to "Sort [Forums] by Highest Rating." That way you could choose to totally ignore the ratings if you wished. If I had my choice though, I would keep it the way it is.

Richie_and_oprah is (are?) right about this one.

If public discourse is to be governed by the use of hand signals,we might just as well go to the middle digit.

How about a system that automatically deletes any posts containing two words or less? That would cut out all the lols and firsts and I agrees, and other similar silly pointless comments. Anyone know if such a thing has been tried elsewhere?

i agree...

Other forums have a system that disallows posts that are too short, but people end up adding inane content to bypass this system.

I remember how one guy used to deal with the "first post" comments on his blog.  He would always post the "first post" comment himself, usually with some silly pun and a goofy image.  After a while, people stopped even bothering to even try to beat him to it, and then he stopped doing it, too - and it never became a problem again.

I second that ;)

Id like to know why I was stopped from voting up or down. they were relevant. 

The op achieved his goal after 12 years.