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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Terrible.  Just another amazingly statist construct to coral and shape people's social behaviours that will not work as intended and will only cause like minded people to stick together and other non-conformists to depart.

 

Stick to chess and solving the inherent issues with chess on the internet.

Or, if implemented, consider changing site name to SocialChessClique.com to reflect this new emergent personality.

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

If it's abusable, it's not usable.

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.

The forums should just be better organised.

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.

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They absolutely use moderators.  More covert than overt, and that is a good thing.

 

Every post is irrelevant from certain perspectives.  Deciding which is more relevant is done by individuals when they click on links. 

So, one clicks on an "irrelevant" thread and now need not go back there.  Issued solved.

 

It is just another thin and poorly disguised popularity contest, regardless of what sites do or do not use such a system.

 

Also, slashdot stopped being significant or seminal about 15 years ago.  It has suffered Yogi Berra syndrome since:  No one goes there anymnore because it is too crowded.

 

Chess is not hip.  Stop trying to make it so.

Yogi Berra's too crowded?

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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!

onosson, why would anyone assume their own specific idea of "helpful" would be the same for others?

Does one pre-suppose to know what I think is helpful or interesting to me?  If not, then how would that person's vote help me?

Answer: it would not. 

It would help and serve only those that rely upon large groups of people approving something as a measure of worth.

 

I understand the demographic the site caters to, but explain me how this fits into the mission statement;

Play, learn, share

Without the addition of a fourth entity, such as JUDGE, I am not sure how it fits.  People can share with out being voted upon.  They sure can learn and play without this measure.  So.....

...it is just another social add-on that has nothing at all to do with chess and everything to do with making people feel better about the social networking aspects of a website forum board.

If this is indeed the true mission, why not be as open about it as Facebook?

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

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If you could explain to me why it is cut-throat and rude, I would appreciate the insight.

 

You see, I find the suggestion of such a system to be cut-throat and rude.  And undignified for human consumption. 

 

As for enemies and their number, thanks for the concern, but I measure success by the number of enemies that pile up and people that cross me off their friends list, so that may not be the best way to convince me of something. 

I did not single anyone out, make an ad-hominem attack, or do anything other than express a strongly worded opinion as argument against such a proposal as made in the initial post, and subsequently re-inforced by others.

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.

There's too many kids here for this to work. I know that sounds harsh but you can't seriously expect a "mature" vote from everyone. Another forum I go to is an art one and this problem is extremely rare (once a month or two). Why? Because everyone is there only to post work and learn. Not much chance for immature babble. Chess sites are different because there is more to do than just play chess and they will obviously cater to a larger age group. Just picture those kids that spam up the daily puzzle getting voting rights elsewhere. Chaos; Proof can be found at other sites attrating a huge age demographic like youtube, myspace, facebook or digg. Now add that number to the adults that will conform to be popular...

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?