Abuse on the rating system

[wesley123]

Letting everyone downvote that has the ability to upvote would dramatically change the landscape.

But I dont think it will change in a good way, actually I am sure that is the case.

There are enough users who are currently at a rating of 3 or 4 who only got there because they posted something everyone liked at the moment and only post short bogus answers, they never add anything and are more of an annoyance than useful, they also tend to make posts that tend to cause off topic behavior(like driver ying yang, team ying yang or other ying yang). Imagine them being able to downvote.

[Nando]

Well we have downvoters that act in exactly the same fashion right now.

As JT said earlier, a person looked up a 4 year old thread and downvoted his post.
Now considering this person must have had atleast 26 votes he can´t be a complete vegetable.

Just because you have 3 votes doesn´t make you retarded by any means. Clearly we have seen that it does not matter what your ratings are.

I mean just think about it for a second... 4 year old post, just how that mind works is truly astonishing.

[Cam]

imo a post should be locked from voting after 1-2 years. Since then such post is made we have all moved on to different things or have the same subject discussed much further. For people who then want to dig up old stuff they can go through what was good then, and not something that has changed over the past.

Imo it is similar as rating a 1960's NASA document as crap because it was worse than it is now, because then we knew less. And so it is with discussions, 2 years ago when the post was made we knew less of the subject than that it is now.

It had crossed my mind as well, but I was personally thinking of only preventing downvotes, but possibly after a much shorter time after the post was made.

Have to agree on locking, and the much shorter timeframe. I don't have the stats, but I would suggest that most votes occur within a week of the post going up. Everyone reads it, casts their opinion (up or down), then moves on. Sure, some people who join late or gain the ability to vote after the post gets locked, may feel shortchanged, but you can never have a perfect system. Certainly isolating 'archived' info from random votes, is prudent.

The bigger issue here, which everyone has missed, is that JT isn't perturbed. He's now well over 100 votes and I'm sure he'll continue to cop some negative votes purely due to tall poppy syndrome. Overall, JT (and others) have far more to offer positively, than negatively - and this is clearly shown. You cannot stop the 1%. If you try, you miss the 99%.

When you focus on the negatives, that's all you see.

[mx_tifoso]

That a four year old thread came up doesn't mean someone looked it up; it could have come up in the similar topics bar at the bottom of the page or coincidentally in a search that someone conducted.

And Cam, your last phrase is perfect for this scenario; "If you focus on the negatives, that's all you see."

[flynfrog]

Well we have downvoters that act in exactly the same fashion right now.

As JT said earlier, a person looked up a 4 year old thread and downvoted his post.
Now considering this person must have had atleast 26 votes he can´t be a complete vegetable.

Just because you have 3 votes doesn´t make you retarded by any means. Clearly we have seen that it does not matter what your ratings are.

I mean just think about it for a second... 4 year old post, just how that mind works is truly astonishing.

just curious what post of yours do you feel shouldn't have been down voted? I think the system is working pretty well. Seems to keep the yearly influx of newbies in check. I guess we will see how it pans out over the season.

[turbof1]

IMO, the upvoting part works fine. You'll get upvoted as long as you make sensible post and show you are making an effort. Just look at nando and me; we joined in 2012 yet got already a decent amount of upvotes.

The downvoting part concerns me though. I have a feeling alot of members downvote just out of "elitism".

[blokkie]

I think the voting is flawed.

on http://www.slashdot.org the voting is done right .

Take a look there .

Votes happen on posts. Each member has an ammount of votes during a period. Use them wisely
If your post get's voted up , you gain karma , if it get's voted down, you lose karma.

This makes browsing topics very easy as you can sort on +5 posts and only have to read the very interesting ones

Think about it ...

[Richard]

As it happens we sometimes get comments from people saying they are being stalked, but when we look at the voting records that person is getting negative votes from a range of people. I've noticed that if there is disagreement about a post the people who make negative posts in public very rarely down vote as well.

Also the mod view of the voting shows 15 items to a page but only 1 or sometimes 2 of those are negative. Those negatives are usually by different people.

The only exception is when we have an outspoken fanboy posting several silly posts. They attract heavy negative voting from a range of members, but interestingly members tend to only down vote that person once, not every post.

We have had two or three people who have been more liberal in negative voting and advised them to be more prudent. In those cases a mod will add a positive to neutralise the negative votes.

So from the data it appears to me that negative voting is seen as something to be used sparingly.

Finally Tomba is working on coding so we can disable voting on non-technical threads, this would help emphasise that voting is for making a valuable technical contribution.

[flyboy2160]

....Finally Tomba is working on coding so we can disable voting on non-technical threads, this would help emphasise that voting is for making a valuable technical contribution.

Thank you.

[Shrieker]

Finally Tomba is working on coding so we can disable voting on non-technical threads, this would help emphasise that voting is for making a valuable technical contribution.

This is what it should be about, or should've been -may I say- right from the start. Up or down votes I have received thus far include no technical posts - none whatsoever. The number below my nickname basically means nothing. However I do value some posters with high rating and try to read their posts whenever I happen to come across them. A high reputation means good technical contribution more often than not, which is a success it has to be said.

[Cam]

Then 'technical' should be defined.

Is it only mechanically technical posts, or is it rule technicalities, or administration technicalities, or IT technicalities, waht about driver technicalities, what about a part post where 'technical' info and other 'non-tehcnical' info is combined in the same post - do you see where this is going.

Only lawyers like arbitrage.

If your post brings value to the discussion of F1 as a whole - rate it positively. If it's pointless and no-one can ever say that post had any benefit to the world of F1 - rate it badly.

F1 is more than 'technical' - so either embrace that, otherwise, limit all members to engineering PHD masters and be done with it.

[strad]

If your post brings value to the discussion of F1 as a whole - rate it positively. If it's pointless and no-one can ever say that post had any benefit to the world of F1 - rate it badly.

F1 is more than 'technical' - so either embrace that, otherwise, limit all members to engineering PHD masters and be done with it.

Couldn't agree more Cam.

[Steven]

I think the voting is flawed.

on http://www.slashdot.org the voting is done right .

Take a look there .

Votes happen on posts. Each member has an ammount of votes during a period. Use them wisely
If your post get's voted up , you gain karma , if it get's voted down, you lose karma.

This makes browsing topics very easy as you can sort on +5 posts and only have to read the very interesting ones

Think about it ...

Everything you describe is identical to what is in place here.

Secondly, as richars_leeds pointed out, there will soon be the possibility for mods to disable voting per threads. There was earlier the idea to limit posting more on a forum section basis, but it's possible that some extremely valuable posts cannot be voted on like this.
As such, some threads will soon be unvotable. One thread like this is is the "caption competition". Its posts are funny, not valuable for F1. We'll still have to see whether vote-locking should automatically undo all votes made in that thread so far. That's still up for discussion.

[Cam]

.....there will soon be the possibility for mods to disable voting per threads.......That's still up for discussion.

I'd like to put forth an argument against locking threads from voting.

Do you want an inclusive community with vibrant debate or exclusivity with just the 5 of you?

If you choose to lock any thread that isn't purely 'technical' or not deemed worthy enough, you could isolate a vast majority of members. We're not all engineering guru's - and some of us prefer to post comments on various other aspects of F1 - some of those comments people like and vote for (or against too). We can't all be Jersey Tom, or Bhallg2k, or Gato Azul etc. So you'll be excluding members like me from gaining votes unless I suddenly master the ability to know pressure values at every speed against every surface type........ does that mean my opinion is worth less than theirs?

You're trying to stop a running nose by cutting it off. Cutting it off, blocking it up, or any other patch apart from treating the source, is folly. It's the members that abuse a perfectly workable system - so focus on those members.

Let's look at a perfect example - mnmracer. When he first started getting votes (Tue Jul 17, 2012 7:50 am) he mainly languished in negative land - basically because he was posting rubbish. Then the light went on. It clicked for him. He went from being negative nelly to rank 19 in a great run of posts from early Dec 2012 and, as of posting, his reputation changes (if you check) are all mainly +1's now with a real trend up. A huge difference to his early forays.

So we've managed to alter a members behaviour for the better of all of us. The system wasn't broken for him then and it's not broken for him now. He changed his approach. The audience responded.

F1 Technical is huge wealth of information - not just F1. If you allow that information to be posted, you must allow it to be judged. This allows all of us an opportunity to grow, to learn and to have our views assessed by peers.

To limit what views can be expressed, voted for (or against) and agreed too, is what some countries do...... don't take the easy way out.

[WhiteBlue]

I'll take the advocatus diaboli position on CAM's post. I welcome the plan to identify individual threads for vote disabling. And I tell you why.

We established by keeping the race threads open to voting over several months that the yin yang posters would vote each other up and take over this site if nothing was done. Some of them acquired a leadership position in the rating system and started to abuse the system firing negative votes machine gun like on everything they personally disliked irrespective of the quality of the posts content. The admin and the mods realized that this could not go on and took action by first blocking all race threads for voting.

The next contentious issue were the team threads. I see them mainly as a field opportunity for more yin yang but some see them as valuable according to this sites objective. So the mods and admin probably got split over this issue.

It seems to me the the solution is to individually disable threads for voting. If one thread is particularly flooded by yin yang it can be closed or even temporarily closed. That way all the options are in admins hands. If there is a trend towards valuable stuff being posted the thread can be reopened for voting. That way all valid concerns can be addressed and the yin yang posters can be frustrated as they should be.