How is the forum rating system doing?

[i70q7m7ghw]

The thing is that the system is not intended to be for agreeing or disagreeing with someone, but rather, about if the information they have posted is positive, constructive, and technically minded. That's as simple as I can get it to be.

And once again, we don't believe that everyone should have the right to vote right off the bat. Once you pass the test (i.e get enough upvotes), then you have the privilege. If you don't care about posting what I explained in the first sentence of this post then you can't vote.

That's exactly the problem. It's left to the privileged few to vote on posts, and they decide for everyone if a post is valuable or not. The scale of voting is too small. At the moment, if a post gets +2 votes its a masterpiece, when in reality, it should be if the post gets +20. That way it's very difficult to abuse the system, because somebody would need 20 vote buddies to make an impact. Exactly the same problem exists for down-votes. 1-2 votes and a post is considered junk. So the opinion of 2 people is enough to trash a post?

The user "reputation" feature should be remove entirely, I don't see how it adds any value whatsoever.

[Clew]

The thing is that the system is not intended to be for agreeing or disagreeing with someone, but rather, about if the information they have posted is positive, constructive, and technically minded. That's as simple as I can get it to be.

And once again, we don't believe that everyone should have the right to vote right off the bat. Once you pass the test (i.e get enough upvotes), then you have the privilege. If you don't care about posting what I explained in the first sentence of this post then you can't vote.

That's exactly the problem. It's left to the privileged few to vote on posts, and they decide for everyone if a post is valuable or not. The scale of voting is too small. At the moment, if a post gets +2 votes its a masterpiece, when in reality, it should be if the post gets +20. That way it's very difficult to abuse the system, because somebody would need 20 vote buddies to make an impact. Exactly the same problem exists for down-votes. 1-2 votes and a post is considered junk. So the opinion of 2 people is enough to trash a post?

The user "reputation" feature should be remove entirely, I don't see how it adds any value whatsoever.

Hmmmm....this topic is now pointless

[tathan]

My tuppence...

I got a Board Warning (whatever that means) for upvoting a post (I don't know which one or why) so surely the whole system is by definition broken. We can't vote for what we want, but instead have to vote for suitable posts... Why ask for opinions but then limit them to what a certain subset of people think, working within specified guidelines of what can be good??

I'd ask why does it matter so much? It seems to be just feeding egos. People can see if a post is with or without merit regardless of what the number says. I know if something is interesting. I would have thought technical people and engineers would have been the least likely to want a massaged ego and to beg for favourable reviews. Just remove the facility and concentrate on stuff like getting the mobile version working or something. Maybe have the 'thank you' for when people answer direct questions or whatever instead?

[Clew]

Now we know how Mark Webber feels like with RBR team

[Pup]

I got a Board Warning (whatever that means) for upvoting a post (I don't know which one or why) so surely the whole system is by definition broken. We can't vote for what we want, but instead have to vote for suitable posts... Why ask for opinions but then limit them to what a certain subset of people think, working within specified guidelines of what can be good??

I'd hope that if an up-vote warranted a warning from the wardens that the reason would be obvious. That, or the mods would take a moment to explain. Maybe now would be a good time?

I've no idea how common this is, though from what the mods have said in this thread, they do a great deal of the voting themselves, both up and down. "Corrections" is the euphemism, I believe. I really have to say that I don't understand the difference between that, and having the mods just give people and posts whatever ratings they want, minus the theater of course.

So since my earlier suggestions were ignored, however insightful they may have been, can I take them back in favor of just one? I suggest that from now on, whenever the mods refer to voting, they put the word in quotes, only so that the irony is clear.

Seriously, though - I can understand the need for "corrections" if some a-hole is voting down someone just because he doesn't like what he reads. "Correcting" up-votes seems a bit heavy handed, imo. I sympathize, but I think perhaps using some social engineering to solve the problem, as opposed to applying patches, would serve the mods' purposes better in the long run.

[notsofast]

I assume that the goal of the rating system is to (a) encourage members to create valuable posts and (b) make valuable posts easier to recognize.

So, who then are the people who are most qualified to judge which posts are valuable? First and foremost, that would be the people who are running this forum. But that's quite a burden for a small group of people. They need help. The next group of people who can identify valuable posts are those people who themselves create valuable posts regularly. That's where the idea came from that people with a sufficiently high rating can start identifying valuable posts.

I think this was a reasonable idea. But, as far as I know, my rating is zero, and I seem to have been given the ability to identify valuable posts. I suppose I should feel flattered, but I'm hardly qualified. I like reading about the technical aspects of F1, but I don't really have any technical expertise to contribute. Some posts sound better than others, but in the end, I have to rely on other forum members to confirm whether a post does indeed contain valuable information.

A perfectly acceptable solution (to me) would be for the moderators to keep track behind the scenes of which forum members are creating valuable posts, and then give out the privilege to identify valuable posts purely on a subjective basis. The forum members who have been given that privilege could then be referred to as assistant moderators, or something similar. We could then move away from showing the rating of each forum member, and perhaps even from showing the rating of each post. In other words, those particular forum members would show "assistant moderator" instead of a total rating, and each valuable post would simply show "valuable" instead of a rating.

In the end, it's not meant to be democratic and it's not meant to be a voting system. It's simply a way of getting a slightly larger group involved in making the forum more useful.

[hollus]

...That's exactly the problem. It's left to the privileged few to vote on posts, and they decide for everyone if a post is valuable or not...

Is that true? The average page has 15 posts, of which typically about 2-3 are from users with no voting rights. So about 80% of the posting users could vote (positively). About 250 users can, which results in the potential for some 1000 positive votes daily. Clearly this is not happening, but not for lack of voting rights, most users simply do not vote because they do not want to!
Also, getting that first +1 is very easy. Take the hot topic of the day, spend some time getting real statistics on it, or adding measurements to a pic that shows it, or collect those cars pics from different places... and 1 or 2 votes normally follow within 24 hours. Opinions, no matter how right... not such a fail proof way to get voting rights.

[i70q7m7ghw]

...That's exactly the problem. It's left to the privileged few to vote on posts, and they decide for everyone if a post is valuable or not...

Is that true? The average page has 15 posts, of which typically about 2-3 are from users with no voting rights. So about 80% of the posting users could vote (positively). About 250 users can, which results in the potential for some 1000 positive votes daily. Clearly this is not happening, but not for lack of voting rights, most users simply do not vote because they do not want to!
Also, getting that first +1 is very easy. Take the hot topic of the day, spend some time getting real statistics on it, or adding measurements to a pic that shows it, or collect those cars pics from different places... and 1 or 2 votes normally follow within 24 hours. Opinions, no matter how right... not such a fail proof way to get voting rights.

I can't down-vote, only the privileged few get to do that. When it comes to up-votes, I get 5 a day. I'm most active over the race weekends, so I get 15 votes per race weekend. I've lost count of the amount of times where I find a "sixth post" which I wish I could vote on, but I've already used up my daily allowance. I can come back the next day and vote on it, but then I find myself building up a back log of "posts I want to up-vote".

It just makes the system very hard work, and I end up just not bothering.

[dave kumar]

I'll start with an apology, I haven't visited the site for a year or so - certainly not since the voting system was implemented, so some of my observations are based on my limited browsing of the site since the new season began.

Okay, I'll state my position: I was one of those who originally advocated the introduction of voting. My area of expertise is applying the principles of organisation of social insects and stigmergy to solve engineering problems, (stigmergy is the principle of multiple agents influencing each others behaviour through changes to their environment - if you're interested look at how rock ants collectively evaluate and choose a new nest site http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2009/6292.html). It allows colonies of tens of thousands of insects to coordinate their behaviour, so surely it can be applied to the F1 technical posters.

For those who are yet to be convinced of the utility of a voting system, I think it needs to be clear why we are voting - to highlight informative posts. It should not be based on the user who posted the comment. It is human nature that we are biased. We will occasionally up/down vote posts based on the person posting instead of the content. However this 'noise' in the voting system is drowned out if enough people vote. So it is crucial that as many people participate in voting as possible so I would suggest giving more people the ability to upvote. It is also vital that people are motivated to vote for the right reasons, to highlight informative posts.

To this end:
1.Give more users the ability to upvote.
2.Reduce the prominence of the user posting the comment so we concentrate more on the content of the post.
3.Definitely change the +/-1 vote icons. Either replace with text 'informative', 'offtopic' or with lightbulb icon, zzzzz icon.
4.Make the number of votes/day more flexible - allow people to use a percentage (100% ?) of their voting allowance for the next day. Allow users to uncast votes. Anything to make people less cautious about casting a vote without allowing unlimited voting. Do users know how many votes they have left for a given day? If not that needs to be displayed as well.

One last thought. We want to make the site more attractive to browse and highlighting informative content is one way of doing that, encouraging good posts is another. If you accept that argument then we must find a mechanism to identify good content then the voting system allows this decision to be made collectively instead of autocratically. The carrot is a much better motivator than the stick. Give users the incentive to earn reputation points through posting informative posts rather than relying on moderators to police those posts.

I would encourage participation in voting - give the system a chance to mature and re-evaluate in a year's time.

[dave kumar]

Some additional observations:
1.It isn't obvious which are the upvoted posts in a thread. You don't want to lose the context that the post was made so hiding the other posts probably wouldn't work but as as has already been suggested, simply highlighting upvoted posts and graying out posts with a negative score would be a good solution. But maybe the threshold for highlighting/graying out should be +/-10 votes.
2.There is nothing on the site that I can see to indicate what the user reputation is based on. I've seen users with a negative reputation. What does this mean and is it based on voting on their posts.
3.Reputation should more transparently map onto privileges.

Stackoverflow is widely recognised as an excellent example of how to give informative answers prominence. However it doesn't quite fit our discussion based forum, it is about Question and Answers. One bit that is relevant is the user privileges http://stackoverflow.com/privileges.

First of all, it is completely transparent how a users reputation translates into privileges - the site tells you how many points you need to attain each privilege and what percentage of those points you have. Secondly there are lots of privileges. This allows a fine grained experience for users and removes the in/out mentality of those who can vote and those that can't. So maybe we can add some more privileges so users are more frequently rewarded for gaining reputation. I don't know what these privileges should be but scanning the stackoverflow list, I reckon that having 'established user' status that allows you to view the breakdown of scores on a post or to see what posts a particular user has had upvoted and downvoted. The ability to open a new thread should be a privilege that is earned. There must be lots of others and I'm sure people will have suggestions - we can start a new thread!

[bhall]

I'd very much like to see examples of posts that people think should be upvoted but are not.

(This is from someone who's often genuinely baffled by his rating.)

(But, he's also talking about himself in third-person. So, there's that.)

[Pup]

Wait, this whole thing was based on the theory that we're insects? I don't want to be a bee. Nor a rock ant. I mean, the music still does it but those dandy outfits were never going to catch on.

I'd very much like to see examples of posts that people think should be upvoted but are not.

Apart from all of mine? Such gems, every one.

If it makes you feel better, I'm baffled by your rating as well.

[bhall]

Maybe it's just my charm and affability. I've been told I'm pretty special - by what voice is another matter entirely.

I dunno. My view on the rating system has mutated from totally against it to totally for it to pretty much apathetical. After all, they're just numbers that don't come with any real perks. (I've found that downvoting isn't nearly as much fun as trying to come up with new and interesting ways to say, "You're a --- moron, and I'm actually quite surprised you successfully made it online in the first place." I'm old-fashioned like that.)

I think it goes without saying that I haven't gotten any brighter due to the ridiculous number below my dated username. It is what it is. So, I don't take it seriously.

[Nando]

That's exactly the problem. It's left to the privileged few to vote on posts, and they decide for everyone if a post is valuable or not. The scale of voting is too small. At the moment, if a post gets +2 votes its a masterpiece, when in reality, it should be if the post gets +20. That way it's very difficult to abuse the system, because somebody would need 20 vote buddies to make an impact. Exactly the same problem exists for down-votes. 1-2 votes and a post is considered junk. So the opinion of 2 people is enough to trash a post?

The user "reputation" feature should be remove entirely, I don't see how it adds any value whatsoever.

Agreed 100%
If they want to acknowledge the highly technical guys or the guys who contribute the most just put a star next to their name.

I know for me, even if i would post a unified field theory and get a nobel prize all the accumulated upvotes would start to slowly dissappear as the thread gets hidden on page 2 or similar.
That´s what happens when a select few has the ability to choose what´s technical and what´s not even if the subject at hand actually is technical regardless of what they think.

It´s broken and several people have said this for a while now but it´s better to ignore the elephant in the room i suppose.

I was even downvoted once because i posted a video with the Pirelli boss discussing the tires in the latest race.
Posted in the Pirelli 2013 thread. Had any of the established done that the upvotes would be raining down.

And before anyone makes a remark, the unified field theory was an example. Yea i know, should be obvious to most but guaranteed not all.

[Dragonfly]

Maybe it's only me but I see people with enormous number of upvotes and ... can't remember a single post of them which has made a memorable impression.
Truth is that the more you write, the bigger the chances you get upvotes. Add to that the partisan votes from people rooting for the same teem/driver and you get the real state of the voting system.