UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Suggestions and Feedback in post polls, yes, but prefer ratings ......

I ws hoping for this for a long time

I actually prefer ratings for posts. So people rate posts, the rating shows up in the listing (postlist.pl)

And in the future we could even sort posts by ratings or delete low rating posts.

I hope you put some security measures against multiple votes by the same person!? One measure would be: only registered people can vote ....

The reason ratings aren't in yet, is I haven't found an elegant way to do this. Naturally you don't want people to be able to rate a post more than once, and so far the only way I can figure out how to do this, would be to make a table that tracks post numbers and the Userid's that have rated those posts. The only problem is if you have alot of posts and alot of users, this table would get absolutely HUGE in very little time.

As for the security measures in polls, already done. You can have your polls open to everyone, in which case you can't vote twice from the same IP address, or you can have them only open to registered users, in which case you can't vote twice with the same Userid.

I am still very against the idea of rating posts. I personally see no use in it, and I think it'd just turn into an ongoing popularity contest on my boards. I think it would also add too much clutter to the interface.

As I always say though, I have no problem with it being added, so long as it's 100% optional.

Yup. My sentiments, exactly.

[]http://www.amdragon.com/images/eileensig.gif[/]

i think the ultimate rating is the number of times a thread has been viewed. the most read rates the highest. *sounds* like a straight forward routine for that one... but i don't know if that feature would be popular to users as they would me more interested in their own forums rather than the most popular from one they are not interested in. i don't know if i would click a button to sort a boards' threads by number of views.. could be useful to new users getting to know the culture though. any thoughts?

these are not the US presidential elections, so some margin for error would be ok.

If you put in a block for 5 minutes, that would be quite helpful already. You can make that webmaster configurable: webmasters with lots of disk space can make the block for 100 000 minutes, economy version would be a simple reload block with no entry in database. Or only one entry: last vote

As ip's change, and as there are proxies, you should not block one ip for too long anyway. If someone really wants to vote 3 times a day, there is not much you can do about it anyway.

regarding the other replies: most good boards have voting. It is quite popular with users.

The read count is only a good measure for the popularity of the title, they might hate what is inside the post. And, finally, the way you do the read count, it is a better measure for the length of thread than it is for the number of fans that actually read a SINGLE post.

I would rather have a vote, and a "lenght of post in bytes" indicator than the read counter we have now. The length of post helps to weed out the "mee too"s etc.

Those who don't like votes, please turn it off. Still, you might find out your users would love it. If we had votes here, we could find the most popular hacks and hints by simply looking at the top 100 post-usefulness-votes. This would save so much time!!!!! I would not have to ask Eileen each time I need a hack.

By the way, I have a serious upload security problem, can someone write me, I don't want to post this here!!! Emailing scream seems futile ...

I want to also note that with 90% of AOL showing up as coming from about a dozen IP addresses, blocking based on IP is a bad plan.

I would offer an option to allow it to only be available to registered users. That way you guarantee a one-to-one correspondence of votes to people. (Or at least you make it a minor PITA to attempt to stuff the ballot).

Right now, with it based on IP's, it will be marginally useless with the many big-name ISP's using proxies out there.... []/w3timages/icons/frown.gif[/]

D

if someone wants to boost a post's ratings, so what?? But in general, even with zero security. Any knowledge about the value of a post is better than no knowledge.

Just block an ip for 5 minutes after the vote, if the guy wants to come back every 5 minutes, so let it be

I am still convinced that with rating in place we could easily find all the important posts with the important hacks, just by a simple search, maintenance free (the board owner does not need to archive these posts).

Voting works on other boards, cnnfn.com votes for stock to buy and sell, why should it not work here?? Why does the voting script work and the popularity per post would not work?? What is the difference??

voting for registered users only would be an interesting option, that would be almost foolproof.

using threads view counts as an indicator is a good idea, in theory, but I, for one, read every post made to every forum here at least once... wouldn't that mess with the counts a bit? []/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/]

Matt

Guess it really depends on the type of board you have as to which is better ratings or views. In a board that has the hacks, then I can see the value of ratings but other boards all ratings end up being are a waste of screen space.

I have been on several boards that use ratings -- in virtually all cases they are either ignored, people don't like them, they don't know how to use them or what purpose they serve. Ends up being an ego type of thing that does nothing but eventually offending people. So they end up being turned off or made to disappear from the screen.

Guess I could be getting on a whole different kind of board than all of you -- but on the boards that I frequent they are very much disliked.

Eric

i just realized that the thread count thing is already present anyways. when you go into a forum you can click on views and it will sort by that.