quote Slumpy monkey

Thumb systems or any system similar always fail because people get into arguments over petty things and just mark the other person down whenever they see them, you were an example of that with the old thumbs down feature.

quote Redemption

quote Gothic Girl

I agree with kik36 ... Putting a limit on thumbs-up/thumbs-down might keep people mindful of what they are really rating.

What kinds of limits would people suggest? If we had a limit system I wonder if we should limit how many thumbs a person can issue per 24hrs and how many of those thumbs can be used in a single thread. If we can nail down some specifics we could implement them and restore thumbs down with the result of it hopefully being abused less frequently.

Probably we can do the following in a relatively short time:

1. show a list of thumbers, and what they thumbed
2. limit the number of thumbs you can issue per day (but how do we determine how many you can issue?)
3. limit thumbing to participants of a story and/or participants on GameGrep.

If we can determine the actual limits on #2 and #3 then we can start this ball really rolling.

Another System Altogether

I still feel like we should replace thumbs altogether with a single word descriptor that people can rate.

Eg:

• Funny
• Informative
• Interesting

Then the number of people who tag the comment with each of those tags would increase its total score, to a total of +5, along with the one word descripting.

eg Funny +3

I consider this system a "Recommendation" system rather than a rating system, you are recommending others that that a comment is worth checking out and why.

This is pretty much what Slashdot does, and I was intending on adding it as a feature for forum thread recommendations. In the forum system, you would then be able to see what threads are "Recommended" that day, even perhaps by friends.

However, if a simple thumbs limit set of rules could be suggested we could implement that first and relatively quickly.

quote Gothic Girl

quote Moonrise

If you're going to have "descriptions", such as "funny", "informative", and "interesting" then there had damn well better be categories like "annoying", "ridiculous", and "completely wrong".

The world isn't so convenient as to allow people to simply run around giving each other compliments left and right, which is why there should really be a thumbs down system in the first place. When people stay stupid shit, they should be "thumbed down" or at least it should be known that everyone else frowns upon their comment.

This is just a suggestion, but maybe Gamegrep could have a "rating" system similar to Joystiq's ...



Whenever a comment gets "thumbed up" it goes up half a heart, and when it gets "thumbed down" it goes down half a heart.

So there's no negative numbers like Gamegrep's thumbs-down system, but the best comments will have three hearts which tells people they are worth reading, while the worst ones will have no hearts and show people that it's not really worth reading.

It's a system that isn't quite as "in your face" as being thumbed-down into the negatives.

quote Sereph

quote Redemption

quote VeGiTAX2

If balance is an issue it would be a good experiment to see if there's a way to achieve a system somewhat like Slashdot then for ranking posts, that various levels of karma/grep, experience and history help shape how the thumb level actually goes. So that instead of being on a fast flight to -10 or +50 it actually takes and processes votes instead gradually shifting their points up or down. So while 4 newbies might vote up a post it may only go up 1 point, while maybe a long time member feels it was worthwhile and their weighted point raises it to 2-3 points.

I like the idea of a Slashdot style system of rating a post from 0-5, with your rank affecting how much you move the score of a comment. If we could flesh out the details of how that would work it might be interesting.

I have a suggestion then. They have a similar system on GameTrailers.com, but their system of points up/down is completely controlled by how many videos you have watched, blogs you have created, etc. So a high level spammer with the intelligence of a pet rock can move a member's comment to -30 in an instant click. Instead, I suggest that your rank and the level of negative or positive you move a thumbs rating should be determined by how many articles you post or how long your posts are (over a certain number of characters so intelligent, thought-out posts could be recognized).

Example, we don't want someone spamming the shit out of GG, which could raise their rank so they could decide the fate of anyone's comment they didn't like. Instead, if they're forced to actually contribute, then that means that mostly responsible and contributing members would attain the highest level of influence and the spammers would be quarreling in the pits thumbing each other down because they're a bunch of children, which a high level contributing member could come by and erase everything with one click, which would keep the level of petty shit low on GG since it's pretty much self-moderating. The report feature would still be useful since it could call attention to offensive comments though.