Vote user by post

Hi,

Please consider having a "helpfulness" rank. Basically this is a harmless rank people have. Each post they do has a + and - link for helpfulness. After time some people who help often will feel rewarded and inspired to keep being helpful.

Your helpfulness must never go lower than 0 and its blind voted, so people can't see who has voted or even if people have voted. So if Mr Bean was helpful half the time we would all see he's helped 50% of people on the forum, its a nice thing to have.

Why do this? to increase the amount and quality of the posted solutions and help people do, while minimising (hopefully) useless trolling.

They are doing this on the forums of --the-- german computer magazines, c't and ix. Honestly, features like that suck big time because nobody will use them to rank helpfulness, but people will use it as a club against other users: "I don't like your stupid opinion, shut up and take that!"

You can click on the "-" button now, because my statement did not help you. I think you get the idea. ;-)

I'm against this idea too. How helpful someone is should not be determined by how often they post useful advice. I don't post as often as some people, but when I post useful and valid advice it shouldn't be any less important than that from frequent posters. This can lead to useful advice being ignored over advice from a frequent poster that could actually be wrong.

As mentioned, this would only get abused - especially on this site. :/

The only motivation I need to continue giving help when I can is a simple "Thanks".

This would definitely be abused. I can think of a few people who I personally find among the most helpful, simply because they have the knowledge and experience to help, but would be among those given the most negative votes because a lot of people don't like their manner. You might well argue that it's the ones with the most experience who traditionally have the lowest tolerance for questions they've heard and answered a hundred times.

A helpfulness rating would be worse than none at all if the most helpful and experienced people were the ones with the lowest ratings. What you could well end up doing is pushing the experienced people out, or at least discouraging them from posting if they know that other people's advice is going to be taken over theirs regardless of the quality of the reply.

Plus with any ratings system, even a flipping post count, you always get someone who desperately wants to be on top. So you'll get a few people prowling 24/7 waiting to jump on any question regardless of whether they actually have information to add or not. However well intentioned the idea, I don't think it would actually lead to a better forum.

Call me old fashioned, but I think the best way to judge helpfulness is by judging who *you* find most helpful. We're all different, we all have different needs, so we're all going to find help in different places.

It wouldn't be. No reasonable person is going to base their opinion on how helpful advice is, based on the random opinions of complete strangers on the Internet.

Besides with the obvious potential for abuse that Winni mentions, only people who don't post frequently are likely to ever have a positive score. Anyone who posts regularly is eventually going to get into a drama with someone else, which is going to reduce his credibility towards the sheep to an effective 0.

@Lowcs
Do you really think they'll implement such a system when they even don't care about something like a engine/wrapper category?

It would be alot more useful to rank threads. Threads with good, useful code will be 'kept' somewhere.

But don't get your hopes up on forum features being developed. On this site you have more chance of Mark announcing working Anti-aliasing in B3D and blitzmax 3D.

Don't like the idea, for reasons stated by others.

I'd vote you zero. (At least I'm honest about it.)

That's the last thing we need here.

People here are plenty helpful and plenty sharp. You can already have a 'heated' discussion with someone who will give you a hand with code not ten minutes later -- nobody seems to need any incentive to be helpful other than the freedom to argue the toss when they feel like it.

Boombooms proposal could benefit the visitors here.

But just don't wait for it ;)

Its a shame ideas are thrown out of the window with no thought or unbiased opinion around here.

Lowcs, theres a whole page of 'thoughts' on the matter above. And just becuase peopel say so or not doesn't mean anything is 'thrown out the window' if its developed its developed.

Trouble with this forum is its built from scratch (as far as I know, its not like phpBB where you can just go on the hack site and download an addon to enable it. It would have to be coded from scratch, and thats usualy not going to happen.