Factorio Forums

Suggestion: Vote Up/Down/Troll/+1 etc on forum posts. Allow sorting by most up-voted forum posts. Hopefully, this could remove some of the "I want this too" messages, as well as allowing Friday Facts to be viewed by the most up-voted suggestions. I had to read through the whole thread about "Friday Facts #250" to find the best ideas and mockups.

dstensnes wrote:I had to read through the whole thread about "Friday Facts #250" to find the best ideas and mockups.

This is good, because you could see the suggestions of all, and make your own opinion.
Vote systems only create a bias towards the 1-2 suggestions that are the most popular at the beginning of ... something.

Koub wrote:

dstensnes wrote:I had to read through the whole thread about "Friday Facts #250" to find the best ideas and mockups.

This is good, because you could see the suggestions of all, and make your own opinion.
Vote systems only create a bias towards the 1-2 suggestions that are the most popular at the beginning of ... something.

Glad to hear that i'm not the only one that thinks voting on everything is a really bad idea. It creates a trend where people write posts go "gain votes", not because they're convinced that what they write is important. And "troll" voting would be quickly abused to remove "unpleasant opinions".
(Reminds me of the "The Oreville" episode "Majority Rule"...)

eradicator wrote:

Koub wrote:

dstensnes wrote:I had to read through the whole thread about "Friday Facts #250" to find the best ideas and mockups.

This is good, because you could see the suggestions of all, and make your own opinion.
Vote systems only create a bias towards the 1-2 suggestions that are the most popular at the beginning of ... something.

Glad to hear that i'm not the only one that thinks voting on everything is a really bad idea. It creates a trend where people write posts go "gain votes", not because they're convinced that what they write is important. And "troll" voting would be quickly abused to remove "unpleasant opinions".
(Reminds me of the "The Oreville" episode "Majority Rule"...)

Yeah, voting tends to show what the majority agrees with, is overly biased towards the first posts (as opposed to ideas that people have come up with after a through discussion), would probably end up making this somewhat more of a "popularity contest", etc. etc. (Also, you think reading the entirety of FFF 250 is bad? Try FFF 224 and 225. It took me a few weeks. But that's beside the point.) The mods already take care of trolling perfectly fine. I don't even know if this is something phpBB supports.

I lurk on the Crusader Kings forums that have this functionality and I really like how it works. It's not only pointing out the things the community agrees, but also to what community disagrees.

You also have to learn a little how to read it - as you say, the number of votes the first few posts get are higher than the later posts, but when you sort the topic by "Agree" votes, then you get a story - initial ideas first with ~50 upvotes, and then the latter ideas with ~10-20 upvotes. From my experience, it's better than having no votes. Also, topics with a lot of "Agree" votes are universally accepted as "community consensus", which makes it easy to quote in other discussions.

The other side is the "disagree" votes - there are occasional topics, where people complain about particular mechanic they didn't really understand - almost instant 20 "disagree" votes discourages any further discussion on both OP and community side, because there is not much to add at that point.

Then you have controversial stuff with ~50/50 split - that is what really encourages contribution and relevant discussion, because you clearly see it's worth talking about.

I strongly recommend this system. After a couple of years on Paradox forums, I don't see any downsides to it.

Another thing I forgot about is polls. Sure, there are plenty of things they don't work for, but they're something to keep in mind.

Matthias_Wlkp wrote: ↑Wed Jan 09, 2019 1:41 pm ...
I strongly recommend this system. After a couple of years on Paradox forums, I don't see any downsides to it.

I believe what you did not mention, but which is important to those opposing a voting system with the argument, that a thread then gets biased towards the earlier posts, is that the posts on the paradox forum are not resorted by the votes they receive. They stay in the chronological order, they have been created in, with the number of aggree/disaggree/helpfull votes displayed with them (below).

Here is a link to a thread on the paradox forums, so the interested reader may form an own opinion about their implementation of this mechanism:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/in ... w.1136637/

I personally am not sure if the factorio forum needs a voting system like that. It can add something, like some sort of aggregated opinion of a not posting part of the community. And after all, quite a lot of "+1" type postings are seen all over this forum. So visitors do imitate this mechanism to fast and easily express their opinion. But it also can remove an incentive to wordly express an opinion and point of view, but instead vote on exiting written opinions which come closest to ones own. The loss of written opinion, in fact would be my biggest concern.

In traditional forums, like this one, as opposed to say Reddit it's more common to have only "Like" (sometimes also known as "applaud" or other names). But I do kinda wish we had something like that. If available, a downvote/dislike option might not be a bad idea either, I think it actually reduces arguing a bit, because if someone says something you disagree with you can just use that instead of making a new post to express your displeasure.

I'm strictly against votes on posts, and I'm even more opposed to the Like/Dislike system. There just is no common, objective basis for people to judge a post, so you only see what has been voted up or down, liked or disliked, by other people -- but not why people have cast their vote one way or the other. Let me explain:

• Like/Dislike:
  I can agree or disagree with an opinion; it also might be an opinion on an issue I really don't care about, so I don't hit any of the two buttons available and my vote doesn't count. Now why would I "like" a post? It may be because the topic is one of interest to me, and I agree with the general ideas brought up by the author. That seems obvious, but there might be other factors that influence my decision.
  
  Say, I'm biased regarding the author -- if a post was from somebody who has been helping me in the past with good advice, somebody who has really made an effort and taken a lot of time to explain in depth until I get it right, I will have a positive bias towards this author. I might then be inclined to be more generous with my "likes". Personally, I make my living with editing other people's texts. So, I enjoy reading well-written texts that are logically structured, that are written in correct grammar and without orthographical errors, and that convey their point convincingly. I can enjoy reading a post because of how it is written -- even though I completely disagree with the points made there. I can also completely agree with the issues raised in a post but still struggle through reading the post completely because everything is written in capitals (or because there are no capital letters at all), using no punctuation marks whatsoever, or punctuation marks randomly scattered all over the text. So, should I punish the author of a post just because I disagree with his/her opinions? Should I reward the author for having taken the time and effort to carefully present her/his thoughts? Even I am not sure, it might depend on the time of day, or on how strongly I feel about a topic. But if even I don't know what criteria I should decide on when judging a post -- how could I expect that others will interpret my vote correctly?
• Voting on scales:
  Just having a system with only two options to choose from (Like/Dislike) is not very helpful. So how about introducing more granularity? May be it's a personal thing, but whenever I am presented with a questionnaire and have to answer questions like "On a scale from 1 to X, how would you rate …?", I am deadlocked. The X options are just too much; I just can't reasonably decide whether I "completely agree", "agree", "partially agree", "don't care", "partially disagree", "disagree", or "disagree completely". The first one or two scales, I try my best to differentiate, but in the end, on 10-point-scales, my answers tend to be either close to one of the ends (2 and 9), or right in the middle. So, instead of helping me out by providing lots of options to chose from, the designers of those questionnaires have made things more complicated for me -- and the results they get won't actually be very helpful to them.

So, I strongly believe that having to vote on posts is, in general, not a very good idea as it usually is too fuzzy. If you don't know why people think a post is good or bad, what can you gain from knowing that the majority thinks it is good, or bad? One could use different scales (like/dislike the idea itself, like/dislike how the idea is conveyed, like/dislike the idea but think it can be realized, …). However, that would be much harder to implement than a simple binary mechanism -- and much harder to parse for the users. You still would have to form your own opinion about a post, and in order to do so, you still would have to read it. Therefore, I think a voting system for forum posts would not be helpful, but just a nuisance.

Hi,

I don't think a vote "like/dislike" is solution :

Most of the time, when people lookin for something, to my pov the better solution is not the "popularity" solution but a "better arrangement of section" solution: and the number of view of the thread will do the job because it will be connected to its consistency. Maybe some kind of "keyword" or "hashtag" arrangment solution can be good. According to my point of view, I'm afraid the suggestion you make don't fit with how people have to show/ask something about the game.

You want a dislike or like something, just write your comment, it's more constructive.

Edit : For the "idea and suggestion" section only, it can be good, it's the only section where things need a basic general appreciation to be clear about priorities, in other section its stay irrelevant to my pov

Could you guys please implement a like and/or dislike function on posts to have and accurate measure of general popularity at glance.

Which of the subforums would you need upvotes for?

Also, Reddit already does that. So if you want upvoted content visit
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio

I dislike posts by adding the author to my ignore list.

The problem with likes/dislikes, in my opinion, is that you just see the result (x people liked this post, y people didn't) -- not the reason for that evaluation. What does it actually mean if I dislike a post? Perhaps I don't agree with the opinion. Say I were to suggest the devs should implement that rockets have a 50% chance of not launching successfully, and would crash-land somewhere in the factory instead (We've successfully crash-landed on this planet once already, after all!), taking out everything in a huge diameter. I'd expect to get a huge number of dislikes for this because it would suck tremendously if this were in vanilla and there was no way to opt out of this behavior. It could also be that I just like/don't like the poster for whatever reason and would be biased towards anything written by that person. I may also like the idea presented in a post as such, but could still not like the post because it was written so badly (i.e. long blocks of text without punctuation or structuring elements, but with lots of typos and grammatical errors) that it's hard to understand the gist of the post.

There are so many reasons for liking or disliking something! In my opinion, like/dislike buttons give you a tool for measuring without telling you what exactly you've measured and how the measured results compare to other measurements. In this regard, they are as useful as the "Trending" feature on the mod portal.

-1


... In 2019 I stated my personal opinion on a voting mechanism as:

Impatient wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2019 12:57 am ...
The loss of written opinion, in fact would be my biggest concern.