Every post would have a like / dislike button. You like the posts you want to have happen and dislike the ones you don't want to see. You can still post arguments but it will give people who don't have anything further to say but still want to affirm / deny an action a voice.

>>55340
that sounds like a giant fight of everyone voting yes or no to every single post.

I've wanted this really bad, it is a good idea. I've intended to implement this on a project of mine as well. It will encourage more participation and a more entailing view of readers support of an idea. Some readers who never suggest will be able to upvote and downvote suggestions, and the conundrum of "Do I make a suggestion if I have the same view as others?" Not everyone enjoys restating the same ideas or posting referential "This" posts.

I've wanted this for a long time, I would gladly volunteer to 'experiment' the idea on new quests/threads once my computer arrives.

>>55301
Do I really need to say it?

Alright, I'll say it.

Tozol Quest.

It could be made so that when you start a thread you can choose whether or not you use up and down -voting.

Which would allow a quest author to choose whether or not they want to use it. If it's not "forced" on the authors who are so opposed to it, then it shouldn't be an issue to have it.

>>55350

should be simple enough to give people a choice to see it or not. also with the borders thing. because let's face it- pony is too obnoxious to look at all the time.

I think it's important to remember that a lot of authors don't have all the possible solutions or options in mind. Often someone will suggest an action and, in the way they justify it, make the author aware of something they hadn't already realized. In other words, authors often get ideas from suggestions... or, indeed, early warning of mistakes they've made!

Discussion and/or debate within a quest thread can be a plague sometimes, but if a voting system would cut down on people giving reasons why they think option X is a good/bad idea, I have to say I disapprove. This besides my previous point about my quests working by persuasion and not voting to begin with.

>>55334
>How does post voting cause more people to favor a "dumb" idea than not having post voting?
People voting for what's most popular. It defeats the entire purpose, but people do it anyway. It happened to me in the The Sword, and I found it extremely annoying.

>>55355
Basically, some guy writes a quick, stupid, but funny-sounding idea and like-minded people vote for it. If the update is soon, people think, "Well, I'm just one guy, my downvote won't matter. I could write a longer, well-thought out suggestion, but by then it would probably be too late to matter, the update is in like 1 minute. Oh well, might as well hop on the bandwagon/say nothing."

>>55355
>>People voting for what's most popular. It defeats the entire purpose, but people do it anyway. It happened to me in the The Sword, and I found it extremely annoying.
>>55357

This already happens, how is it possible for the built-in post voting we don't have to be the cause of it?

Also, nothing forces you to go with the most popular option, and built-in post voting doesn't change this.

>>55360
I think that Jukashi believes that built-in voting will intensify the problem, since people will just vote for the first thing that hey see and like. Before, they needed to make some small effort to say "This", and generally onyl 2 or so people did at a time. The rest just stayed silent and let those three carry it. Now they'll all spam votes for the first thing they see and like, which would make the aforementioned problem worse.

Of course, I'm playing devil's advocate right now and quite possibly putting words into Jukashi's mouth, so don't quote me too heavily.

>>55355
>Discussions gives ideas
Yes, and this facilitates actual discussion by removing the use of posts to vote. Thus every post is an actual discussion. This is essential on any high traffic quest.
>People voting for what's most popular.
This is the CURRENT state. It is only done because of the clumsy voting mechanism of "this" posts.
By allowing a person to up/down/abstain/recast vote for every individual post with one click, voting is made smoother and this decreases, not increases.

Someone makes a good post, everyone upvotes it.... currently to change your vote requires going back, deleting old post, and making a new one... but wait, you actually made an ARGUMENT in your old post so you must actually leave the old one but make a new one pointing at it and saying "changing my vote from X to Y"...
It is ridiculous and likely to get lost and people just go "meh" and leave their bandwagon vote.

With my suggestion this is NOT the case. They had already voted for the first ok idea... but then they see a better one. So they spend 1 click removing their vote from the first idea (or even altering it to a downvote, again 1 click). and 1 click upvoting the better idea that was made later. It takes them all of 5 seconds and does not require removing their old argument (Although they can add new argument).

>>55338
>you mean everyone would get more then one vote point?
There are no points. you get to vote once per POST... on every single post.
So if there are 17 people reading the thread, and 5 posts were made, each of the 17 may upvote/downvote/abstain on each individual post, and may cast or alter their vote with a single click.

>>55341
Yes, only not a fight just a friendly argument as long as people don't actually get rude to each other.
And since voting is done by 1 click rather then typing out a response that is inbuilt.

Better then a giant fight with recursive (upvoting/downvoting upvotes/downvotes... multiple levels deep) posts of voting with words.

>Make it optional
Fine with me

>>55364

>It is only done because of the clumsy voting mechanism of "this" posts.

No it fucking isn't. The means you are using to arrive at these conclusions are fucking baffling to me.

>>55366

>Better then a giant fight with recursive (upvoting/downvoting upvotes/downvotes... multiple levels deep) posts of voting with words.

Except that that discussion will invariably reveal more about what the readers actually want than +/-n.

Also I know for sure that I would absolutely ignore the shit out of any vote tallies and anyone who decided to use them would end up excluded from participation in my quests because of it. Not intentionally or anything, I just think it is a stupid and useless idea. So people who used it in other quests wouldn't be able to actually participate in quests where the author doesn't give a shit.

Also having the numbers there would ugly up the layout and generally just piss me off in general.

>>55364
why WOULD they make a post with a argument? they voted for what they want, they have no more reason to make a post.

>>55368
I think it is a completely legitimate choice to ignore the votes, because not all quests just go with what the majority wants. I think the borders are going overboard and that the post voting should definitely have an option to be disabled if implemented. When creating a new thread there should be an option to disable post voting for the thread (so people know that the author doesn't care about them), and there should be a user-side option for hiding all voting.

I would say discussion in quests is a good thing and don't think it should really be frowned upon like it usually is. Long-term plans really belong in discussion threads, but short-term ones are usually better suited to the actual thread. I don't think that post voting will drastically effect the amount of discussion in either way. I think the rules page advising that "disagreeing with other suggestions" should be in the questdis thread and not the quest thread effects it way more than post voting could.
In-quest discussion also makes it actually reasonably possible to follow along with what the readers were thinking when reading an archived quest, unlike trying to follow along in the questdis thread while you're reading the quest.

>>55369
The reason would be the same reason people make arguments in quests now. It's to convince other people to vote the same way.

>>55326

Oh wow that's amazing.

>>55369

Uh, because you can't up/downvote posts if they don't exist? See if people have new ideas or want to contribute with new suggestions, they'll do it. The voting system is pretty much only going to sponge all the "+1" and "This" types of posts, and in general all the people that read quests but never suggest in them (which is the majority).

Anyways, nobody needs to get their panties in a twist, the authors DON'T HAVE to follow the voting system, and for a matter of fact, I know that most authors DON'T FOLLOW a democracy when deciding what suggestion is going to be followed. That's fine. They can keep doing that, nothing is going to change. And maybe I'm wrong, but I think Dylan can exclude threads from this system if the authors ask him to (Inb4 NO I CAN'T).

The only thing that's gonna be affected is that there'll be less suggestions in simple, binary updates. "You want to be boy or girl?" "Right door or left door." Instead of a bunch of posts, you'd get only two, with a different number of votes, and the occasional extra "BOTH!". In conclusion, the result would be the same, but with the voting system it would look neater, and easier to count. On the downside, I admit that many authors (myself included) wrongly measure the success of their quests by the number of suggestions. So this decrease of posts (without losing responses) might feel unpleasant at first.

Anyways, we're all speculating what's gonna happen. We'll never know if we don't give it a try.

>>55382
There is one thing I had not thought of, and that's how this will effect the dynamics of threads being bumped. I guess it will encourage authors who use the vote system to avoid binary solutions or questions in favour of more open solutions or questions. Whether this is good or bad is unknown to me.

>POST VOTING
I dunno. I can kind of see the appeal, I guess, but I would prefer an option to enable or disable them on a thread-by-thread basis. I don't mind >this posts (it boosts my egoh god i really am trout) and having upvoting and downvoting would just be more to keep track of...I think. Would this be too complicated?

SPEAKING OF WHICH, POST EDITING: GOOD IDEA OR BEST IDEA???
I'm mostly thinking of it for quest authors to be able to fix mistakes without reporting it to me, maybe some way to limit it to OP?

Sadly Dylan is the only one who knows PHP and PEARL and SQL and... stuff... so i can only sit here and talk about how neat it would be.

i can code in BASIC and almost in LUA but that just doesn't quite cut it!

Voting will actually make the level of interest in a quest more evident, not less. After all, if people aren't interested in your quest at all, they won't bother voting (can't vote on what one isn't reading). But very often people who are interested in your quest just read it and don't comment.

So, for example, if your quest was getting maybe two comments per update, but gets 10 votes to each of those comments, you learn that more people're reading your quest than you previously thought.

Essentially, voting lowers the barrier to quest participation. Some authors might prefer that, and others might not.

Authors who care about empty suggestions more than participation and results need to stop being babies.

>>55382
>The only thing that's gonna be affected is that there'll be less suggestions in simple, binary updates. "You want to be boy or girl?" "Right door or left door." Instead of a bunch of posts, you'd get only two, with a different number of votes, and the occasional extra "BOTH!"
For binary/otherwise quantised options, wouldn't it be better to place those options inside the quest post itself, rather than wait for people to make replies with the options in them before voting begins (inelegant)? Alternate lateral-think responses could still be posted as comments below.

Two more issues that would also need to be addressed: First, the ability to change your vote. Without being able to vote twice, delete your post, or post a "Disregard X, Y is better", you'd be locked into whatever option you voted for first. Second, leaving delineation of voteable options up to suggesters is open to abuse; whoever is the first with a popular option can tack on an additional clause. Subsequent posters either 'split the vote pool' by posting another voteable option without the clause, or you end up counting one block of votes for "X with Y", and another for "not Y" (if both have the same number of votes, which do you pick?).

Slinkoboy 2012/05/28(Mon)06:13 No. 55404 ID: d6ae01
File 133821083863.gif - (1.30MB , 474x198 , 1255605321_shocked.gif )

>>55392
...........

YOU SOLD ME.

I'd still prefer it be optional if possible, but golly maybe I'd use it more than I thought.....

>>55370
yes, if an author wants to ignore it they still can. As well as looking at well thought arguments.

>>55369
because >>55371

>>55392
I think so too.
Lets say you have a choice, 2 people post their decision. option A gets 7 "this" posts and option B gets none. Tally is 8 v 1.
There are actually 30 readers but the others haven't bothered with "this" posts because they saw the overwhelming winner. With a "one click vote" mechanism they could and suddenly you see 20 votes and realize you have greater readership then you thought (some are still not voting due to one reason or another).

>>55382
eloquently put.

>>55391
I'd love some post editing.
This can make cheating somewhat of an issue but as you said, it can be limited to OP...
For players cheating with it can be mitigated via "view edits" button like on the Stardock forums http://forums.joeuser.com/425458

>>55392

> Improved Visibility of User Interest
Another good way to do this, which wouldn't fall through the cracks when people DON'T VOTE, is to implement a View Counter. Each time a thread is viewed (full, +50, etc), it increments the total views. Thus, a popular quest would have many views. It would act roughly the same as having many votes for (popular) decisions.


> Generic Counter-argument of Cynicism
While I would agree that it would potentially remove clutter, voting has a major down-side: Popularity.

If number of votes are not limited in a thread, someone can vote on every suggestion. This may be nice to increase the apparent "visibility" of a quest, but it can result in two scenarios:

1). People will rely on up-vote/down-vote rather than participation. More often than not, commenting seems to give way to just "Like"/"Dislike" banter in the form of Youtube buttons. (This may also increase levels of butthurt from those who see their ideas get down-voted to hell rather than simple ignored)

2). Stalemates and herd-mind will kick in as we've normally seen, and people will vote diametrically based on how others have voted.


Meaning in the long run, we're statistically more likely to end up with a bunch of the same things we see anyway, just with less stuff between each of the posts.

> What It Means
This is not to say these are the ONLY outcomes, but they are real world examples of the stuff. Moreover, to make sense of voting, we'd need the following requirements (this is where we get into the code-weeds):

1). Each IP/tripcode can only vote once per suggestion
2). Each suggestion must be clearly marked, or else non-suggestion posts deleted/hidden to prevent confusion during voting.
3). To prevent weird issues with Up/Down votes on old posts, there would need to be a way to "lock" them up to a certain point, essentially creating "voting cycles" under the administration of the quest author. This means that threads would require a mechanism for ownership, registered to an IP or tripcode.


> I Like Titles for Organization
On a completely unrelated note, while Up/Down voting is a good way for silent, non-post-oriented participation in a quest, a lot of this seems to come down to:

A). "I want to know that people are interested in my things", and
B). "I don't want to read a lot of posts saying the same suggestion"

While voting may improve the first, it essentially recreates the second, but it WILL incur one massive issue a poster in the thread had mentioned, but which no one seems to have thought of:

Reason.

So everyone decides the popular opinion is to use Suggestion#22. This is grand, but what happens is that no one goes to say "Yes, we should do the thing, but before that, we need to...."

That is the entire point of having posts. Banter and discussion are the LIFE BLOOD of a quest. Without Suggesters being able to offer opinion or changes to statements (without created a locked-in Yes/No scenario), Authors can't operate on meta-creativity.

Think of how many times a quest has suddenly changed direction or subtly integrated the speculation or reasoning of a suggestion. That's the power of posts. You don't get that with voting. You don't get that by skimming suggestions of trends. Think of what could have happened in some of our most popular quests if people were to have kept their wild speculations or candid rambling to themselves.

So no, I still think it's a bad idea.

> Another Approach
If people really want something to clean things up, make threaded posts. Replies (marked like a Spoiler Image, for example, to prevent auto-folding) immediately "fold into" their owner, rather than attaching at the end of a thread. This increases visibility of a popular talking point, organizes thoughts into discrete chains, and allows an author or reader to hide extra suggestions between posts by "folding" each sub-thread.

We'd also have a nice, cascading, and easy to read style for everything. To top it all off, it works exactly like voting: the more replies, likely a suggestion is a MAJOR POINT.

> Let's Review
Ways to pretend we're voting without voting!

1). Use a Thread View counter: this makes it so we know just how many people like to read your quest!

2). Implement a more structured, conversation-oriented style of threads and sub-threads, essentially facilitating the "logic" of voting without introducing a limitation of opinion, reason, and debate.

3). Just do what we've been doing, as while it's not as fancy as voting, it sure as hell has worked so far, and if people really are that concerned about clutter, there's /questdis/ for that.

>>55406

TL;DR:
- There is no "Always Works" solution. Posting and voting don't work if people don't do them.

- Visibility is a concern, but the only guaranteed numeric method is to track passively, not actively.

- Clutter is a way of life in threads and boards. You can either clean it up, or direct it elsewhere, but you should never stifle posts.

- People are sheep and will usually act as such. Don't give them a reason to click without thinking.

- Reading is good for you. If you don't read, you're probably not as interested in your quest as you thought.

I'm not particularly invested in the issue of whether to implement a voting system or not despite arguing that voting would help make viewers more visible. I did that mostly to counter the notion that the audience would be less visible.

Honestly, I don't think any method would alleviate author angst. There'll always be people wondering "Why don't people post to my quests?", "Why don't more people vote?", or "I get a bunch of views. Why aren't more of them posting?" I've seen that last one a fair deal on sites (forums, art sites, etc.) that track views. In the end, the only way to deal with that kind of worry is just to suck it up and keep posting your quest for as long as it's fun for you to do. If self-confidence issues are keeping an author from doing their quest, it'll likely still be a problem to overcome, no matter what.

I'll say that right now we're only making guesses about the effects a voting system would have. We don't know for sure what'd happen. I'm not so certain that discussions of the sort you've mentioned would disappear entirely. If people have something they really want to add or some little detail to discuss, I think there's a fair chance they'll still say it. Unless they happened to feel discouraged by a previously posted option already having a bunch of votes, which will happen at least a few times.

Speaking personally (i.e. I'm not going to make any argument that I'm a particularly representative site user), I can say that a voting system would increase my participation in this site. I make comments, but I read more than I comment. And if I have some subtle detail I want to add, I'll add it, but often what I had to say felt like it would just be going >this. We've already established some people don't really like doing that too much.

But with all that said, I'm perfectly fine with the site continuing as it currently is.

This whole up/down malarky is a load of balls, because all that will happen is that people click + on the one they like and - on every other one, or any suggestion by Seven.

(Being able to "audit" votes to see who clicked - on whom is pure drama-shitstorm territory.)

If you're going to do this, actually get some explicit semantics in on which posts are updates, and have the voting work as one ID gets to upvote one post since the last update. If they post and haven't voted yet, that's their default vote. Voting for a different thing without an update since moves the vote. If they post a second time, auto-ban them for not taking it to dis/. :V

Or leave it as people posting "this", which is mechanically identical but less work.

I have yet to see a website where the introduction of an upvote/downvote system hasn't been horrible.

>>55414
Well, there's stackoverflow, but adding a reputation system to quests for "correct" or "accepted" suggestions is an outstanding idea for generating even more drama.

>>55414
I absolutely have to agree here, I have not seen a serious problem that requires implementing this whole voting that isn't fixed simply by more users posting, as is the entire point of a Kusaba-styled board. If nothing else and this system ABSOLUTELY HAS TO BE IMPLEMENTED, I want the option to not have any ugly boxes for voting on posts when I browse the boards, because I will refuse to take part in it.

I'm also against the idea of reply chains collapsing into each other, as that disorganizes posts by who they reply to rather than when they reply and would make the site feel more like Reddit, not something to be proud of. Probably a moot point regardless, as I don't think Kusaba would be able to function that way, but still worth noting.

>>55418

> More like Reddit
.... excellent point.

I'd like this system without downvotes.

I can appreciate a lot of people liking an idea. I think that's fine to let them support it without posting.

But if you want an idea to not work, propose or support a better one.

>>55428
The problem with that is the first good post is likely to recieve the most votes, so if you propose a better one the first post will most likely be chosen as people cannot change their votes to tell the author to do the newer suggestion.

>>55429
thats why every reader needs to be able to upvote -every- post, though it will still result in the first post getting the most attention like how things are already

>>55430
But that makes following quests turn more into work than fun.

It just seems easier to leave things as they are than to implement that.

Look, I've wanted to at least try this option for my quest for a long time. I don't want it forced on everyone, either!

I realize a lot of you don't want things to change. Speculation and unrelated comparisons aren't really helpful. It might take a lot of work and only a couple people use it.

So what? Obviously leave the default option to not use the voting set-up. Allow people to ignore the votes if they want as readers. All of these things are absolutely fine. Just don't take away the adventure and experimentation. I think trying new things and having fun is what Questing is really all about (to me anyway), so refusing to try something that may or may not be beneficial or work out is all in the spirit of things.

Let the people who want it have it, then we can discuss whether or not it was the worst idea in the universe or a good idea that most people didn't care for.

tl;dr I'd rather try it and be wrong than never do it and never know for sure.

Is it possible to have a thread be created that can either allow or not allow voting?

That way those who want it can have it and those who don't can just ignore it.

So, basically we have 2 camps here. those that think this is a good idea and those who think this will literally collapse society (specifically, tgchan/quest's society) prophesying doom and gloom.

So, how about an opt in test run?

>>55413
You can audit who voted on what right now in and quests with lots of posts this is often done.
Its not a pure drama shitstorm right now (merely used to catch duplicates) so why would it magically become one?

>Colored borders
It SEEMS to me that this is universally loathed.
So this part apparently needs to be dropped (unless I misread... if only there was a voting mechanism...)

How about hidden voting? You can see your votes, and the quest author can see the totals, but you can't see everyone else's votes. That should go some way to curb the herd-mentality that generally follows vote systems. Of course the drawback would be requiring the quest author to log in somehow, or be stuck accessing from only one IP (or however the ID is generated).

>>55458
you already raised the IP issues that ensue... also CURRENTLY you can already see everyone else's vote.

>>55437
What this guy said

>>55446

>So, basically we have 2 camps here. those that think this is a good idea and those who think this will literally collapse society (specifically, tgchan/quest's society) prophesying doom and gloom.

If you are going to continue being this brand of shithead in this thread, I will literally lock it and ban you. You don't get to make a suggestion and then strawman the ever-loving shit out of people who disagree with it.

>>55446

I really like the colored borders. In fact I wish they had more snazzy colors. Hot pink, neon orange, lime green...

>>55461
Really, having it be optional solves almost every problem this is bringing up. It lets authors choose before hand if they actually want voting in their thread or not.

>>55463
My sincere apologies.
It was meant as a humorous exaggeration not an actual argument or a put down.
I'd have done the same for the pro side but couldn't think of anything funny to say there.

>>55471
are you being sarcastic (neon pink?) or serious? Cause I like the colors but so far I have only noticed people saying they don't.

>>55521

Dude, I like obnoxious coloring schemes (actually I like high-contrast schemes but to most people that's the same thing).