[twoshy]

As you can see, I don't post at all, although I do spend some time reading these boards. To downvote without giving a reason is not my style, but a silent upvote for entertainment or educational value feels reasonable. Anyway, when trying to upvote a post, I misclicked which led to a downvote. Unfortunately, it seems that votes cannot be changed once they are cast. I think that we should be able to change our votes as can be done on Reddit, YouTube or the like. Reputation may well be more significant here than in either of those two sites so there may be some intricacy I am missing, but if this seems to be a reasonable suggestion I would be grateful if it could be implemented, thanks.

[Bbradley62]

Or, if it's easier to program, disable my "-" after I downvote a post, but leave my "+" enabled, so I can at least cancel out my own inadvertent downvote.

[Free]

Perhaps it would be useful to throw the entire voting system away and delete all existing votes.

[Vampyr]

Free, on 2011-June-27, 06:35, said:

Perhaps it would be useful to throw the entire voting system away and delete all existing votes.

After all of the late shenanigans, I tend to agree. Although I do think it would be OK to have posts voted on, without the votes accruing to the poster.

[Rain]

There is no option to change vote, sorry. Free's suggestion is more along the lines of what we're thinking, positive or negative. (ie Inquiry's suggestion from some other post)

[hrothgar]

Few quick comments / observations regarding up-voting and down-voting:

• I am active on a number of sites that successfully use up-voting and down-voting or other reputation based systems. Stackoverflow and Daily Kos are two well known examples
  
• The reason that these systems “work” is that they are comprehensive. Voting serves a real purpose. Reputation has value and there are real consequences to losing a user ID. There are benefits to creating content that gets upvoted. There are costs to creating content that is down voted.

From my perspective, it feels like the system on the BBO forums was added willy-nilly. It isn’t integrated in with the forum software (for example, you can’t filter on high value content). Consequently, people treated it like a joke. I strongly recommend looking the “Privilege” system on Stackoverflow to see a more comprehensive reputation based system. http://stackoverflow.com/privileges Few things that are worth noting:

• People can (pretty much) read anything they want; however, some forums require fairly high reputation to participate in. As a practical example, consider a system in which
  [**] You require zero reputation to create a new thread or answer a question in the Beginner Forums
  [**] You require a medium amount of reputation to create a new thread (ask a question) in the Advanced Forums
  [**] You require a high amount of reputation to answer questions in the Advanced Forums
  
• Someone who creates a thread which asks a question has the option to “Acccept” an answer. This indicates that a reply was particularly valuable and solved their question. (Accepted answers net you lots of reputation)
  
• You can “upvote” (give people reputation) with a relatively low reputation. Downvoting (which hurts your target’s rep) requires much more rep
  
• Players who really want a question answered can create a “bounty” and pay people with some of their reputation.

Obviously, this type of system requires more sophisticated forum software. However, if we really are hemorrhaging talent to other bridge sites it might be worth investigating.

[Vampyr]

All of the above is still open to the abuses we have seen as long as there is no way to prevent people from having multiple accounts.

[hrothgar]

Vampyr, on 2011-June-27, 11:05, said:

All of the above is still open to the abuses we have seen as long as there is no way to prevent people from having multiple accounts.

The easiest way to deal with this type of issue is to build in a weighting system for reputation.

Upvotes and downvotes from accounts with relatively high rep carry a high weight
Upvotes and downvotes from brand new accounts (which consequently have zero rep) have very little impact on the system

People are welcome to create all the sockpuppets they want, however, even a swarm of new user IDs has relatively little impact on the system.

Obviously, things get complicated when the system is "brand new" and no one has "real" rep.

If were bootstrapping the system, I'd do so based on some combination of

• Star Status
  
• Number of boards played on BBO (this is a bridge site after all)
  
• Yellow status
  
• Length of membership
  
• Number of posts

[hrothgar]

BTW, it seems appropriate to repost spaf's goodbye address to the Usenet

Quote

Axiom #1:
"The Usenet is not the real world. The Usenet usually does not even
resemble the real world."
Corollary #1:
"Attempts to change the real world by altering the structure
of the Usenet is an attempt to work sympathetic magic -- electronic
voodoo."
Corollary #2:
"Arguing about the significance of newsgroup names and their
relation to the way people really think is equivalent to arguing
whether it is better to read tea leaves or chicken entrails to
divine the future."


Axiom #2:
"Ability to type on a computer terminal is no guarantee of sanity,
intelligence, or common sense."
Corollary #3:
"An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards
could produce something like Usenet."
Corollary #4:
"They could do a better job of it."


Axiom #3:
"Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) applies to Usenet."
Corollary #5:
"In an unmoderated newsgroup, no one can agree on what constitutes
the 10%."
Corollary #6:
"Nothing guarantees that the 10% isn't crap, too."


Which of course ties in to the recent:


"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea --
massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a
source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect
it." --spaf (1992)


"Don't sweat it -- it's not real life. It's only ones and zeroes."
-- spaf (1988?)

[Bbradley62]

Too bad... I was hopeful that after we got through the initial learning/experimenting period we would all behave like adults and have a simple system where we upvoted posts we thought were "good" (whether based on content, attitude or whatever) and downvoted posts we thought were "bad" (for the same various reasons).