Comment Voting: Back, Modified Comment Count

Brian

09aafa37dd14701cfd302eb8963d1e1c0faa5119d60e2671eea5f13620231492[1]

Hello. Comment voting is back. As as often the case with these things, I just had to do something entirely different to get it to work. Once I modified the approach it was easy, which… computers, man.

The graying out and highlighting are still a work in progress, but we have restored the status quo ante bellum, pre-slashcomments. I'll probably move the voting thing to the right, but I figured I'd let people get a grasp on the new/old status quo before making further changes.

The system:

You need 100 points to vote and start threads. As per before. No change there.

Upvoting is free and provides two points to the upvoted user. Someone posted something you like. Hurray!

Downvoting costs a point and subtracts a point from the downvoted user. Finally: something to spend your points on. It costs a point to downvote a guy in an effort to mitigate the echo-chamber effect; downvoting is not supposed to be disagreement. It also hurts the downvoted user less than upvoting helps him an effort to only excise folks who get more than two-thirds of the site on their bad side. If this is you… I cannot help you.

THERE IS NO LIMIT. bwahahahahahaha (there should probably be a limit. working on that.)

Comments

Skunkeye

December 11th, 2013 at 4:31 PM ^

I'm very happy to have voting back but I still think that it is essential that negative voting is free so that every comment that isn't useful in some way, gets punished.  This is what it will take to increase the quality of comments to the point that people want to read them again.

 

dragonchild

December 12th, 2013 at 6:34 AM ^

Ideal community behavior:  Someone says something incredibly cruel just to rile folks up, a few dozen people each spend a point to send the post to oblivion to preserve the site's integrity.

Non-ideal behavior:  A few dozen zealots go through threads and systematically neg every post they find disagreeable or, worse, neg every single post by a particular user.  That can ONLY be done if neg votes are free.

I've been targeted in forums just because someone didn't like my opinions.  It's incredibly annoying to have someone follow you from thread to thread, spewing hate the whole time.  That's not any better than trolling.  At least this way, that sort of vendetta will burn through a busybody's karma in short order.

Space Coyote

December 11th, 2013 at 4:31 PM ^

You tell your grandchildren about. Then they flip you the ole double bird (because the younger generation lacks respect for their elders), talk into their invisible ear piece, teleport up to their hover-pod, and tell the robot butler to "pitter out" (which in the future will mean "piss off")

MGoTeach

December 11th, 2013 at 4:37 PM ^

Who was about to ditch the website post bowl games, but hopefully this change will improve the board and get rid of the problems that have left me shaking my headd.

 

bluebyyou

December 11th, 2013 at 5:33 PM ^

Vote me down, y'all, but I don't like the expiration in a year feature.  I think that provides an impetus to post frequently rather than posting less frequently but with posts that include something of substance, particularly on a sports blog where point accumulation is another game many people play.

griff32

December 12th, 2013 at 10:14 AM ^

The experation will make accumulating points make everyone read a bunch of nonsense so people can get their "voting" rights back. I have been here a while, and have noticed that this community does a pretty nice job of policing its self when the voting is on.

 

Thanks Brian hopefully this will eleviate a lot of the moderation that has been necessary as of late.

UMgradMSUdad

December 11th, 2013 at 5:16 PM ^

Points aren't worth what they used to be when you had to earn them one at a time. A guy could pound out posts from sun up to sun down and only earn maybe 10 or 15 points. This inflation is ridiculous! Have you seen how much they charge for a nickel candy bar these days?