Meta: Comment Sorting Request

Submitted by a2_electricboogaloo on

COMMENT MODERATION IS BACK.

It's pretty awesome.  

I had a request for Brian/whoever does the programming site.  We currently have two options for comment sortins "newest first" and "oldest first".  Could we add another sorting option for sorting the highest rated comments first?  Now that there isn't a cap for the rating of a comment, it would actually mean something to have the highest rated comments at the top.

IThere would obviously be some drawbacks of the sorting method:newer comments would have a lower chance of being seen, but then again, with the standard "oldest first" method, they usually do.

If you don't want to mess with this now that's definitely understandable, as there have been some issues with the programming of moderation system before, but I think it'd be a good option to have.

mgobaran

December 12th, 2013 at 1:28 PM ^

I think this is a pretty solid idea. Although do resposes come with the original post? What if a response is the best comment, but it doesn't bring the one above with it, causing it to be out of context and not a good comment? What if reply chains are so long, the next funniest/best comment is half way down the page still?

Like I said, good idea. There is a lot of other things to consider though.

a2_electricboogaloo

December 12th, 2013 at 1:35 PM ^

I'd make is so it's ordered by "level 1 comments" (the original comments), and then the responses to that comment are ordered (level 2 comments), and then the responses to that one are ordered. 

Example:

Level 1 (+50)

      Level 2 (+10)

      Level 2 (+5)

      Level 2 (+1)

Level 1 (+22)

      Level 2 (+20)

            Level 3 (+10)

            Level 3 (0)

            Level 3 (-2)

      Level 2 (+1)

Level 1 (+2)

Level 1 (-10)

      Level 2 (+5)

            Level 3 (-1)

      Level 2 (+1)

      Level 2 (-1)

 

DH16

December 12th, 2013 at 1:34 PM ^

Similar to Reddit almost? Of course the same algorithm of rating and timeliness couldn't be replicated (Reddit's algorithm is bugged, funny enough), but I do like that method of sorting

a2_electricboogaloo

December 12th, 2013 at 1:38 PM ^

That was my original inspiration.  Reddit's algorithm is pretty complicated though, or at least their "hot" sorting is (it combines both the number of votes and the age of the comment, so older comments lose influence over time, to newer/higher voted comments).  I'm just thinking a straight up most votes=highest up on the list sorting.

lakeside

December 12th, 2013 at 1:36 PM ^

or graying out negative comments would be nice. However, I'd rather see development efforts go to the Drupal 8 version of the site. Create the future, Brian.

go16blue

December 12th, 2013 at 1:37 PM ^

I think this works great with massive sites like reddit but for a place like mgoblog where most threads wont hold more than 50 comments I think it only really serves to stifle new discussion and add to groupthink. It's not very difficult to just scroll through a big thread looking for highly rated comments (it's what I do sometimes tbh), but something like this would actually hurt the site I think.

If it is possible, maybe a good compromise would be to enable this feature once a thread is x hours old? But I get the feeling that that's impractical.

a2_electricboogaloo

December 12th, 2013 at 1:42 PM ^

Very true.  It definitely it could lead to an increase in the group think mentality of the site, which honestly has become really annoying for me at times.  However, for certain thread large threads (like open threads, or threads on very controversial/commentable topics), it could be a nice addition.  But I definitely see your point.

As for your suggested one, thats the be a great addition, but yeah, I think it'd be difficult to implement.

joeyb

December 12th, 2013 at 1:52 PM ^

I'm probably one of the biggest opponents to hivemind on this site, but I think that reddit's system would work well here. I think you'd have a lot more Space Coyote and Magnus posts floating to the top over the "CAN HE COACH OL???" comments. Plus, if the OP had his way, it would be an option, so you could still view them in chronological order while other choose to view them by highest vote.

reshp1

December 12th, 2013 at 1:59 PM ^

This is my feeling too, I really like Reddit's system because the best comments get elevated above the noise and it's really useful because there may be tens of thousands of comments.

Here, it's pretty rare to get a topic over 200 comments and most of those are threaded replies to other comments so it really doesn't make too much sense to rank them. The other big threads are live game threads, which you want to be sorted by time so again, not worth the effort.

By the way, the way reddit does it is really ingenious, they actually weight by score AND time, so that new comments always get a brief chance on top and even high scoring comments eventually fall if the voting isn't sustained. The formula is:

 

Where n is the score and t is the time stamp of the post, in seconds from an arbitrary date. Newer posts have a bigger t and will therefore rank higher, but older comments effectively move forward in time and become "newer" according to the log of the upvotes.

http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2013/01/16/the-mathematics-of-redd…

joeyb

December 12th, 2013 at 1:48 PM ^

As awesome as this would be, I don't think this is likely to happen. Drupal is a framework and almost everything that you see is a plugin to that framework. I think blog posts and comments are the only thing that come native to Drupal. The forum nature is a plugin. Sorting is probably another plugin. Points are another plugin.

Basically, all of these features are developed independently and don't have a good way to work with each other. You can issue hacks and whatnot to try to get it to work, but I'm not sure that it's really feasible for Brian to be able to do that on this site.

As an aside, this is the same reason that the mobile apps don't have voting. Brian can expose the data necessary for the apps to work as is via a plugin, but I'm not sure that it has access/is even aware that the other data exists in order to make it available.

vbnautilus

December 12th, 2013 at 2:12 PM ^

Instead of re-ordering, we need filtering.  I'd like to keep the order of the posts to maintain the flow of the conversation, but just hide/collapse all posts below a certain threshold.   That's what we had during the slashcomments phase.  

moffle

December 12th, 2013 at 2:26 PM ^

Off topic for this thread but also META:

Is the navigation to older threads on the MGoBoard broken for anyone else? It has never worked for me. If I click the arrow to go to the next page, I instead get the first page of Diaries. It has always been like this. And this happens on both the sidebar version and the full page version of the board.

Not a big deal as most threads I'm likely to want to continue following are ones that are still very active (so accessible under the "Hot" tab) or ones I've commented on (so accessible through my mgopoints history). I just imagine it can't only be me, as it happens for me on every computer and every web browser I've tried.

Hail-Storm

December 12th, 2013 at 2:58 PM ^

I think the posts are manageble enough, and it's easy to see the high point posts.  A lot of times, the high votes are going to be on one of the few first posts anyway. I really like this voting vs the newer voting that we had. I hope Brian keeps this.

ckersh74

December 12th, 2013 at 6:32 PM ^

I would think that ordering by upvotes would have the potential to cause some seriously disjointed looking conversations, if you were to sort replies in that manner.