Site Changes, 7th Febuary 2005

[sether]

Ah, all good points. I guess we'll just see how this works out.

[Workaphobia]

I agree with sether. A person who is extremely helpful deserves to be acknowledged, but if they try and fail to solve someone else's problems why should they be penalized?

[lakerdonald]

Once again, just because your piece of help doesn't quite work doesn't mean that somebody will say "No"

[sether]

On a separate note, how long of a period do you have to wait in between changing ratings? I've been going back to old posts when people helped me, and I tried to update two different members' help ratings but i get

You can't change karma yet. Not enough time has passed

Speaking of which, should I even bother going back to old posts to boost peoples' ratings? Plus it seems I can only go back so far....

[lakerdonald]

Well it's a relatively new system, so I'm saying that everybody gets a fresh start, karma wise. I'm basing mine based off of activity since like 8:00 pm or whenever.

[budman7]

IMO it should be at least a 2-week test period. And what a great idea this is.

I don't think that the people that are helpful would resort to unethical tactics to boost their rating.

And I don't think that the people who are asking for help are going to try and bring these helpful people down.

[mechmaster]

i agree, personally if i was asking for help i would probably thank anyone who gave an effort in trying. I dont think i would take anyone down just because they gave a wrong answer and the plan didnt work. I would reward them for trying. It is a good system and i think it will succed.

[jasonlambert]

ok, responding to some of the points raised so far:

clicking the yes/no button yourself
It wont have any effect on your rankings, if you attempt to vote for yourself the vote is ignored.

Application of "No" votes
I would expect no votes for one line unhelpful or troll answers, eg "The answer's in the manpage", or "RTFM" - luckly we very few of these anyway. Just because a solution posted to a question didnt work does not always mean it wasn't helpful

Malicious use of the "No" votes
Your displayed HelpScore is calculated by subtracting your no votes from your yes votes to produce a running total. The webpage that im working on display's yes and no votes, as well as your total HelpScore. It would be easy for me to see any malicious "no" voting against a user and I can re-adjust vote's manually in the database if warrented.

Defrauding the yes vote by false account creation
It would be very easy for me to detect this

Length of time between casting votes
This was set to an hour, but as of now I've removed the time limit.

voting for past replies
If the reply was good/bad enough to warrent you going back to find it and cast your vote then feel free.

Thanks for all the constructive feedback so far

[tfk]

Wow, giving help feels like playing space invaders now. :P

--LC

[sdousley]

Once again, just because your piece of help doesn't quite work doesn't mean that somebody will say "No"

I agree. I have seen a few posts i think where the person who answers the question has not got it right first, but that has lead to different errors that allow them to solve the problem, maybe it should be that the person asking the question should NOT click yes/no until say a week after the post, or once the solution is resolved.

On another note, I have had a few people that have said i really helped them out even though i have not actually solved their problem. I have taught them things they didn't know about not directly related to the initial problem, like with a newb learning how to edit in the CLI rather than graphical editors such as Kate or Kwrite etc.