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The voting system has been fundamentally broken since it was first initiated and has been complained about on a regular basis with no action taken despite many good suggestions. As the system stands now if you have anything over a 4 it's about the best you can hope for.
However that being said I just noticed that Chris has added weighting to the votes which is a good improvement so some action has been taken obviously, I retract what I said above  , however I really like Colin's statement that when an article has few votes you can't go by the score, that should be pursued as a feature: perhaps an article with less than 10 votes doesn't show it's score until the 11th onward or something.
I also think it would useful if people were more strongly encouraged to leave a comment if they vote significantly different than the current average.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
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We've had many suggestions on the voting system but very few that are practical.
Weighted votes have been with us for years and tend to even out an article's rating over time faster than straight votes. The other suggestions we've had are:
- Showing a histogram (Like it, and am looking into incorporating it)
- Allowing members to change votes (this is being added)
- Forcing a comment (means we just get "asdf" comments)
- Restricting votes to N per day (people just create fake accounts)
- Displaying a list of who voted (this will just cause voting wars)
We also disallow votes from those not logged in, and disallow multiple votes from the same IP to make it harder for people to create fake accounts.
I'm open to more suggestions.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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Hi Chris you must have missed my almost immediate edit on my message. I made two suggestions: don't show the score until a certain number of votes have been made, i.e. not until the 11th vote or something. This calms the author and doesn't skew the initial results.
The second is that any votes that are extremely off the current average should have a *Suggestion* pop up that they make a comment of why they voted that way.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
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John Cardinal wrote: Hi Chris you must have missed my almost immediate edit on my message. I made two suggestions: don't show the score until a certain number of votes have been made, i.e. not until the 11th vote or something. This calms the author and doesn't skew the initial results.
If doing this it should be X votes or Y days so that an article that gets very few votes will eventually show a score.
--
CleaKO The sad part about this instance is that none of the users ever said anything [about the problem].
Pete O`Hanlon Doesn't that just tell you everything you need to know about users?
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Anything that forces a suggestion will often result in either asdf or something that will get filtered out by our obscenity filter.
I've also toyed with the idea of using statistics to weed out poor votes but it's a tricky one. Let's say you have someone who creates 5 fake accounts and votes 5 5's. Someone else comes along and gives a more accurate "1". Statistically the 1 vote should be removed.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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Chris Maunder wrote: Anything that forces a suggestion will often result in either asdf or something that will get filtered out by our obscenity filter.
Exactly. Which is why I capitalized and put asterisks around the word *Suggests* as in a wild vote deserves a popup suggesting the user make a comment, not forcing them to make a comment.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
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Chris Maunder wrote: Statistically the 1 vote should be removed.
If someone's using fake accounts to skew the score, the stats are gonna be screwed up no matter what you do.
IMHO, a histogram is still the best bet for making the score more meaningful. You're actually presenting more information. If someone's gaming the system, well, the results are gonna be wrong regardless, but if you see an article with 2 1s and 5 5s and a weighted average of 3, you'll at least have a better clue of what's really going on...
----
It appears that everybody is under the impression that I approve of the documentation. You probably also blame Ken Burns for supporting slavery.
--Raymond Chen on MSDN
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John Cardinal wrote: don't show the score until a certain number of votes have been made, i.e. not until the 11th vote or something
Oooh, I like that, but I think the number should be higher, like say... 20 votes.
John Cardinal wrote: The second is that any votes that are extremely off the current average should have a *Suggestion* pop up that they make a comment of why they voted that way.
I think showing votes accumulated like this would alleviate Chris' voting wars fears (illustrating the way it would look for one of my articles - grin):
Vote -------------- Votes By -----------------
Value Platinum Gold Silver Bronze
5 1 4 2 3
4 5 2 7 0
3 0 0 5 0
2 0 0 0 0
1 0 0 1 4,038,764,324
Further, Chris cited the a probability that if forced to leave a comment, many folks would just post "asdf" or other equally invalid comments. My response was that a rudimentary text parser could be created that would parse the comment, and automatically reject votes that are associated with comments that failed the following checks:
a) When trimmed of leading and trailing spaces, did not contain any characeters. The nefarious "empty" comment.
b) Comments must have X number of characters (this prevents the simple "asdf" example provided by Chris. I would think 30 characters would be enough.
c) Comments that don't contain a certain percentage of spaces. Statistically speaking, Chris (or whoever) could take a reasonably long sentence out of a well-written article, and calculate the percentage of spaces in that sentence as a baseline.
d) If the comment passes all of the previous validation, come up with a vocabulary file and compare all of the words in the comment against it. Assign levels of coherence based on the percentage of word matches achieved and an ultimately lowest acceptable value that can be used to automatically reject the comment/vote pair as invalid.
So, if a comment matched 80-100% of its words with the vocabulary, it would be automatically labeled as "probably valid", and the vote/comment would be viewable by the article author who could then read it. The article author would be able to see the vote, the comment, and the member status (platinum, gold, etc), but would NOT be able to see who the person was that voted. Keep in mind that site admins WOULD be able to see who the vote came from and could take action behind the scenes to correct any problems with the voter (those who continue to perform drive-by-1's for no reason other than to cause havoc).
Notes:
The vocabulary file could be automatically created by selecting a handful of articles and parsing the text into file. Spell-check the file, and then move the words into a database table. That should cover the majority of words that might be used in a comment and would present a reasonably small vocabulary to prevent undue load on the server's CPU cycles. I figure a reasonable vocabulary would contain between 2000 and 3000 words since we're only looking for a percentage of matches.
A cleverly-constructed vocabulary list should further mitigate the server load issue.
If the comment is restricted to something like 120 characters, this will limit the number of words the voter can type, and would further reduce the server load during the vocabulary check.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001
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I have been accumulating notes on some of the software utilities I use regularly, and wanted to submit some reviews of this software to CP. I was surprised to find there is no Software Reviews section, although there is a Hardware Reviews under General Reading.
My suggestion: create a Software Reviews section under General Reading.
-- modified at 10:49 Saturday 14th April, 2007
Here are some possible subsections:- Backup
- Database
- Dev Tools
- Editors
- Email, RSS, & News Readers
- File Management
- IDE
- Media Players & Management
- PIM & Calendar
- Project Management
- Source Control
The general idea of a "software review" is to describe the main features, possibly compare several products, and show how to use it. Both free and non-free products could be discussed.
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Has anyone else noticed that two entire threads, not just a post hear or there in them, have disappeared from the Coding Horrors forum?
Did they actually get removed or moved somewhere else?
Dave Kreskowiak
Microsoft MVP
Visual Developer - Visual Basic
2006, 2007
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There were two threads that were removed.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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How about only being able to vote when actually replying?
V.
I found a living worth working for, but haven't found work worth living for.
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or, limit people to 5 votes per day.
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Then abusers will create 5 dummy accounts
cheers,
Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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Let them, much harder then a constant stream of ones.
Brad
Australian
- peterchen on "Who has the worst keyboard"
Keyboard? Ha! I throw magnets over the RAM chips!
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The Headline style on the News page (eg: for 11 April, 2007[^]) is crying out for some leading vertical whitespace. My aesthetic sensibilities are constantly offended by the lack of separation between the "Source" line and the next headline. It's causing me lack of sleep and loss of appetite.
No wait, I just ate a ham sandwich. Mmm... 
/ravi
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How about having the "It looks like you've already posted this message"... work acrossed multiple forums to stop a good deal of the cross-posting.
Dave Kreskowiak
Microsoft MVP
Visual Developer - Visual Basic
2006, 2007
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I can just see it now... a CP Clippy! 
/ravi
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How would that work if what you were trying to do was move the message to another forum?
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Delete the old message first?
Trinity: Neo... nobody has ever done this before.
Neo: That's why it's going to work.
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Ya know, sometimes the simplest answers are the most evasive! 
Dave Kreskowiak
Microsoft MVP
Visual Developer - Visual Basic
2006, 2007
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Good one. Added to the list
cheers,
Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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I was just looking at an article and was wishing (once again) that I could "Watch this article" and get an email when the article was updated. I know this has been suggested before, but I'm hopeful.
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That'd be nice, I bookmark any articles like that but since then I've only seen my bookmarks (CP ones) once because I forget to check.
Perhaps it simply notifies you of any changes to your bookmarks?
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That's a really good suggestion and would greatly increase CP's appeal, imho.
/ravi
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