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What's wrong with the Collaboration and Testing forum? Simply post a link to your beta article and ask for comments.
Having beta articles posted in their own section doesn't make a lot of sense - just seems to be wasting more of CP's bandwidth.
jdunlap wrote:
I think that would increase the likelihood that people would contribute, because then it isn't going "live" and then having people make negative comments because of something that they didn't know about about formatting, wording or whatever.
There are no excuses for not knowing about formatting etc, it is plain to see from the articles already posted what the standard for CP is.
Michael
Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch
Who watches over you
Make a little birdhouse in your soul - They Might Be Giants
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Articles arrive in the "unedited" area, and can be discussed/edited there. The problem is that most readers don't want to discuss a new article, they just give an anonymous "poor" rating. The rating form should be combined with the article forum, so that readers have to post a comment before they can post a rating lower than 3. This way the author would know immediatly what's wrong with the article.
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The problem here is that forcing a member to post a comment when voting will result in lots of "asdf" comments.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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asdf
Tiiiihiii
--
He is the painkiller. This is the painkiller!
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I agree that people are voting on articles in the unedited area which are clearly not ready nor meant to be; Articles that are in draft or requesting collaboration and discussion.
I don't think we should force votes on those articles to have a justifying message. As Chris points out we will get asdf messages. No filtering will help either.
How about not letting voting on unedited articles? Vote only on edited articles; Edited articles are considered ready for prime time, complete and also of a suitable level as deemed by the editors.
Unedited articles can then be re-worked, discussed, requests made for collaboration/help and developed further. Then once the author(s) is ready they can mark it for the edits to take a look at.
One thing that will need to be countered is forgotten articles; People putting up a rough skeleton and then never working on it again. That could be solved with a simple time-lapse feature. e.g. if time since last edit longer than 1 week, alert author and remove from the site.
Also this means only edited articles get on the front-page and in the New Articles list etc. Or maybe people can choose if they want to see both tracks or just one.
regards,
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
South Africa
Brian Welsch wrote:
"blah blah blah, maybe a potato?" while translating my Afrikaans.
Crikey! ain't life grand?
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Paul Watson wrote:
How about not letting voting on unedited articles
Votes on unedited articles helps us tremendously in searching for those articles that merit getting edited and moved to the main sections. If we remove editing then it will increase the load on the editors many fold and result in fewer articles getting the attention they deserve.
Paul Watson wrote:
if time since last edit longer than 1 week, alert author and remove from the site.
Some authors are no longer in contact with their articles so this could result in articles being removed even when they are of sufficient quality. If poorly rated articles are removed using this method then fine.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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What is poorly rated? < 2 or 3?
--
He is the painkiller. This is the painkiller!
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A few ways around this :-
(1) Put up your beta article on your own web site and post a link to it in the testing/collab forum. That way people can comment on it using that thread you started and later on, once you've fixed the errors you can submit it to CP
(2) Have an "Enable Rating" check box for unedited articles that an author can set. Till the author has enabled Ratings, the editors can stay off the article.
(3) Ignore ratings - which I do now. I've seen perfectly good articles get 1s and really ordinary ones get 5s. There is no way that a public rating system can be accepted as being even remotely reflective of the quality of an article. If at all a good article gets a good rating - its a good pointer to the fact that the author is a popular fellow on CP  or a new person to CP (so no one has got time to dislike him yet)
Regards
Nish
Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework [NW] (coming soon...)
Summer Love and Some more Cricket [NW] (My first novel)
Shog's review of SLASMC [NW]
This post was made from Trivandrum city, India on a 0.0001 KB/s net connection
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Allow me to disagree.
The article ratings are no good when there are only a few votes, but once there has been a number (over 10) then usually the legitimate votes outweigh the spurious votes. Just because something isn't perfect is no call to disband or ignore it. Rather, we should think of a way to improve it.
Article ratings serve two very good purposes:
1) They help sort the wheat from the chaff in article listings.
2) They provide the author with feedback on his article
Ratings must either be on for all articles or off - it's useless to have ratings on some but not others. If that were the case then only good articles would have their ratings retained which would defeat the purpose.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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What we need is the ability to change our vote on an article.
Currently, when you try and vote on one again, the server does say you have already voted on it, and thats it. Cannot it just change the voted value to the new one? This will aloow people to modify thier opinion on re-worked or updated articles.
Also, under the rating for an article, if it could say that You voted x on this article would be useful.
Roger Allen - Sonork 100.10016
If your dead and reading this, then you have no life!
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>Also, under the rating for an article, if it could say that You voted x on this article would be useful
It is there, just not under the rating, it is down below where you normally vote for an article. Instead of the voting buttons you get what you voted
regards,
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
South Africa
Brian Welsch wrote:
"blah blah blah, maybe a potato?" while translating my Afrikaans.
Crikey! ain't life grand?
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... just because they've been buried.
I know it's feature creep but I've seen something like this on other sites:
Would it be possible to flag a thread (lead message?) with a counter inc'd by users (Interesting Thread)?
The top 5 in a forum (the criteria would be #of messages, and IT vote level, as transformed and interpolated by the latest 'let Maunder figure it out' bit of magic) get links (once you're in the forum).
The goal here is to lengthen the life of interesting threads, make them more accessable, and lsseen rpeiitton.
Hmmm... better make that the top 10...
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Hmm. Maybe what I can do is show the top N threads from the last M weeks ranked by the sum of the votes for messages in those threads.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Ooooo... you just made my brain hurt... 
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Chris Maunder wrote:
Maybe what I can do is show the top N threads from the last M weeks ranked by the sum of the votes for messages in those threads.
Sounds like a great idea. Use that funky popularity algorithm you spin on the articles.
Shog9
---
You'd better turn back, before the frost sets in.
These desert nights are for weathered men,
The ones who've already given in...
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Hi Tim,
How is it going Tim? I think you're on to something. Personally, I would love to see people have the option of having a threaded or non-threaded presentation of messages in the Lounge
In non-threaded discussions, a "buried" thread can get resurrected by anyone at anytime, merely by posting a new message which would appear at the top of the Lounge message list.
The ideal would be that you could toggle back and forth from threaded to non-threaded whenever you wanted. That way you could keep it non-threaded, but if you ever wanted to see all the messages in a thread you could toggle to threaded.
I agree that many interesting discussion die out once the thread is kicked off the main page.
JM
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Hey John
I'd change 'non-threaded' to 'stream' or some such, but if I read you right you could open a forum with posts sorted LIFO.
Interesting...
The Question Time page does something like that, but the dif would be open/dynamic view and I think you'd want it to be forum specific.
I guess if its easy to do it might be worth it - could be an interesting view on a forum - but without something calling up power threads the order may not be that much of a departure from the threaded view.
But hey - it sure is nice of us to brainstorm these new specs for Chris 
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Tim,
It was the LIFO thing that I was talking about. But I guess there are limitations on what can and can't be done.
The current system is working well on speed and useability but it is always nice to speculate on what direction things could go.
JM
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Let me throw in a few things here:
You can't merely go by the total number of posts on a thread to see how active it is, but rather by how many posts have been done recently (rather obvious, I suppose).
New threads should be given a high priority because they're new, not only based on the number of posts recently added to them.
A high-voted thread should be given a higher priority, and maybe also a low-voted thread should get a lower priority
You might want to cache priority levels and only update them when a vote is cast, a post is added, or a given time interval (5 hrs, 1 day, or something) has passed, etc. Saves load on the server (priority levels are just another number field that way), and doesn't affect the results at all.
I'd also like to allow for voting a thread as a "sticky" thread - one that goes in an all-time favorites section - maybe when someone bookmarks a thread in their thread bookmarks, that thread's priority in the global all-time favorites list is incremented. A thread would have to get a certain number of bookmarks to be even shown on the favorites list. (Hmm... should that apply to whole threads or just individual posts?)
Tim Deveaux wrote:
But hey - it sure is nice of us to brainstorm these new specs for Chris
 You can tell I'm in "design mode" here!
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jdunlap wrote:
You can tell I'm in "design mode" here!
I tell ya, the guy has it good!
Bookmarking threads (can we do that? - as a CP feature, I mean? I haven't played with that) would certainly have an impact on a LIFO thread forum view, assuming a discussion had grabbed the attenion of a couple users.
Hmmmm...
Ain't feature creep fun?
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This is why the idea of bookmarking a thread, or perhaps a "hall of fame" of sorts is so appealing - there are plenty of threads that are [interesting|informative|entertaining] which are occasionally useful to refer back to, but have no business being posted to.
Though, CP's forum search has improved somewhat, so this is less crucial than it once seemed.
Shog9
---
You'd better turn back, before the frost sets in.
These desert nights are for weathered men,
The ones who've already given in...
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Granted - this might be mostly a lounge thing - although I wish there was a way to get some programming threads into the FAQ on occasion.
Example? Well, in a couple of weeks we'll have the annual 'Meaning of Christmas' thread(s) (which I hope are not purely soapbox material) and they will probably surface a few times. Kind of disheartening for those who stay up till two crafting the difinitive post on the origins of the Yule Bunny to see the question rise again in MOC thread 3.2.
Also, might be nice to log in in the morning and see if there were any highlites from the night before... I mean, without having to wake up too quiclkly... 
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I guess what we're really talking about is enabling value-added users. Let's talk clicks and mortar ROI - what can we do to empower inter-holistics vv thread incubation?
Bookmarks. No. As an asset tracking mindshare, its leverage to incentive implementation graph wouldn't cascade - would require another server to boot.
Chris Maunder wrote:
Hmm. Maybe what I can do is show the top N threads from the last M weeks ranked by the sum of the votes for messages in those threads.
Maunder, you've got your goats in a row here. Keep it simple and go production asap. Once we start gaining traction on the customer-facing aspects we can get granular on the back end. I don't want to whiteboard this past the vortal of opportunity. We can start convergence towards enabling sticky threads once we disintermediate the initial bandwidth.
And thanks again. I know you'll architect another world-class solution.
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But So many people have asked for it that Chris had better do it. 