Yeah, there's not a lot we can do to encourage people to vote more. We have thought about having a "score" for everyone to display under their avatar on posts, and then certain activities can give more or fewer points. Voting might be a way to get more points. Not sure if anyone will care about a score though :) The scores might come with titles and things you can display, just for fun/prestige. Maybe other things later.
The fact is, builds DO obviously rise up. The community does vote, and they even vote positive, they're just very very selective and you have to have good timing, on top of a good and well thought out build.
The forum thread... It would be like any other forum topic (like this one, the General topic) except instead of a list of threads you'd get a list of all the builds (filtered somewhat - maybe only showing complete builds). When someone creates a build, it appears as a thread there. When someone comments on a build it gets bumped and marked unread. It's just a different way of keeping track of new builds and discussion on them, using a forum style interface instead of the browse interface.
I actually half-implemented it already. Note it's incomplete, missing many features (such as paging), and I didn't test it, but you can see an "alpha demo" of it here. If anyone complains that it doesn't work well or is incomplete I will do mean things to your profile :P
The fact is, builds DO obviously rise up. The community does vote, and they even vote positive, they're just very very selective and you have to have good timing, on top of a good and well thought out build.
The forum thread... It would be like any other forum topic (like this one, the General topic) except instead of a list of threads you'd get a list of all the builds (filtered somewhat - maybe only showing complete builds). When someone creates a build, it appears as a thread there. When someone comments on a build it gets bumped and marked unread. It's just a different way of keeping track of new builds and discussion on them, using a forum style interface instead of the browse interface.
I actually half-implemented it already. Note it's incomplete, missing many features (such as paging), and I didn't test it, but you can see an "alpha demo" of it here. If anyone complains that it doesn't work well or is incomplete I will do mean things to your profile :P
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Do you guys feel like builds that get an early -1 end up getting ignored purely because of that? Possible solution is to hide the score until there are more than x votes (voting will reveal the score).
Yea, after one -1 no one so much as acknowledges the build. Hiding the build vote count until 10 or so votes have been casted might work but the issue is getting 10 people to even vote at all. Maybe 5 votes? On average votes usually only get 2-3 votes, though.
Do you feel like there is just not enough commenting on builds overall? Possible solution is adding rewards for commenting, rather than forcing comments. I've also played with making a special forum topic that shows all builds as if they are forum threads - this might make it easier to follow and encourage more discussion.
Please elaborate? I'd love to know what kinds of "rewards" are in store for us if that happens and the forum thread thing has me confused.
Do you feel like there are certain people that vote -1 all over the place? Possible solution is a system that gives you a reasonable number of down votes, but if you want to down vote more you have to start up voting things as well to "buy" extra down votes. This would have to be balanced carefully.
Yes but if this happens, votes that don't deserve +1s might end up going to the top rated builds in order for people to get downvotes.
Do you feel like there are people that -1 any "competing" build? Or that -1 a build based on the person that posted it? Possible solution is to display the names of the first x people that vote, and once the number of votes is over a threshold it just shows a number instead.
Only if the voters' names' are shown to the build author only. That might help to see anyone that has a record of running around and being a -1 troll.
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