Season 2011 - Site suggestions

[zyzzyva980]

Good spam, while being better than bad spam, is still spam.

It's hard to address your concerns when you don't give examples...

Why do I need to give an example?

About the way the forums is organized, perhaps there could be a poll before the season begins to see where every event should go or something, but I like Build/Lab/Study over alphabetical.

[starpug]

Good spam, while being better than bad spam, is still spam.

It's hard to address your concerns when you don't give examples...

Why do I need to give an example?

About the way the forums is organized, perhaps there could be a poll before the season begins to see where every event should go or something, but I like Build/Lab/Study over alphabetical.

Because it helps us better understand your argument? If I don't understand your argument how am I suppose to respond?

I think that the whole karma system would be mostly hype. Everyone would go crazy about it for a couple of weeks and rate, like, every single post. But then when the novelty of it wears off, I hardly think it would be used at all. For example, if I'm reading through the Ornithology thread and find a really useful post. When karma is all new and cool, I'll think "Hey, that helps me out a lot. KARMA!" then give them some. But in a couple weeks, I'll just think "Hey, that helps me out a lot." but I'll totally forget/not bother to give them karma because it's not a shiny new toy anymore.

Actually, that's a really good point. Most other forums I'm on... karma is there, but almost never used.

Who says there's anything wrong with it coming into disuse (not that it neccessairly will)? If people hardly karma then in some ways karma is more meaningful because only the really helpful posts recieve karma then the person with the highest karma count will most likely be the most helpful

I think this form of the system is better. I don't think regular users should be allowed to rate, just mods/admins.

Because you can't trust them? All they can do is help you as negative karma is disabled

Says who?

Says DS from the last site improvements thread, I posted the link a few pages back.

[zyzzyva980]

Basically, here's what I'm trying to say. Bad spam is bad. Posting without reason, or in this case, voting down posts for no reason. With the karma system, there's also "good" spam. I've seen this on many other sites, there are people who go around up voting things for people, sometimes for rewards. This skewers the statistics, and while being better than "bad" spam, it's still spam, and should not be tolerated on the forum.

[RandomPerson]

I still don't like the idea of karma, it isn't necessary on a forum where we already know who are the helpful users and the spammers. It would just complicate things.

What I meant by not displayed on posts I meant only the number would be displayed on posts, who has karma'd who for that specific post would not.

Think of it this way Random, who are the people on this site that have the most informative posts? fleet? Fester? Neither have too many posts, but the things they post are more helpful then all of the things I post combined and have been around a lot longer. Do they not deserve the same if not more as I do from having over 600 posts (Which is not much as posts don't really mean a whole lot besides that you have been active for a while)?

Only voting positively would cause vote inflation for some, and lack of such for others. I don't think the karma system is worth using on a whole because there is just no way to keep it standard across a forum for what deserves karma and what doesn't.

Essentially:
K.I.S.S.

[starpug]

Basically, here's what I'm trying to say. Bad spam is bad. Posting without reason, or in this case, voting down posts for no reason. With the karma system, there's also "good" spam. I've seen this on many other sites, there are people who go around up voting things for people, sometimes for rewards. This skewers the statistics, and while being better than "bad" spam, it's still spam, and should not be tolerated on the forum.

As mentioned before, any attempt to exploit the Karma system will be frowned upon

[zyzzyva980]

Yes, it will be frowned upon. Of course it will. Will that stop it? I don't think installing the karma system would be worth it.

Good points have been brought up:
We already know who spams and who doesn't (basically)
It'll lose its excitement after a few weeks
People will abuse it
Etc.

We know you like the system starpug. Why? What are your points?

[starpug]

Yes, it will be frowned upon. Of course it will. Will that stop it? I don't think installing the karma system would be worth it.

Good points have been brought up:
We already know who spams and who doesn't (basically)
It'll lose its excitement after a few weeks
People will abuse it
Etc.

We know you like the system starpug. Why? What are your points?

My points are I've seen it executed on another site without any problems

This topic has been worn out, maybe we should focus on other ideas

[zyzzyva980]

Good idea.

[paleonaps]

Very good idea......

[blue cobra]

Regarding event organization, I don't see anything wrong with what we have now (but of course if we can improve it, why not). Even if there is some gray area between build/lab/study, it really isn't that hard. Any event with "Lab" in the title, which some of these "hybrids" have, invokes the thought that you should look in lab events. I've never had nor have I heard of any major problems finding events. I don't like alphabetical, in part because I just find alphabetical so boring and unintuitive, but with these faults it still fails to solve the problems. In a given year, the amount of events that go by multiple names (like for this year, Shock Value/Circuit Lab, I've seen both names used on official event lists) usually will rival the amount of events that could cause people familiar with SO any confusion as to whether they are build/lab/study. Add in the aforementioned faults, and in my opinion it just makes things worse. Organizing them by category could be nice, but I can still see some problems, not to say that the good couldn't potentially outweigh the bad. Without looking up the official category, it would be fairly easy to at the very least narrow your event down to 2 categories, if not get the right category on the first try. Either way, do this once and you know it for the rest of the season. It could help, since most of my events are Physics and Engineering, it could be convenient to have a good amount of my events in the same place. As well, others, who's events aren't mostly building like mine, have the potential to have this convenience as well. However, we would have to consider if we want to create 5 threads with only 4 or 5 events in them, each. The could be over-organizing.