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Solution to badly rated comments, karma?
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Post by
Wanderingfox
How about adding a karma system?
Specifically, I'd envision it being like this.
Anyone can create a comment
Anyone can positively rate a comment
You can only negatively rate a comment if your total rating/comment is higher than the person who posted the original comment
Essentially it'd work as such:
New people would have a clean slate (we'll default this to 1)
People with lots of useless comments will have a value of 1 (providing useless information isn't that much of a contribution)
People who post good comments will have a value greater than 1 (representing their comment's worth to other people)
People who post bad comments will have a value less than 1 (representing that their comment's did not help anyone)
Assuming the above, we end up with:
New users can positively rate any comment, and negatively rate any bad comment
Users who create lots of comments that aren't found helpful, but aren't exactly useless, can positively rate any comment, and negatively rate any bad comment
Contributing users can positively rate any comment, and negatively rate any comment from someone who contributes less than themselves
Users who post bad comments can positively rate any comment, but only negatively rate comments worse than their own.
With this system anyone can praise someone, but only the people who post constructively can deem a constructive comment as uninformative. This of course has its issues, such as:
Good users rating good comments down incorrectly
New users getting sniped down to a negative standing by other new users
Users positively rating bad comments in an attempt to tamper with their karma
Conveniently these are either non-issues, or can be resolved fairly easily:
I'm fairly sure our contributor user base is good enough to not have the first one become too much of a problem, if it does it's fairly easy to moderate the specific person in question
We can prevent new users from being segregated by adding in a limit to how many negative ratings you can give in a day (as a function of your rating divided by your total number of comments, rounded to the nearest whole number, minimum value of 1)
The last problem could be resolved like the previous issue by limiting the number of positive comments a person can give. Something like their rating divided by their total comments, rounded to the nearest whole number (minimum of 1) times 2 (or 3, something larger than the negative amount so that they can mark multiple good comments a day)
Just a thought :P
Post by
Malgayne
I dunno, this sounds a lot like the way Allakhazam works, and on a number of occasions we've been told that people switched to Wowhead because they liked how clean our comments are.
What problem do you perceive that you feel this system would solve?
Post by
Wanderingfox
The biggest issue I see is new comments by people who provide good relevant information getting nuked because some spammer walks by and hits the - button for no reason.
I mean there's other ways you could go about things too, but the premise of the idea above was to make comments that are likely to contain useful information (ones posted by frequent contributers, ones with high rating, etc) harder to remove, especially by those who seek to do so just out of spite.
The comment system as is works, except for the fact that comments can be removed from the site simply with 2 negative ratings. This means a new good comment can be removed very quickly. I guess another possible solution would be to just make comments posted by frequent contributers start with a higher rating, or even all comments. The issue is that new comments can be nuked before they get a positive rating.
There's also the issue with the pages getting cluttered with discussion rather than actual information, which was why I suggested karma originally, because it put a tangible risk on writing a comment because lots of useless comments wouldn't improve your karma (and would lower your karma slowly to 1 the more you did it).
Post by
Smaragd
Maybe adding something like "Report" for wrongfully downrated comments could be added. This would of course have some negative impact on your account if you overuse/abuse it.
Some examples I've seen are comments where information was valid in a certain build, then something got changed that makes it invalid. In truth, as a comment it should be downrated if not edited, but this is unfair towards the user who wrote the comment when it was valid. Would be nice if these ratings could be nullified and comments deleted (or immortalized) on reports including that reason.
Other than that, I don't think it's that big of a deal, since noone really cares if your personal rating is high or low. Most people only look at the specific comments' value.
Post by
Wanderingfox
Well i only suggested using personal rating because it seemed like a fairly accurate measure of someone's contribution to wowhead's comments. Honestly the only issue with the current incarnation is how easy it is to invalidate new comments.
Post by
Miyari
When we
did
have a what was essentially a "karma" system (in the form of "reputation") users freaked out over every single aspect of it and we ultimately had to remove it before things got completely out of hand. Ideally we would hope that users would respect the comment rating system and use it appropriately. I do not feel that the cases in which the comment rating system is being so drastically abused are extremely common, but we do have the tools in which to revert any damage that is done in those cases. That being said, I expect that the comment rating system can continue to work as implemented (and expected) provided that users follow the
guidelines
and do not abuse the system. If you feel that a comment has been unfairly rated, you can always report that comment to a moderator using the new Report feature and a moderator can handle the situation accordingly.
Ultimately, the only practical solution lies not in re-configuring every aspect of the comment rating system but rather making changes so that abuse is less simple, and will eventually become less likely. The comment rating system is
100% working as intended
. The way some users use it, however, is not. The only way to change that, similar to the OP's vision, is by restricting what can and cannot be done on a user level.
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