A "preview" button when typing in a reply would be nice. Even with the restricted formatting, it'd be useful to be able to check that we didn't typo a link -- especially since there's apparently no way to edit a reply.(Also, a "search this thread" feature on the forums would be really great, as this suggestion may have already been made somewhere in the twelve pages of ranting.)
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
The community is unused to the change after using the old system for so long. As people like Asakawa have said, such a change is necessary for the site to function as best as it can as there were many flaws in the old system they wanted to address.There's been lots of criticisms and the WH staff had been working hard to improve it further for the community. Until they say they're happy with it, I think it's too early to cringe at the change.
@tmssinner,Some of the reasons for the change are expressed in the first post in this thread. You can trust that no changes were made on a whim.Regarding your example of the Witch-Hunter's Harvester, which comment do you find useful in the comments section? Did you upvote that comment? Did you downvote the one you mention as being pointless?What I'm saying is that 23 people read that comment and liked it enough to want to give it a vote. The next comment got that reaction from only 6 (and got a downvote from a 7th person for a total of +5). If you want ratings to reflect your own view then you need to take part in the process.You are still able to order comments by date (oldest or newest first) but doing either doesn't yield particularly strong comments (in fact, oldest first showed me a comment in which someone was circumventing the language filter so I deleted it). The system will remember if you chose to order by something other than rating and show comments by that in your future visits. All in all I don't understand your criticisms. I've found that ordering by rating shows me the most useful comments very quickly and easily but you're not even forced to order by that.
And I am wrong how?Edit: could you summarize your point because I don't see it?Edit 2: im fairly sure being able to vote delete comments was already a feature in the old system.
But that reply, once detached from the comment to which it replied, would have looked like gibberish and would have been reported for moderator deletion, rated down or deleted by vote before long. As has been said the difference between the way in which people were using replies and the way in which people are being asked to use them from now on is different and this has led to a few issues with conversion of the old stuff. It seems like many of the changes that caused the issues are being reversed which I personally think is a shame. The conversion issues would become less and less of an issue as time goes on and I think it's a stronger format for comments and worth a bit of trouble to get there.
Reading the replies makes me feel relieved-- I'm not the only one who dislikes some of the changes! But I do like some of the changes, as well. And I'm sure some people like the new format too, so maybe give users the options to toggle between the two systems? They don't seem impossibly different, and after using wowhead for many years, the change is a huge adjustment for a lot of us to make.I've been a patron of wowhead for many years, and I wouldn't be the first one here to comment on how jarring the switch has been. So in the interest of fairness, I decided to experiment around on the site for over a good week before I came in here to post so I could get over my shock, let the changes sink in, and really sit down and evaluate what I like and don't like about the new system. I'll start with things I like. :) I do like the ability to sort by date, or to see posts only from a certain patch. The deletion rules are nice, although I don't delete comments very often. I'm very glad that reputation is no longer rewarded for upvoting/downvoting posts-- it got people voting for the wrong reasons and didn't really help the content of the site itself. I think I like the larger upvote/downvote on the side, although I'm still adjusting to it. Being able to change my vote if I miss-click is nifty! As for what I don't like? I don't really like my replies being listed separate from my stand-alone posts in my profile-- it's basically two lists I need to look through in order to find a post I made and intend to update. I don't really like the way replies are listed right now, and how it's impossible to downvote them (I know you're working on changing that-- thank you!). I think the UI for replies right now is a little strange, especially for longer replies. For one-line replies, it looks great, but for longer, multi-paragraph replies (like this, for example) look terrible and are ridiculously hard to read because of formatting problems. That said, the thing I dislike the most is that replies don't all load at once if there are more than 5. I don't mind that as a default setting for people who have old computers and slow internet, but there should be a way to change it so users with faster computers/internet don't have to click to display every list. It's really frustrating to click through multiple lists-- not just for finding information, but for when the user is intending to make a post and wants to see if anyone else has posted something similar first and avoid multiple posts on the same topic. I hope that my input was helpful, and that users and moderators both can continue to work together to keep this site the shining star of WoW databases across the internet. :)
Something that I'd like to see, and I know a lot of people may disagree with me on this, is something that shows which users have downvoted your comments, particularly if it is a newer comment and there's no feedback being left. Nothing is quite so discouraging about posting a comment to a page that isn't bragging, flaming, or purely opinion, and then seeing it downvoted without explanation. I like to post useful information, but the only effect of a negative downvote on fresh comment is that it 1) gives it a negative rating, making it less likely that others will view it and 2)reduces the reputation of the individual who posted the comment initially, resulting in (at least) a net loss of site reputation. By making votes public, it would maybe encourage people to think more about when they cast a vote, and discourage downvoting because a user simply dislikes/disfavors something in a post without giving useful feedback. One method that might be a compromise (instead of revealing a user's name) might be to at least show in the reputation frame the reputation/achievement statistics of the person who made the vote - it'd be less obvious identifying information, and it'd give posters a sense of the value of the vote. If a "respected" community member downvotes you without comment, it might be obviously deserved, but if a site troll is downvoting comments, that's likely to show too. (However, you still run into the problem that site trolls tend to get their "funny" comments upvoted like mad sometimes, resulting in a high rep score). One other thing that I'd like to see is a cap on the amount of reputation a person can gain from a single comment being upvoted - users who post guides within comments sometimes do so by unfairly editing their old comments to include newer information, which results in a massive influx of reputation gain. Additionally, users who post the same guide on similar pages capitalize on reputation gains, which sort of eliminates how much authority a high reputation ranking really has.
I understand what you're getting at with these suggestions but I think the first would create way more problems that it would solve and the second would discourage things that actually are helpful.We already see a lot of people who edit their comments to say things like "why did someone downvote that?" if people could see who downvoted the messages would say "Joe90210, why did you downvote that? hey, you also downvoted my other comment! I hate you and now I'm going to downvote everything you've ever posted!".It might prevent some of the abusive voting but that is being tackled from a different direction so don't worry too much about that. I think it would also discourage a lot of the voting that the site really needs to function and that would be a shame.Regarding caps on comments, if someone's made a comments that lots of people find useful and especially if they take time to consistently update a comment to keep it current then I think they deserve all the rep they get. It can sometimes look a bit like cheating when you see that someone has posted the same comment on lots of pages but again, if people on each of those pages are finding the info useful then they deserve the rep. Someone searching for a single one of the pages with those comments doesn't care about all the other pages they just want that info and it's right that they upvote the comment that gives it to them.
Yes, I'm a moderator. That means I'm a user of the site like you who volunteers to help the site by dealing with reports and the like. You're basically asking questions about the rating system but for the most part that hasn't changed with the new comment system so it might be worth raising your issues in a separate thread. Essentially, though, you don't like the comment that most other people did like and you did like a comment that a few people actually disliked. Well, any rating system like this is going to promote the comments that most people like. Perhaps your tastes are different to those of most other users but how can a site cater to the specific tastes of every individual? A balance surely has to be found.I specifically asked if you had upvoted the comment you liked and downvoted the comment you didn't like because if you're not taking part in the process of rating comments then how can you complain about the ratings not reflecting your own views?I also wonder what you found so useful in the quoted comment. I don't think I would actually downvote it if I read it myself but I don't find it very useful. Of course it's a good Hunter weapon - anyone on that page is very likely aware of that - and the cost values given are completely useless since they're not based on my server economy. I dunno, the comment is fine but I'm not surprised it's not the top comment on the page.However the new comment system does mean that a comment like that is no longer purged and unviewable so the new system has helped you to find a comment you found useful.