Voting
Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)
Posts: 23,514
Per Ken's Announcement post:
"Voting - The comment that best answers the original question rises to the top of the list, so folks can quickly find solutions to their tech problems and get back to working on their projects. If you prefer chronological order, click “Date Added” below the original post in any thread (enable cookies for your preference to persist)."
Ken, I'm sorry, but I think you're overly optimistic about how well voting is going to accomplish your stated goal. It's hardly ever the case that an answer is encapsulated in a single post. By yanking any post out of its chronological context you're destroying a huge chunk of its value. This is only going to confuse new users rather than enlighten them. Besides, who's to say that the post with the most votes is the best one anyway? I urge you to reconsider voting order as the default. _______________
Dang it! I'm really sorry to be the messenger of so much push-back on the new forum. I really am. But I sometimes feel that the dev team is working in a vacuum and doesn't have a good feel for how the forum is used by its contributors. I bring these issues up as a friend of Parallax who wants the forum to succeed as much as you do. So please listen to your forumistas when formulating policy matters as well as solving technical issues.
Thanks,-Phil
"Voting - The comment that best answers the original question rises to the top of the list, so folks can quickly find solutions to their tech problems and get back to working on their projects. If you prefer chronological order, click “Date Added” below the original post in any thread (enable cookies for your preference to persist)."
Ken, I'm sorry, but I think you're overly optimistic about how well voting is going to accomplish your stated goal. It's hardly ever the case that an answer is encapsulated in a single post. By yanking any post out of its chronological context you're destroying a huge chunk of its value. This is only going to confuse new users rather than enlighten them. Besides, who's to say that the post with the most votes is the best one anyway? I urge you to reconsider voting order as the default. _______________
Dang it! I'm really sorry to be the messenger of so much push-back on the new forum. I really am. But I sometimes feel that the dev team is working in a vacuum and doesn't have a good feel for how the forum is used by its contributors. I bring these issues up as a friend of Parallax who wants the forum to succeed as much as you do. So please listen to your forumistas when formulating policy matters as well as solving technical issues.
Thanks,-Phil
Comments
Ken's statement there assumes this to be a simple minded question and answer site as opposed to being a discussion forum.
This is not stack exchange neither is it face book. Neither should it try to be, we already have those.
A dismembered conversation will never make any sense to anyone.
While I wasn't initially opposed to voting I quickly developed a strong hatred for it. People don't up vote the best answer to a problem, they upvote the opinions they agree with. And worse than upvoting posts they agree with, they downvote opinions (or people) they don't agree with.
I personally think the voting "feature" contributes to a negative vibe in the forum.
I get the impression they have gone somewhat into 'siege mode' over in Forum Development.
Other forums have a simple *solved* link, where you jump to what the OP considers a solution.
That avoids the spaghetti scramble of vote-sorted posts - instead, you have a choice of going straight there, or reading the more nuanced outcomes elsewhere in the thread.
Good luck with Ken's Voting Sorting working on any of the longer threads here...!
"Other forums have a simple *solved* link, where you jump to what the OP considers a solution. That avoids the spaghetti scramble of vote-sorted posts - instead, you have a choice of going straight there, or reading the more nuanced outcomes elsewhere in the thread."
I like that solution. At the top of the thread, add a link to the "best" post so it can be viewed in context.
-Phil
Nobody in Parallax is in siege mode about the forums, but the team has certainly become frustrated with the response and how to handle it. This puts me in a tough position because relationships with several forum members have decayed.
I feel fair in saying that we hear and understand your concerns, now you can understand mine. I don't think you really understand that I truly don't have enough time or resources to make the forums exactly what you want - I have to let some things evolve without my day-to-day intervention and under management from our team simply because there's not enough time. This means we'll be able to evolve the tool to some extent, but it's not going to be everything you want, especially according to your individual preferences.
If you looked at our total needs at Parallax you might even agree with where we place our energy [to date, the forums have had over 1,000 person hours this year]. We have products in development, an ongoing and expensive P2 development cycle, educational customers with very specific needs, and a team who needs individualized support for their roles. From a personal perspective, I've given more to Parallax and our customers in the last 20 years than most people do in a few careers, but I've also got my limits to managing even more projects more closely. Most importantly, our team hears you - they're doing what they can to make this what you want it to be and what we want it to be. If you participated in their daily meetings you'd feel positive about the efforts we're making around this forum tool.
What you can do is continue to work with us on this tool's configuration, rather than comparing it to other forum tools or asking us to do something that involves custom programming (this is what got us into trouble with vBulletin). We've already chosen this Vanilla and had to make some concessions. We can change it around (but I'm not moving away from a default installation), configure defaults, etc.
Ken Gracey
I don't know Facebook... really!!!I played a bit with Diaspora and GnuSocial... but it was boring very fast...
But I'd like to see how a Propeller StackExchange would work...
This crossbreed of forum and wiki looks very interesting but the success of the individual StackExchange sub sites seems to depend a lot on the people doing the cleaning up in the background. These busy ants are polishing away typos, broken formatting and unclear wordings and sometimes I wish they even would merge similar discussions into one... Neither should it try to be, we already have those.We do not have a propeller StackExchange site by now. And probably far to less busy ants cleaning up the content here... destilling?
So, what did we do about that? The voting data needed to be viewed as additional data to other factors that kept relevant posts higher in the sort result. Tags or even key words within the posts were combined with the voting data, along with date/time info. Using relevant key words to determine "interesting" posts was a key factor in bubbling-up posts that provided real data, not opinions. Our initial goal was in sorting to the top, posts that provided information that would allow us to debug the thread poster's issues. We found that we could also bubble-up trend data as well, by including date/time info to the sort. For this forum, data/time info may not provide what is needed, so that's just an example of what worked in one case.
Other factors such as posts that contain code bits, could provide relevant sorting queues. Posts that contained numbered steps/instructions, might also provide a clue, etc...
Then, just combine the rankings of all the informative factors and use a multiplier to give each a weighted value for the sort.
Of course, that sorting should always be an option that the user can select as they peruse the forum... Probably should not force readers to view threads in a specific, weighted sort. Always give the user the ability to view the threads in date/time, last-edited, recent posting order, etc...
Just my $.02 (U.S.)...
dgately
Going off on the custom path is tough, and it often ends badly. You guys made a great effort to carry the state of discussion forward. Thank you for that. I agree with you in that this may not be valued the same way among everyone.
Honestly, all the UI, formatting, presentation issues are minor league to me. The conversations are possible and not difficult. It's going to work, and maybe one day, work better.
Posting code is important. That one is the only thing I would prioritize as being "do what it takes" to resolve. Doesn't need to be fancy. I'm not entirely sure how to do that. And I'll go and look too.
I think all of us really need to think about what is worth what. You guys had your constraints and you made your choices. And you are great people, working hard.
For me, seeing it all go forward and knowing you guys go home at the end of the day able to play with your kids, relax, work on your projects, and do so without undue stress is very important. Worth it. This is why I'm happy with the basics. Being unhappy just isn't worth it.
The friction seems to come from, "hey guys, we really worked hard to get here" clashing with, "but it's not what we expected or are used to" and the value of things is in the balance.
Just know I get it. I've no real worries, and I'll share that sentiment from time to time in the hopes it's catchy.
and something else?
_________________________________________________________________________________
When I’m looking for a solution it’s valuable to single-step through the questions and answers,
examining the whys of various solutions and eventually picking the best fit for my design.
The logic evolution is generally chronological.
The above op question doesn't have a right answer.
My preference is to read the latest posts without logging in, unless I have something to say.
I vote for date-sort.
_______________________________________________________
“We are a fleeting alliance of enlightened self
interest.” Hea Ter, AD2015
"You can simply set your preferences to the date sorting order, and the voted reply won't surface to the top. This may even be a default option in our setup. ..."
Setting date sorting order as the default mode would satisfy my concerns, and I'm sure most others' as well. I've had my preferences set to date sorting since day one, of course. My worry was that new users might not catch on quickly enough and become confused if posts are out of order, hence taken out of context.
Ken, as far as "decayed relationships" are concerned, I think much of it stems from frustration that the forum members who've built this place have been largely excluded from certain policy and design decisions being made internally. All of us feel a pride of ownership here from our own thousands of hours of contribution; but I feel there's a prevailing sense that that ownership was undermined, and pride betrayed, by the way the migration was thrust upon us. I'm sure things will heal over time as the forum evolves and settles into our psyches, but this upheaval has been a pretty painful experience.
And things are getting better. My only remaining policy complaints are the default vote-sorting order and the possibility of covert thread-sinking. Other than that, theme issues are solved for me by using Stylish. And I'm not worried about the technical issues slated to be fixed; I'm sure they will be eventually.
-Phil
Even now when I read the forum from a public computer or on public wifi, I don't log in, and the few threads that have votes are difficult to follow, because you cannot change the order default (only possible on first page after the original post) and have it carry to other pages in the thread.
I recommend that if you need to keep voting as an option, please change the default to date order.
ThanksTom
Think of the "right" way of commenting. Pure personality. PAsM for Beginners thread. Harprit and I clashed. on Many things. I believe there were many silent who agreed with one or the other or even both of us as the discussion progressed. But there is one 7734 of a lot of gold in that thread. With voting, would not have happened (my opinion) Lot of very good code examples and explanations would not bee there.
So for that reason in the best shark tank voice, as to buying into voting, I'm out.
....
What you can do is continue to work with us on this tool's configuration, rather than comparing it to other forum tools or asking us to do something that involves custom programming (this is what got us into trouble with vBulletin). We've already chosen this Vanilla and had to make some concessions. We can change it around (but I'm not moving away from a default installation), configure defaults, etc.
Given that comment, there is a best answer - simply disable sorting by votes, until you do have time to fix it properly.It certainly should NOT depend on user saves of settings.
But I see no reason to remove it. I have set the setting to date/time and have no problems at all with having voting. I do not see any sense in it, but it also does not affect or disturbs me.
Actually sorting by date makes the voting an interesting information about the post.
In a Mercedes Benz Forum I participate regular you can LIKE a post. But you can not DISLIKE it.
Sort of half baken solution. Just able to up-vote somehow.
So I personally think that the voting itself may be useful or not. We still do not know. So disabling is a wrong move.
Just do date as default aand all is fine.
Enjoy!
Mike
Well said, Ken. 1,000 man-hours in California is a staggering amount of money. I, for one, am very grateful for the amount of resources you and your staff have poured into managing the forums.
To be truthful, we also hear from many customers who won't come near our forums. They're simply scared. They feel it's a club, or they're afraid to post because of how people may reply. Sure, I realize they need to get over it and realize they're not speaking in front of a group and that they have their anonymity. For the educators, we direct them straight to their private forum to get the resources they need without a pit stop in the main forums. We rarely see them mingling in our other categories even though they are our largest type of customer by a significant amount. [Sidenote: educational customers have mostly paid the way for all R&D efforts, so all of us should welcome them].
If we can keep the spirit more positive (and welcome new members, as creepy as it seemed to a few people), then these moderation tools like thread sinking wouldn't be too relevant anyway.
While it may be the features that cause us to throw our arms up in frustration, it's the tone of discussion that's more important. That's something I believe I can help set regardless of what features exist on these forums. If we have technically interesting things to discuss, progress on the P2 to share, and new applications we'll almost forget about voting buttons. Heck, maybe even Heater will get a Facebook account and start sharing his posts. . .
Ken Gracey
I do so support your desire to maintain a positive tone here. For years this place has been an oasis of positiveness in the swamp of despair, bickering and general bad behaviour of the internet. (Please excuse the weird metaphor there.)
I'm curious about those educators and other customers who are too timorous to show up here with their questions. Are there still people around who cannot handle the rough and tumble of interacting with the human race over the net?
That is a shame because I'm sure their input and perspectives would be interesting and valuable, to us forumistas, Parallax customers in general and hence Parallax.
How do we get them to come out of their shells?
I always wondered what goes on in that secret discussion space
Oh, and no. I will not be getting a Facebook account. Unlike you, the boss of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, considers users of his system are "dumb f***s" https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
So I think we need to identify what the psychological barriers are to getting participation from prospective forumistas. Obviously, registration is at least a speed bump in that path. I haven't had to go through that process recently, so I don't know what's involved or whether the skids could be greased somehow. A virtual welcoming fruit basket maybe?
Once a new user is registered and certified, what next? Do we make it easy and inviting for them to know what to ask -- and where? As much as I personally dislike the condensation of categories, it was probably a good move from this standpoint. But maybe, for students, we need one more category: a student lounge, where they might feel more at ease.
Anyway, it's something to think about, and I certainly don't pretend to have the answers; otherwise, I'd hang my shingle out as a high-priced forum consultant, spend my winters in Baja, and summers drying out from an excess of margaritas.
-Phil
Some people have difficulty understanding others via text. A bit of snark may come off in ways they find difficult to process.
There may not always be solutions to those problems.
The idea of a lounge where the norms are extra careful may serve us well. Seconded.
One thing I do know is participation online tends to improve people over time. But they gotta invest that time.
... What I heard from students, though, was that they came to search for existing answers to their questions and, lacking success, just went away, rather than registering and posting a query.
So I think we need to identify what the psychological barriers are to getting participation from prospective forumistas.
This looks like a classic case of such individuals being happy to give up their freedoms just so as to eliminate all recurring username/password creation processes. Hey, Facebook to the rescue!
I think what is really needed is some serious education on freedoms, security, privacy ... and stop being so lazy.
Privacy expectations online really are different for people today.
Frankly, there is very little actual privacy online anyway.
It's all about managing ones identity and being able to link things to one's identity in useful ways.
Because of that, having things like a FB sign up right along with a standard one using just email make great sense. Not having it is a barrier and that creates friction.
These same people are sensitive to that and friction free type interactions are seen as high value ones.
There is as much privacy as one demands.
Referring to your earlier comment...
"About the covert thread-sinking mentioned by Phil... I also don't like threads being sunk without notification either - it's confusing if not unclear (how did this end up on the bottom of the page?). I think it's being used as a moderation tool for negativity. One behavior we'd like to change on the forums is the amount of negativity and we're looking for ways to manage it."
It has been obvious to me, as I am sure that is obvious to all regular members, that there is a serious attempt by Parallax to silence negativity within the forums. While this may seem like a worthy pursuit, you are in fact drowning out the voice of the customers and can only lead to bad customer relations. An analogy would be polishing an apple that is filled with worms. Even though some forms of negativity can be quite destructive, other types can provide great insight to building a better foundation with your customer base. Of course the dissemination of negative misinformation should be dealt with swiftly, but if the negative information is honest, then it should be listened to, studied, and resolved, instead of being silenced. I understand that nobody likes to receive criticism, but in many cases, criticism is handed out by people that love and respect us. And I personally believe that this is Parallax's situation. Parallax truly has some die hard and loyal customers, that would truly fight before switch, but even these loyal customers will have criticism and negativity that they want to express. Over the last year or more, I have seen several loyal fans and supporters being silenced because of their criticism and negativity. When Parallax silences some of their best supporters, it does not send out a friendly message.
And you can and should not use entities like FaceBook then.
You know, I can take your words here, spend an evening with some searches and a few nice guesses and very likely pin you down to a few possible people. And I'm not even very good at it.
If you've let anything slip on the various places you contribute, that can go down to a couple, or even identify you well. Have you used USENET? Does your username exist on a few sites? Are there common themes, phrasing, subject matter, written quirks out there? What e-mail visibility is there associated with those things? Use a company e-mail for any of it? Is that company public? What about their employee data, contact lists, etc...? It really doesn't take much for somebody to drill down and find out stuff.
What happens is people get lost in the noise. So it's fairly private because nobody cares to look any closer. This has been true on the net for a very long time.
Some of us really value privacy, and that education should be there for that purpose. Some of us manage our privacy, and despite that education, get value from how that's managed. True for me for sure. I'm quite public on some things for career / professional purposes. Still others do very little.
Having low friction options is a good thing in that it improves participation rates. Doesn't mean people must use them.
Works a lot like the open source / free software stuff does. It's not important that everybody be able to build software and or modify it.
It is very important that they CAN do that, or they can hire somebody to do that for them.
Reasonable privacy is possible on the net today. It's tough though. Ask people in some parts of the world about that. If we actually did rise to a very high privacy standard, this wouldn't be a very nice place to interact. But then again, how much of a target are we for these interactions?
Fair question.
And that right there is why people will use FB, Google, etc... to handle a lot of low value things. It's simple, doesn't really matter, and because of that, it frees them for things they really want to be doing, not adding time taken up by meta-tasks that take away from what they are doing.
I'll be frank. Nobody really cares what we say and do here. It's fun stuff, educational stuff. Perfectly ordinary, benign, and our forum code of conduct more or less rules out the nefarious stuff. Some of us may need a layer or two of insulation for politics reasons.
Say an XMOS guy is really stoked about P2, for example.
But I must very seriously question the value of asserting that too much. It's likely a net loss for something like this. Seriously.
And I'm writing that not to invalidate the basic ideas you are expressing evanh. It's good to invest in that stuff, and I won't go farther down that road because it's not what we do here. Just know I get it. No worries.
I am writing to frame this up a little differently.
Ken is saying there is negativity, and I'm gonna say it's not always friendly. Not that any of us are bad people. We just aren't, and we all know that. But we are often frank, many of us are smart as heck, frequently blunt, and so on...
If the intent is to lighten it up a little bit, present a more friendly face, I can totally see where Parallax is at on all of it. Adding some more modern features is a part of making that happen.
Goes back to what is worth what, as I wrote earlier.
I think having more people here is worth having the features, and so does Parallax. Count me in then. I'm here for Parallax, my own pleasure and learning, and for the great people here. And it was better some time back.
Maybe we can get back to that mode. I miss it. P2 is going to bring some folks in, and that's gonna be fun!
Finally, I trust people here. Really, I do. Parallax and you guys are not a threat to me, and I trust you understand I'm not one to any of you either. Maybe we can lighten up some.
Not quite. Sinking is sort of sneaky. The dialog is still there. It's just not up front and center.
Like when a newspaper buries some unflattering thing or other. They know better than to not publish it, but they also know it's probably not wise to have it on the front page too.
That's what sinking is. And once we all talked about it, the idea of making intent more clear seems to be playing out reasonably. Isn't that a good thing?
Intent really does matter and the vast majority of friction I see over this whole thing is failure to set and manage expectations and that comes down to poor communication about and on intent.
Parallax has now expressed it's intent pretty clearly. From where I stand, it's good intent! Reasonable at the least.
So we may not agree, but we can be more agreeable, yes? I think so. When I look back at my first coupla posts, I was not all that nice. And it was because I didn't see a clear expression of intent, so I assumed bad intent, or just indifference, which rubbed me the wrong way.
Important question was, "why?"
Turns out, after some introspection, the answer was I felt like I cared, and I didn't have bad intent, and so I should be receiving what I'm giving. "Be excellent to one another" and "consideration due is consideration given" are how I like to do stuff like this. Just didn't seem balanced at all.
But, once I saw what the intent really was, the investments made, what people from Parallax were experiencing, I found it pretty hard to be in a bad place. So now I'm not.
The sinking can go a number of ways. It could be seen as pushing people aside, not caring, and so forth. It could also be perfectly benign too. Improving clarity, etc...
But it's not silencing at all.
Real silencing is about deleting, banning, locking, warning, and so forth. I've not seen that happen.
Most importantly, Parallax has expressed the intent of sinking as not intended to be negative or to reflect badly on people associated with a sunk thread of discussion. Either you trust that, or you don't. I'm gonna operate on trusting that, until I see a reason not to. Join me. You might feel better about it all.
I submit it's worth it to evaluate what is worth what and let's focus on the high value things and operate under the assumption of good intent.
Do it because the intent is good. Seriously. When exactly has Parallax demonstrated anything but very high grade efforts to serve others well?
Frustrations may be running high, and that's OK. Perfectly human. Take a hard look at those through the lens of good intent and maybe it's not as bad as we may think it is.
Sure isn't from where I stand. No joke.