The Voting System is Unhealthy For These Boards

In an ideal world, sure let's have a voting system to sort out the boards but in this small community it really is not a good idea. When I think of good forums, I think of Steam and Reddit. You might say we have a similar forum to Reddit why is our forum bad then? Or you might ask isn't the recent tab similar to Steam so why is our forum bad if it takes the good of both worlds?

The primary problem with the boards is votes manipulations and solving this problem is not an easy task in a small community. You see, voting systems are designed to be a popularity contest on their own. It is not a clear choice of I agree, or I disagree as what some have pointed out in the past.

I wish it was a simple as disagree or agree. But votes in this community have too much weight to them, even a single down vote can render a good post obsolete. We need to ask ourselves, do we want a popularity contest or good discussions? How are we defining trendiness and bad posts?

Reddit is really a website for popularity contest that works because the large number of users which represent an accurate numbers of how people feel but in a small community such as ours it really is a bad idea.

On the other hand, the recent tab isn't really that good since a forum that tries to implement as many features to itself collapses at itself because it becomes too complicated. In other words, no one bothers to look at the recent tab because we have other features.

#So what is the solution?

Well, if you want to make the boards a popularity contest, why not do what Facebook does with its likes system? Facebook gives you a handful of expression to choose from where you can decide how this post makes you feel.

I'm not saying we implement an exact replica to Facebook's likes system. I'm suggesting that votes should be an opinion rather than a vague statement of up and down.

So what you need to do to make this work is the following:

• Give us other options of votes and remove down votes. For example give us the option to vote on the following: "Agreee," "Disagree," "Angry," "Sympathy," and so on. Also make all of those into emojis like features just how Facebook is doing for simplicity reasons.
• Make votes visible to all. This is a must do since votes hold so much weight and we want to prevent votes manipulators from doing their thing.
• Add captcha before logging in and a logging in timer. This is self explanatory and a must have.
• Define the trendiness of a post on discussions and not solely on the votes. If more people are talking in a post and not just typing one word to pump up the post then that post is trendy.

If you have other suggestions please do share with me.