Feedback on Site Update - don't judge a post by its title

RiotKrylhos·10/24/2013, 12:13:27 AM·10 votes·1,121 views

Greetings,

We just rolled out something we were trying, and I was hoping to get some feedback on it.

On the listing of threads, the voting widget is in a "disabled" state, encouraging you to visit the discussion before casting a vote.

We still wanted to show the widget because the vote score helps to explain why discussions are sorted. If we only show the vote score (without the vote chevrons), it feels super weird because there's a random floating number with no explanation of what it is. So, we're still showing the vote widget, and message some guidance using our good friend .

Thoughts?

11 Comments

SmokingPuffin10/24/2013, 1:26:56 AM5 votes

From a usability perspective, I don't like the same widget accepting different user interactions in different contexts. I think it will be confusing.

I wonder if it would look okay if you drew some different chevrons around the number, in order to indicate that these don't behave like those.

For example, maybe instead of < 4 > it could be [ 4 ], everything being rotated 90 degrees of course.

edit - Now that I see this live, I think it would also be cool if you could somehow detect that I have visited this conversation and allow me to vote on it from the top level. For longer posts, I find that I am hitting the back button after reading instead of scrolling back up to the top of the page to vote.

SlumlordThanatos10/24/2013, 12:38:07 AM3 votes

I still think the upvote/downvote system needs to go away completely.

IMHO, people should judge a post by the number of replies going on, not how many upvotes/downvotes it has. Lots of replies indicates a conversation, regardless of whether or not people agree with the OP.

Just because the poster has an unpopular opinion doesn't mean that it shouldn't be heard, unless said opinion is just the OP being overtly racist/sexist/retarded or something like that. If the OP makes a good but unpopular point, they should be heard, and having lots of downvotes just means that people are less likely to read something that could potentially be interesting.

Besides, there's nothing stopping people from just popping in to downvote and not bothering to read the post.

And for troll posts, that's why there should be a "Report Post/User" button.

Daen10/24/2013, 1:19:53 AM3 votes

Excellent, so happy to see this!

I love the upvote/downvote system but it doesn't really make sense in the thread listings. Requiring players to actually enter the thread before voting is something I personally am all for!

ModCaptainMårvelous10/24/2013, 7:05:51 AM3 votes

I do like this change, as it makes it so that you have to read/actually look at a post before weighing in if it's worthy of downvoting.

Not so good at coming up with ideas for this so I'll have to weigh in at another time when I can think of actual feedback.

Eyrgos10/24/2013, 9:33:36 AM1 votes

Yay just what I had requested :) now I'd just additionally like if we could vote in the Updates Panel.

Aregionius10/24/2013, 2:30:37 PM1 votes

Going back to usability for this feature, you either need to be able to click on sad amumu to go to the post or it should just appear as a temporary tooltip only on mouseover instead of click.

Right now, the sad amumu message "Please visit the discussion to vote" actually pops up and blocks the thread link, so you can't even get to the thread unless it has a long title.