[Idea] Bump

Hyrum Graff·Jun 17, 2014·10 votes·1,328 views

###You've been there.

It's been 24 hours, and you haven't checked the forums since. Now, though, you're home for the day and you have time. In your excitement to log in, you mess up the captcha twice.
Finally, you're in.
[Forums] -> [Community Beta]: Dreams of double digit notifications fill your head.
You look in the upper right corner, and...

Oh. Apparently that brilliant masterpiece of a post, wasn't quite as brilliant as you thought it was. Or... was it just not seen by the right people to make it popular? If only there were a way to get a little more visibility...

######Bump.

Okay, story time is over. The fact of the matter is that sometimes posts that you put a lot of effort in, just don't get the response you'd wish for. One problem with the CB currently is that, if your post doesn't take off right away, there's no way to get more visibility for it; you have to make a whole new post! And - let's be honest here - there are worthy posts that fall into this category. They happened to be at the wrong time of night, and didn't garner enough discussion before they fell off the 'hot' listing, and now they're stuck in the void.

Were this GD, you could simply bump the post to put it on the home page. But that opens up a whole 'nother can of worms: the current GD environment, where only people who constantly bump their threads get front-page time. So there obviously needs to be some kind of restriction in place to prevent this.

###My suggestion:

Each account can bump X of its own posts per Y time period. No post can be bumped more than once per Z time period. X and Y change based on the level of the account; a level 30 can bump much more than a level 5.

This allows you to generate some ongoing publicity for a post with meaningful discussion over time (that perhaps doesn't have enough volume to naturally stay on the front page).

At the same time, it's fairly easy to safeguard the system against abuse: in order to bump the post at an abusable level, you need a high level account; since bumping is a dedicated action (probably a button at the bottom, "bump" next to "edit"), it's easy to track, so if an account is spam bumping, it's easy enough to ban it -- and now the troll has to play a LOT of games before they have the ability to spam again. Additionally, since the limit for bumps is account-wide, even a spammer can only do so much. There could also be additional restrictions, such as: if you continually bump a heavily downvoted post, your bumps won't do as much (or, bumps could generally work like that).

Even if you don't use any of those specific implementations, I'd encourage you to consider a dedicated bump feature - it's a much more controllable system than "comment to bump" and a much more user-friendly one than "no bumperino."

##Updated idea: What if a bump only gave you higher visibility for a set period of time? Bump a post, and it'll be on the front page for an hour, before returning to where it was; maximum of a single bump per day.

You could also base the amount of time on the home page on the post's calculated popularity level - more upvotes and conversation -> more time on the front page. A downvoted troll thread? You've got a minute for redemption.

I'm not sure how well this idea would scale, though.

##Update #2:

What if there were a separate listing of bumped threads (credit to FFF1 for this idea)? Two implementations I've thought of are:

There's a small "bumps section" along the right side of the front page, like this:

https://i.imgur.com/Wrwg3A8.png

Obviously there would be more threads in the section, and not the same ones as the main listing, like there is now - it was just a quick mockup.

There's a separate section, listed right above/below the red tracker, called "bumps" that behaves the same way as the red tracker, but lists all threads that have been bumped recently, in order of bumpage.

Tags:
@Riot Tamat, Affordance, Pendragon, Baconhawk, BuboBubo (haven't seen you for a while!), Whist.

20 Comments

KSHarrisonJun 19, 20143 votes

Man sucks this didn't get too much visibility. Facilitating discussion is a good thing. Blocking it doesn't make trolls less prevalent; it just makes some of our lives more difficult.

Hyrum GraffJun 19, 20142 votes

It's funny because posts like this getting visibility is the topic of the post :P

KSHarrisonJun 19, 20141 votes

yeah the irony :D

MackleDogeJun 17, 20141 votes

Honestly, bumping is awful. It gives a false sense that the thread is having a communication and it doesn't add any content or any reason to participate. If you're thread doesn't catch on, tough, that's life. All this is going to do is have a bunch of people with their QQ threads bumping themselves to complain.

Hyrum GraffJun 17, 20141 votes

Here's the specific post that inspired this thread.

It was created 9 days ago
3 Days ago, KSHarrison joined the conversation
He contributed what I consider valuable content, that other people might have wanted to read and respond to.
Nobody saw it, because the thread, though popular, was already off the front pages.

Consider forums where we have a 'bump' feature. KSHarrison joins the discussion, I bump it, now his content gets more visibility.

MackleDogeJun 17, 20141 votes

I feel like it would be better solved by having an update feature attached to the current updates that showed thread updates as opposed to just a direct reply. That way you can stay informed without implementing senseless bumping.

Hyrum GraffJun 17, 20141 votes

That would certainly work for threads you had already commented on (and it's a feature - following threads - that I hope they will implement some time), but it doesn't solve the issue of nobody new seeing active discussion.

Which, when you think about it, is kind of the point of having forums.

MackleDogeJun 17, 20141 votes

Except that assumes that A) no one saw the post, as opposed to people seeing it and not caring and B) that the post itself is worthy of being seen (which given this community is a fairly large assumption).

There are always going to be threads that people don't see, especially as the community gets larger, that is just a part of having forums. If it's really worth discussing, the thread will probably be made again by someone else, there are plenty of discussions started over balance changes on PBE (as there should be). Just because one of those isn't seen doesn't mean the rest weren't as well and the conversation didn't occur on another thread.

KSHarrisonJun 17, 20141 votes

Hey sorry this took me so long to get around to! I have had my hands full with another thread. So, I think this is a great topic to address. I'm not the most knowledgeable about forum formats, but I'll do my best.

One of my concerns with a method like this is volume. I have seen on GD extremely rare cases of people bumping just to bump and be annoying. Typically there's a topic that has devolved into crap but there are enough people still committed to the discussion that it stays on top. On CB, this is currently impossible; in a forum with thousands of users, gathering 5 people interested in discussing how Dota 2 is superior to LoL is not unreasonable. This could result in unwanted topics still being bumped despite the current system.

I'm still not convinced bumping is inherently bad. As volume increases, bumping acts as a way for multiple threads to share the spotlight of the first page. In almost all cases, once the discussion has run its course the topic dies out.

Except for necros, in my experience it's pretty uncommon to see people continually bump old threads over a long period of time. Once the discussion ends, the topic usually dies in short order.

The issue with bumping and volume is whether we want 100 different threads passing back and forth over the course of an hour through a front page that only displays 20 threads at a time. The traffic makes a mess of organization, and it apparently is an affront to many users when they stumble into a troll thread they find uninteresting.

Anyways now that we're on the same page, what are your thoughts on the critique of volume? Would this system show a meaningful difference in blocking the threads we don't want to see as opposed to enabling liberal bumping?

Hyrum GraffJun 18, 20142 votes

###Scenario 1:

There is ongoing, constructive discussion in a thread: small to medium number of people

GD: Thread gets continually bumped, stays on front page. Working as intended.

CB (Current): Thread initially sits at the top - as time goes on, even though there's interesting discussion continuing to happen, because nobody new has entered the thread, it falls off the main page. Arguably working as intended because if nobody new is joining the thread, it doesn't need to be on the front page anymore for people to follow it. However, I'm inclined to think that if there's ongoing discussion, a thread deserves visibility.

CB (With Bumps): Thread comes to the top, and stays near the top (though not at the top - numbers can be tweaked as necessary so it won't crowd out recent, trending threads) for as long as people are bumping it. Working as intended, better than current, IMO

###Secenario 2:

There is a troll thread that has little to no constructive discussion.

GD: Thread gets continually bumped, stays on front page. Not working as intended.

CB (Current): Thread gets downvoted, nobody sees it. Working as intended.

CB (With Bumps): Thread gets downvoted, bumps have little effect, nobody sees it. Working as intended.

KSHarrisonJun 19, 20141 votes

Ok, that's reasonable. Last question: How would the two scenarios play out if you just allowed unlimited bumps like in GD?

Hyrum GraffJun 19, 20142 votes

I imagine that Scenario 2 would work as intended, functioning pretty much like "Scenario 2, CB w/ Bumps."

However, I think Scenario 1 would play out like this:

Thread gets spam bumped, stays on the front page. Any thread that isn't getting spam bumped, even if it has good discussion, never makes in onto the front page.

It's possible you could make bumps less important to compensate for this, but then bumps don't do anything meaningful, so you might as well not have them at all.

What if we did something like this:

###Different Bump Implementation:

####Bumps only last for around an hour.

So when you bump the thread, it'll be on the front page for an hour (obviously, this needs to be adjusted based on # of threads getting bumped), but then it'll go back to its old position. This guarantees visibility, but without crowding out threads that aren't bumped.

KSHarrisonJun 19, 20141 votes

Ok, this works too. I was just proposing a bit of a thought experiment. I like your original idea as well as this. Good discussion relies on visibility. I think your topic addresses an important consideration for the next iteration of forums (which I think is already in the works)

+1 from me!

FFF1Jun 20, 20141 votes

Have a separate list on the front page exclusively for recently bumped topics, and also have bumps appear on the normal front page listings, with the non-default option to hide bumps, optionally based on rating (upvote counts).

I think this would be a good alternate solution to the problems where making bumps temporary would be a solution.

Hyrum GraffJun 21, 20141 votes

Oooh, I really like the idea of a separate area or view for bumped threads only.

I think this idea really illustrates my point: when you have a system for bumping, that's only used for bumping, it opens up possibilities that aren't available when commenting and bumping, or voting and bumping, are tied together.

RiotRiot BaconhawkJun 23, 20141 votes

This is an interesting idea and I'd love to chat with Tamat and the crew about it this week. :) Thanks!!

sizzles, flies away

Hyrum GraffJun 23, 20141 votes

Thanks :D

Another thought on the matter: It'd be interesting to compare which threads receive bumps, comments, and upvotes (ie, which would be bumped by users, and which would be featured by the system), as one way of evaluating the system's effectiveness.

CaoilJun 23, 20141 votes

I had a further idea to this thread because I like the idea, but I think it's lacking just one thing. I think we should be able to hide posts that we are not interested in, so that if it keeps getting bumped to the front page we won't see it anymore. It could just be in the form of a checkbox next to the thread. It would give users more meaningful content that they want to see on the front page.

Hyrum GraffJun 23, 20141 votes

I agree with you, and I think that it's not particularly relevant to this conversation, simply because it's a feature they should have whether or not they add in bumps (though, as you suggest, bumps would probably increase the need for this feature, unless they make a separate bump section as per update #2).

I know that filtering like is on their radar. Specifically, I know that they're interested in a "Choose which sub-comms appear on the main page for you" feature - I hope they add in your idea, as well.