Boards›Boards Feedback

[Idea] Bump

Hyrum Graff·6/17/2014, 12:12:37 AM·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:

  1. 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.

  1. 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

KSHarrison6/19/2014, 8:26:44 PM3 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.

MackleDoge6/17/2014, 12:35:25 AM1 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.

KSHarrison6/17/2014, 10:10:00 PM1 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?

FFF16/20/2014, 6:41:28 PM1 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.

RiotRiot Baconhawk6/23/2014, 12:44:08 AM1 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

Caoil6/23/2014, 4:34:09 PM1 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.