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I was randomly browsing the forums and stumbled upon a very good post on ssh and certificates. Which made me thing that there should be a way to make these posts stand out.
Besides the recognition to the poster, it could also then be used in the search to make highly rated posts appear at top of the list.
It could also be used to identify posts that could be reused in the wiki no ?
I realise it's not necessarily trivial but I am sure that it would make data mining linuxquestions.org a lot easier....
it's not the same thing as there is nothing that helps you find the really good and helpful posts in the thread. In thread I was reading, nothing was really interesting (like 5 iterations of various questions and inconclusive answers) until that guy comes up with a clear and detailled explanation of what makes ssh safe and what kind of configuration compromises it... Only that explanation was of interest in the thread.
Digg does that now, unfortunately, it's not a technical help site.
Well, the definition of which posts within a particular thread are the "really good and helpful" ones is a totally subjective call, and what might seem completely useless to person A might be the perfect solution for person B, or vice versa. Along these lines the idea behind the Rate Thread tool is simply that if a given thread has been found especially helpful by a lot of people (even if some of the posts within the thread don't necessarily add a lot of value) then a mechanism exists to allow people to vote for it. Sadly though, pretty much nobody ever uses it, and I expect the same would be true for voting at a post level.
Your argument doesn't hold water. How would rating a thread be more objective than rating individual posts ? If only one person finds a post useful, it will not compare to the post than 10 persons found useful.
Rating threads doesn't make much sense since you have to read the whole damn thing to find the wisdom in it. Also, when you read the thread, you are past the button that allows you to rate it(I had never noticed it).
The bottom line is that individual post voting is in place in lots of sites (Amazon was amongst first for reviews) like osnews, digg and others, and it's a raging success. I would make even more sense for a tech website.
How would rating a thread be more objective than rating individual posts ?
Yeah, but that's not really what I was saying; I was only trying to point out that for members who wanted to flag a thread as being helpful or useful, the Rate Thread tool already exists.
Personally, I remain convinced that the best and most effective way to indicate that a post was helpful is just to post a simple "Thanks" followup, indicating that the advice/recommendation solved the problem. Not only is it common courtesy but it's a big help to any future readers who may be encountering the same issue, who likely would benefit from that same information
I agree that a thank you is a minimum but it hardly helps you find the right post(s) in the thread. And just imagine 15 people saying thank you to one perticular post.... hardly an efficient use of space.
Why not change the thread voting (hardly ever used anyway) to "post voting" and then put a button on the forum showing the most voted posts ? That combined with a search on a perticular subject would be I think pretty helpful.
Because if people won't vote for a thread, why would they vote for individual posts? This all comes back to a point made when anysuggestions which involve member inputs come up - if a member won't even say "thank you" for some help, why would they bother voting? And if not enough people vote, the figures are meaningless.
Also, and this is from personal experience, sometimes an answer is useful even when it's out of context. I have lost count of the number of times I have searched a problem and found a post helpful in a way which doesn't really relate to the thread I found it in. If I vote the post up, it is only meaningful to me, not to anyone else.
Not saying it's a bad idea, just that you'd probably need to add comments to make it useful and really we could all just say "hey, thanks <poster>, post number <x> was useful to me <because>".
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