Yeah, if the Thanks system was undesirable, what is the use of indicating the number of posts? On simpler forums it is often used to indicate how experienced the member is, or how much time he spent behind his keyboard on that forum.

jlinkels

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LQ is a community, but I don't think that's an apt comparison. In your small and close knit circle of friends and neighbors, you know who's an expert in what and can therefore easily ask the correct person a topical question. In a technical forum with literally hundreds of thousands of people (most of whom have little or no previous interaction with each other) I think it would be beneficial to have some kind of indication of the quality of an individual members previous posts.

--jeremy

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As do we, which is why we're trying to glean exactly what members got from the system so we can try to incorporate it into something better.

The post to thanks ratio doesn't seem like an ideal indicator to me. First is the fact that it came to the site 8 years into LQ's existence and will therefore be highly skewed. I can give this one a pass, since any new system we add will have the same deficiency. More importantly though is that the "thanks" had no qualitative measure, no guidelines and no consistency. One member may thank because the post helped him solve an issue, another member may thank because he agreed with the viewpoint of the poster, yet another may thank because he liked the tone of a post. The resulting number therefore didn't have a lot of meaning. I'm not saying this made the system useless as it's clear that some members derived quite a lot of value out of it. I think we can do better though and this thread will serve as the beginning of an effort to do so.

--jeremy

If the visibility of the "this post was useful" feature was improved, would this alter your thinking on the topic?

I think we can make the new system a significantly better figure of merit, for the reasons I outline in my previous post. We know posts alone is a very bad measure.

--jeremy

My observation of the overall use of the system is similar to this.

"reputation for what?" is a question I've been thinking a lot about. The best delineation I have been able to come up with so far is a per forum type system. While this still leaves a considerable amount of leeway, it seems to strike a balance between being usable and useful vs. having a nearly endless taxonomy of potential areas of expertise. I'm very open to feedback on this though.

--jeremy

Reading what you said here - I thought "per-forum". It makes sense to me. Someone who is good at networking (as I seem to be) maybe useless on security (as I seem to be!).

I'd like them to be more visable too -- I'd like a kind of up and down arrows as seen on the linuxexchange type thing, maybe with a ranking number too.... get so many UP arrows and your rank goes up for that forum. Of course its welcome and open to abuse but if people are sad enough to abuse that, then they'd be sad enough to create two accounts and click "yes" lots of times to increase the helpful count post.

Adding in some kind of detailed stats so you can see how well you rank in different forums, with your most liked/disliked posts.... how far do you want to take it?

For clicking "Yes" multiple number of times with multiple accounts they need to have at least "15 reputation points" per account, as it goes on LE. It will not be that easy

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And one more thing:

The member titles are based on post counts ! Will that be altered too according to the new reputation system ?

We have no plans to change the member title system, and member titles should in no way be seen as indicative of member expertise (and all newer ones are explicitly worded with this in mind). It's possible we could use a reputation system for slightly accelerated usergroup advancement (as opposed to basing it solely on post count, which is the case now), but a decision like that is quite a ways in the future.

--jeremy

I think that's a fair comment,but why have them at all then?.
More 'feel-good' factor perhaps....

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While we're chewing the feedback cud ... how useful is the No answer to "Did you find this post helpful?" Pedantically, the vast majority of posts on LQ are not helpful to me -- but I have refrained from clicking all their No buttons. Under what circumstances are users actually motivated to use the No button? I suspect it is mostly done in pique. That being the case, is it useful information?

What however, if you saw a post with some seriously incorrect/insecure/bad idea infomation? This is when I'd personally click the "no" button, to hopefully warn others its concidered "bad". I'd likely reply too however

I have never used the Non-Thankful button.

If I think advice offered is inappropriate or potentially dangerous I just add a (polite) post to that thread saying why the Original Poster (OP) might like to reconsider the advice offered.

This "rating" system seems madness to me because it is very difficult to rate this sort of thing (no doubt why jeremy has started this thread).

That said, in an earlier post to this thread, I said I would not miss the "Thanked posts" count at all.

But now it has gone, I find myself looking for it.

WHY?

- Because if I see an OP with 1200+ posts and < 3 "Thanked", I'll probably just quietly move on. Why should I "give" to them when they just "take", and never give anything back?

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IMHO the "no" option should be reserved for when you find a post "unhelpful", not simply "not helpful". For some insight into how the system actually is being used: we've had just shy of 20,000 uses since the system was added. Of those, 84.5% have been yes votes.

--jeremy

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jeremy, I am not at all sure what you are looking for here.

Please define the difference between "unhelpful" and "not helpful" because I am lost now.

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