Following comments (and ratings!) on the new rating system, we have decided to withdraw the option of negatively rating posts. We don't mind if you negatively rate C4P's posts, but we don't want to discourage others posting at all.
Rather, we want this feature to help those who don't have as much time to read all the posts to quickly find posts others have found helpful. Obviously there are a lot of posts like that here already :) Therefore we are also changing the feature to better reflect this - instead of "rate" arrows there will be "helpful" thumbs-up.
Marking posts "helpful" is particularly important for those first-time users who have come to Car4play.com from search engines. Unfortunately this site will be unsustainable in the medium-long term if we cannot attract more traffic (and hence advertising revenue) from search engines.
This means that there will only be options to mark posts as helpful or offensive. It is only ever when posts are marked offensive that the community filter will trigger automatically. After a certain threshold, the post will be partially hidden, but still viewable. If the community continue to rate it as offensive it will be completely hidden.
We hope that the offensive marks will decrease work for the mods and help them to make better decisions. Although at the moment hardly any of the posts are in need of any moderation, both markings (helpful and offensive) are designed with new members and more posts in mind.
When you take the time to mark a post as helpful or offensive you really are helping the community. Now all registered members will have the option of marking posts, "regulars" will receive an additional mark in an effort to counter marking abuse. If you still can't stand the system, then please just ignore it - we hope it is not too intrusive.
Only "helpful" marks are available for this post, we're afraid, but comments are welcomed. However, this is a feature that will be staying, despite the fact that such changes always seem to be controversial at the time.
We are resetting the system so that all posts now start back at zero.
Last edited by: car4play on Thu 8 Apr 10 at 14:47
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That's good - however...
Should someone post, say in "Technical", a very good answer that perfectly fixes one person's car problem, it might only get one "helpful" indication; it might be lost behind another only slightly helpful post that helps several people. What about a scale of helpfulness modified by the number of people rating, or something like that?
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None of the punters want this, some are prepared to tolerate it.
I thought the folly of hacking-off the users had been demonstrated at the other place.
Can we at least get the new posting markers back to normal?
The forum now has a feature no one wants, and the operation of another feature has been impaired.
And you call that progress?
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>> We hope that the offensive marks will decrease work for the mods and help them
>> to make better decisions. Although at the moment hardly any of the posts are in
>> need of any moderation both markings (helpful and offensive) are designed with new members and
>> more posts in mind.
>>
High Court ruling serves as a warning against any moderation of user comments
OUT-LAW News, 08/04/2010
www.out-law.com/page-10902
Struan Robertson, a technology lawyer with Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, said that the ruling serves as a reminder of the risks in moderating user-generated content.
"Many sites apply some form of moderation to all user contributions for reasons of quality control, whether that's before or after publication. This ruling just shows how dangerous that is and how narrow the safe harbour may be," he said.
"Even an attempt to filter for profanities or comment spam, if done manually, involves a risk for the publisher. If you want to be sure that you're not liable for what your users say, the judge is basically saying you need to ignore user contributions completely until you get a complaint."
"That's not a new principle," said Robertson, "but it's a warning to site owners about how to interpret it. Some owners may think they have less responsibility for user comments than they really do, and they may wrongly assume that a post-moderation policy is completely safe."
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I suspect guys we may have to give a little on this, if you want long term viability of the site.
At least here we are being give the chance to moderate and tweak the features as they arrive.
I would say, that being allowed to tag offensive and helpful posts (but no negative markings) is probably a good place to draw a line under the horse trading. (If you want the site to flourish, dont forget we are squatters in effect)
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All posts "now start back at (Z)ero" after all...
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Never mind the philosophy. If we have to have this buffalo of a thing can we spell "useful" correctly in the floating tooltip please?
I'm seriously obsessive you know, to the detriment of my health. :)
Edit.
Marvellous. Now I've posted the tooltip text has changed, and now the word "helpful" is clipped...
Last edited by: Crankcase on Thu 8 Apr 10 at 16:46
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Positivity, Negativity - now Helpful or Offensive… - FotheringtonTomas
