New changes to voting

Posted under General

The way voting is handled has been changed. Now, instead of keeping a running total of all the votes, your individual vote will be saved in the database. This means you can change your vote, and you can query for posts you've voted on. The syntax for this is vote:1:username for posts you've voted up, and vote:-1:username for posts you've voted down (I see I have to update the cheat sheet for this).

Anonymous users can still vote. A separate running score is kept to count these.

Most of these changes were written by petopeto so he's probably in a better position to answer detailed questions.

What I'm looking for right now:

  • Bug reports. I've done minimal testing but there might still be bugs lurking around somewhere.
  • Feedback on the user interface. Does it make sense? Are there any ways you would improve it?
  • Other suggestions, even blue sky topics like recommendation systems.

Updated by RumittanceWuzHere111

This is basically aesthetic, but... the red and green stars don't lighten when moused over like the blue one does. Also nice would be some tooltips (maybe <abbr> tags) to elaborate on what exactly the stars do. :)

This is definitely a nice system, I think. Sometimes I like a pic but not enough to favorite it, so I just upvote it. I think this will encourage people to be more active in voting, as well. Though I must admit, it seems like quite an increase in database usage, doesn't it?

Odd behavior: before voting for a post, I see its score (say, 14). When I vote up for it, using the green star, the vote score halves (now 7).

It still, however, responds correctly to the stars (green results in the 7, blue 6, red 5).

jxh2154 said:
On the other hand, you can see how people voted now. Liked that better anonymous.

Agreed. I prefer the old system's simplicity too.

Not_One_Of_Us said:
Odd behavior: before voting for a post, I see its score (say, 14). When I vote up for it, using the green star, the vote score halves (now 7).

It still, however, responds correctly to the stars (green results in the 7, blue 6, red 5).

I just had something like that happen too. I voted up a post and its score went down by one. I guess it's possible that two people downvoted it between me loading the post and voting on it, but I'm wondering if it's a bug.

Edit: GOTTA be a bug. I just voted up on a post and its score went from nine to THREE.

nanami said:
I don't see any stars to use so I can vote. How can I see them?

Maybe an encoding or fonts problem, as the stars are not images but just textual characters.

unicogirl said:
^_^;; is there a purpose for voting?
or is this just an on site activity?

like a "we agree" type of thing

The purpose is ostensibly to mark posts as being "good", so that if you search with the condition "order:score", the cream of the crop will come up first. That's all.

There was a glitch where it wasn't counting favorites toward the score, which should be fixed.

I'd like to try to implement a better recommendation system using the new data. I havn't figured out a good system that scales to the amount of data this will have yet, though.

Voting "2 stars" (gray) does not change the post's score. This exists so you can "undo" a +1 vote, and not be forced to choose between +1 and -1. It's also useful for statistics, if we implement a recommendation system using it.

nanami said:
I don't see any stars to use so I can vote. How can I see them?

What browser and OS are you using? It works for me in FF2 and Opera 9.

Magus said:
Okay, obviously this system doesn't work at all.

(troll troll troll)

0xCCBA696 said:
This is basically aesthetic, but... the red and green stars don't lighten when moused over like the blue one does.

That's actually supposed to be grey, not blue, and none of them should highlight on mouseover. I'll check it out.

petopeto said:
What browser and OS are you using? It works for me in FF2 and Opera 9.

IE7 on XP. Where can we see the stars? On mine, even in the profile page, there are no stars; only a row of three numbers.

(And I'm not likely to change my browser, so don't urge me to do so.)

Updated by MaskedAvenger

petopeto said: Voting "2 stars" (gray) does not change the post's score. This exists so you can "undo" a +1 vote, and not be forced to choose between +1 and -1. It's also useful for statistics, if we implement a recommendation system using it.

Any option to opt out, or make your scores anonymous? I'm not really interested in any recommendation system, so I don't mind if opting out removes your own access from it or whatever.

At least you can only do it one more time now. In the past, if your browser session expired, you could vote again, and again, and again, etc. The old vote totals had no user associated with them, so it's not surprising that your vote is not counted among them, and thus can be made again.

Updated by 0xCCBA696

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