We just installed a new feature on Control.com that allows you to rate each post as to whether you think it is helpful or not. This appears when you visit any discussion thread, in the form of "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" icons you can click on to register your vote.

Note that you have to be logged in to vote, to cut down on cheating, and you can only vote once per post (although you can change your vote at any time).

This is a way to recognize frequent contributors, especially those whose input has been considered valuable by other forum members. On the thread display pages, a number of stars will appear by the username of each author (these are starting out all at one star, since this is a new feature and no votes have been cast yet), indicating the number of thumbs-up votes received. If you hover your mouse over the stars you will see the total number of thumbs-up votes received for that user.

So, have fun, and show your appreciation for the people who make this forum useful through their contributions.

Ken Crater
Control.com

 

So how do you score the thumbs-down votes?
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Steve Myres
Automation Solutions
(480) 232-6862

 

>So how do you score the thumbs-down votes?

Yes, that was an interesting question for us. They're counted implicitly in the notation above each individual message which received votes, as in "1 out of 2 members thought this post was helpful...".

For determining helpfulness of a member, though, we elected to ignore the cumulative total of negative votes, because the intent was not to have a popularity contest. Rather, we wanted an indication of the number of instances in which users felt they were helped by a given member.

Having said that, it's a work in progress, and if it looks like it's not functioning as intended we may end up changing the metrics.

Ken Crater
Control.com

 

The up/down vote buttons could use to have more visual separation from each other and from the rest of the page. The way they look now, it's not obvious that they are buttons (as opposed to just page decorations), and it's not easy to see which one you are pressing. I can imagine people clicking on the wrong one by accident.

I also wonder whether having a negative vote is a good idea. A positive vote for being "helpful" can be a good idea, but how many people are simply going to vote down posts when you try to tell them that hooking up a hydroelectric turbine to their kitchen faucet isn't going to solve the world's energy problems? Or, they're going to decide you're not being "helpful" when you tell them you can't fix their Mark V system because they won't tell you what the alarms said?

There are forums where users vote down posts. but those are typically ones which don't do any moderation at all and rely on down votes to "bury" spam and abuse. Unless you have additional changes in mind which would affect this, perhaps all we need is just "up" votes.

It will be interesting to see if I get voted "down" on this one ...

 

I primarily use Firefox as my preferred browser, but for the purposes of testing in preparation for this question I've used others.

How do we know which posts users find helpful or not? I can only see the ones I have identified as useful or not helpful.

Is there some browser setting which needs to be enabled (or disabled) to allow everyone to see which posts were helpful (or not)?

Thanks!

 

I use Firefox 3.6.17 and I see a little line above the post header that says:

"1 out of 1 members thought this post was helpful..." or whatever number.

And I haven't made any particular settings to make it happen, though who knows what settings I might have had different from you initially.

I think it's just that most posts don't get any votes up or down (in that case there is no display at all). In fact I'd say the majority of threads that I read, there isn't a single vote on any of the posts in the entire thread.

 

Okay; I've found one post with that indication. I was expecting to see the icons "animated" with green or yellow to indicate quickly if a post was helpful or not.

I would agree the feature isn't being widely used. It's unfortunate because it is another tool which readers of archived threads could use to see if information was helpful to others or not.