Question Best Posts in Thread: Disagree Post Rating?

Thank you @Rye83 and @TheDude for the informative posts. I appreciate the effort you put into substantiating your thoughts. I wish everyone put forth this much effort.

@Rye83, after reading the referenced links, I agree with the removal of the down votes dislike and disagree options. The main issue being that they did not require an explanation. The forum is about discussion and discussion should be encouraged.

I agree with the SO concept. @Notmyrealname was trying to do this for healthcare in Dumaguete. I worry that that this site might lose it’s free flowing entertainment if it were more wiki regimented. If the users stopped posting then there would be nothing.

I agree that this forum does not have enough activity to justify the development of a voting system.

Here are my thoughts if the forum had more activity:

To improve quality and enable community moderation a feature would be added that enabled a sub discussion regarding the quality of the post. This feature would be an expandable smaller sub-thread/reply chain under a post. A user who wished to leave a sub comment would be guided through a dialog that described the intent of the process. After leaving a sub comment the user could trigger a voting process that, depending on the outcome of the vote, would require the post to be modified or removed. Any post that was removed would be rolled up to one line and grayed. Because the post may have content that should be removed, only adults or specific users would be able to click on and see the content.

Users who were required to modify or whose posts were removed (diminished) would lose ranking and be reviewed for possible removal from the site.

 

Every forum has a different culture. You can't make generalizations.

Reddit has down-votes and that does little to encourage good behavior. To enforce good behavior requires a lot of moderation work. The well forums that I know of with good behavior and up / down voting are heavily moderated. The voting may encourage better behavior for some, but it causes others to stir up problems from getting down-voted. The voting is more for surfacing quality than for behavior. This forum doesn't have enough activity to require a voting system.

It's Xenforo, which has a commercial license. The code-base is hell. You can create plug-ins for it though.

If I were to do a site like this myself and had a huge amount of time, I would create a wiki and generate a summary from popular threads. Then the wiki could accept edits, etc. This is sort of the model that StackOverflow works on. Everyone sees the forum (answers) component but the site is meant to be a wiki. The wiki features are just not as obvious.