Recent Code Change - Negative Votes, Deals/Comments Editing Timeout, etc

scotty on 06/11/2010 - 01:01
Last edited 09/11/2010 - 00:46

Updated: OzBargain is now running with the updated code.

With the recent discussion on negative votes, I will be pushing out a change tomorrow (or later, depending on the feedback here). I know there are a lot of voices with various ideas (sometimes conflicting ideas). The changes pushed out will be testing the water to see how the community react, and we'll see where we go from there.

Do note that currently I am burning my mid night oil on this site, and all the moderators are volunteers — and some people here seem to have more free time than we do :) So apologise if we cannot respond quickly and update the changes quickly. Also the aims for the changes are:

  • Reduce the voting dispute (especially with negative votes on deals)
  • Reduce the work load on moderators (especially with sorting out reported negative votes)

So here are the changes

Negative Votes

  • For guests/visitors, they see NO negative votes. The negative vote button won't be there, and they will have no idea who voted and how many have voted.
  • For logged in users, they can only see whether they have voted negative vote themselves. They can't see who have voted or how many have voted negative. It's like Bury on Digg, but I am just trying to get the logic/workflow right with minimum changes to the user interface.
  • Requirement for negative votes is still the same — at least one comment. You can still revoke your vote.
  • Threshold for temporary ban and demote from listing are now lowered, as I suspect a lot more people will cast their invisible negative votes.
  • Revocation of the negative votes can also be automated now (experimental, as it depends on a few factors that might not work).

While it might look like nothing has changed, I think by actually hiding the negative votes would help people to focus on the deals themselves, rather than arguing why so and so voted negative. However the function of negative vote (or dislike, or bury) is still there to provide some kind of automation.

Deals/Comments Editing Timeout

Moderators found some people are still going back to their old posts and edit them, which might already become irrelevant. So we are now putting time out on deals and comments editing.

  • You can't edit a deal or a forum topic after 1 week. This is actually quite a long period of time to let the thread starter modifying the first post when the status of the deal updates.

  • You can't edit a comment after 1 hour. Post a new comment if you want to put some amendment.

Regards,
Scott

Site Discussion

Comments

  • Crownie on 06/11/2010 - 01:31

    Requirement for negative votes is still the same — at least one comment.

    So people will be commenting that they have negged the deal like they do now.

    It then makes the above 2 points mute:
    * For guests/visitors, they see NO negative votes. The negative vote button won’t be there, and they will have no idea who voted and how many have voted.
    * For logged in users, they can only see whether they have voted negative vote themselves. They can’t see who have voted or how many have voted negative.

    • scotty on 06/11/2010 - 22:58

      True. It does not work well for obviously bad offers.

      However for heavily discussed deals with many comments, a comment still does not reveal whether you have voted or not. After all you can't even tell whether there's any negative at all.

      I am just trying to work out a way to prevent irresponsible voting. Any constructive suggestion?

  • tomsco on 10/11/2010 - 18:34
    -2

    Any chance you can make a test deal for everyone to test this on?

    • scotty on 11/11/2010 - 16:18
      +1

      Feel free to neg one of my posts :) Yeah seriously. I won't have hard feeling on getting negative votes. I promise! :)

      • Mikinoz on 11/11/2010 - 16:21

        sorry couldnt stop myself lol
        http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/34118#comment-312286

        • scotty on 11/11/2010 - 16:37

          LOL. Come! I can take more!

          (Although that might put BigFishGames out of action for a while though).

        • tomsco on 11/11/2010 - 18:15

          So assuming Miki's vote still stands, that means we can't see neg votes at all. I assumed you meant it wouldn't show who neg voted, but still show there was a negative. Is the purpose of this simply to bury a deal if it's bad?

        • scotty on 11/11/2010 - 21:21

          Yes correct.

          The user-interface is still using the old +1/-1 votes, but the concept behind is just +1 and bury (with your negative votes).

          Sorry I did not have time to refresh the user-interface. Will try to work on it this weekend. I thought I'll just throw the half-finished code here to test the water.

        • tomsco on 11/11/2010 - 21:44
          +4

          OK, fair enough. I guess it can work to avoid people being harrased, but on the other side, a lot of the time harrasment only happens when people are clearly wrong in their reason for neg votes. Generally I do like scrolling to who neg voted, and if they had something constructive, I'd take it on board (or if it was something stupid, I'd ignore or troll them :p).

          But kudos for continually updating OzBargain, I appreciate that it can be hard work as a side project :)

  • bob_wangkar on 11/11/2010 - 21:41

    @Scott -

    i dont understand this point:
    •For logged in users, they can only see whether they have voted negative vote themselves. They can’t see who have voted or how many have voted negative. It’s like Bury on Digg, but I am just trying to get the logic/workflow right with minimum changes to the user interface.

    Care to explain in more simple terms…(though i found it simple enough)…but i got confused..

    • scotty on 11/11/2010 - 22:28

      Basically there will be indication on whether you have voted -1 (or have buried the offer), but you can't see whether other people have make negative votes.

      Before:

      • You can see how many -1 votes a deal has
      • You can see who voted them

      Now:

      • You can no longer see how many people buried a deal
      • You can no longer see whether anyone has chosen to bury this deal
      • You can see whether you have buried the deal. So for logged in users, the negative votes will always be 0 or 1. This will be fixed later with a user-interface updates.
      • bob_wangkar on 11/11/2010 - 22:44

        i see… thanks :D

      • Iggsy81 on 14/11/2010 - 15:10

        this is stupid

        why cant u see how many negs a deal has? leave it how it was.. it was fine before.. u are stuffing it up

        • scotty on 14/11/2010 - 21:29
          +1

          The only reason why I am changing it is because it is not fine before. As lazed has said, the visible negative votes put a lot of pressure and workload on moderators, and has been constant fight between members.

  • lazed on 14/11/2010 - 12:54
    +2

    ozpetes blood pressure will come down significantly as a result of this.

  • illumination on 14/11/2010 - 14:27

    Interesting.. will try this.

    I'm guessing the OP can still see who voted negative though, right?

  • Lenneth on 14/11/2010 - 17:06
    +9

    I dont really like this change. How will we know if something is a bad deal or not? Before this change the red negative vote would help us zoom into that persons post to see what was wrong with the deal, and if the deal had a lot of negatives in it, it would save us wasting our time from looking at that deal. Negatives were like flags to tell everyone xxxx was a bad deal. This takes it away.

    • Iggsy81 on 14/11/2010 - 20:19

      i agree.. this is the stupidest change ever. if u applied half the strenuous measures about giving positive votes as u did to negatives we'd only have really good deals left. As it is now, any garbage can get positives and no one is allowed to neg, or see the negs for that deal. Just go back to how it was for goodness' sake

    • scotty on 14/11/2010 - 21:26

      If a deal gets too many negative votes it will be delisted from the deals page.

      • Iggsy81 on 14/11/2010 - 21:56
        -4

        what is "too many" ?

        do u idiot mods actually talk to the community b4 making dumbot decisions like this? Because if u did u would know it is moronic.. can't u make a vote with the OzB community or something???? No one would support this idiotic change.. u seriously made a dumb decision here.

        • neil on 14/11/2010 - 22:06
          +1

          Iggys you prove the point exactly. People on here who are more interested in starting fights then finding bargains.

        • Iggsy81 on 14/11/2010 - 22:10
          +1

          Hi Neil.

          The old guidelines didnt allow trolling either.

          There was no need to change it and be so despotic as what we are seeing now.

          I want to find bargains but i am not allowed to say when something is not a bargain because u mods remove every negative vote.

          I don't understand the "purpose" of negative voting if u will remove it when it is based on the price being inordinately high.

          Can you please explain to me why you have negative votes, then? Because, like i said elsewhere, u may as well remove them, just have positive votes, since u are so opposed to any negative being posted even when a "bargain" is 3 times the going rate. If that is not grounds for a neg, god knows what is.

        • Iggsy81 on 14/11/2010 - 22:11

          andy.. i know the company, i know the competing prices, i know it is a rip-off, and i neg, is that wrong?

        • tomsco on 14/11/2010 - 22:22
          +2

          You think you'd have a bit more respect. If it wasn't for scotty and the mods, you wouldn't have this site to find bargains. The fact is they are contiunally trying to improve the site, and while hiding negs votes might not be the best step foward, it's usually done in response to trolls like you.

  • neil on 14/11/2010 - 22:27
    +7

    Iggys, this is directed at you. There is no problem with discussion but when you personally attack people on this forum and call us idiots then you have overstepped the bounds. You are a serial troller on here and we have told you on numerous occasions to cut it out. I suggest you seek out professional help and find another outlet for your anger.

    (Iggsy is in the penalty box)

    • tomsco on 15/11/2010 - 08:32

      Thank god. I was sick of his whinging.

  • infinite on 14/11/2010 - 22:34
    +1

    I still don't understand the changes? Why break something that wasn't broken in the first place?

    The fact that you now can't see how many neg's a deal has is ridiculous. As a potential buyer & bargain hunter, that was one of the single BEST functions of this site !!!

  • neil on 14/11/2010 - 22:43

    infinite, it was broken. It may seem in a users perspective that it wasn't and that's understandable but the fighting over negative votes was out of control and was detracting away from finding bargains. Wish I could give you a count of how many incidents there were but take our word, there was a lot.

    Is removing neg votes from a users view good or is there some other happy medium? Not sure but…

    I can give my honest analysis after the change in a mod POV.

    After a week of the negs not showing up, I can say we haven't had 1 incident of people fighting over a neg vote as opposed to the numerous ones we get on a weekly basis. A few deals this week that were negged because of SPAM or whatever were already removed by the time a mod got a chance to react. Again good for both mods and users, although it seems the code closes commenting and delists it from the new deals rather than unpublishing it which is what manual moderation does.

    I think the next phase of making the UI clearer will make the neg vote make more sense. A neg vote that only goes to a max of 1 doesn't really make sense visually. But a button that says Bury or Thumbs Down (or whatever you want to call it does).

    infinite, can you give an example of how a visible associated neg vote would help a potential buyer/bargain hunter?

    • tomsco on 15/11/2010 - 08:35
      +3

      Visible neg votes helped as you could instantly find comments to whether it's a bargain or not. Example somethings got 50 comments and 1 neg vote it's easier to scroll down to the negger's commen. To see any potential issue.

    • infinite on 15/11/2010 - 09:50
      +5

      Neil,

      The visible associated neg votes next to a deal quite clearly shows that the bargain hunting community does not believe the deal to be a reasonable bargain. In my time coming to this site, I've never once come across a heavily neg'd deal where i too did not feel this to be the case. As a result, it became very easy to skip past the crap deals (almost always from from retailers directly, retailers rep's/agents or or people pretending not to be them) to get to the real bargains.

      Now since this decision was implemented, I've found myself having to waste my time sifting through the rubbish purported to be bargains here, time after time, in order to get to the good stuff. If i wanted to find general bargains where no other input & shared opinions could help me find a better deal, I'd stop throwing out the junk mail, or just visit a lasoo.com (spelling of the website?) type website instead of coming here.

      I can only assume that by making this decision, one of two reasons were really behind it.
      1) The site is about to become an online junk mail site like any other & you dont want the companies advertising their stuff here to get butt-hurt about us not believing for a second that their deals are actual bargains.
      2) The site is already getting paid by some companies to be allowed to spruke their stuff here & they've become butt-hurt over obvious comments from the community that their crap is not even close to being a bargain.

      You also keep referring to fighting taking place over negative comments. I've consistently followed what's been said in the comments sections of these bargains & all i see taking place is healthy (all be it occasionally heated) debate over the actual value of posted deals. How on earth is this NOT the best possible scenario for visitors to this site? People aren't just crap-talking the vendors, the debate over deals is leading to people posting historical sales numbers, links to better bargains for the same product & warnings over the safety/value/experiences people have had with certain products. That's exactly the type of information people are looking for & the community supports each other with, via this website. The simple process of neg'ing a deal after leaving a comment explaining why, is how this is done. If you deprive us of this, why should we bother coming back?

      To sum things up, like many others here, unless the "Facebooking" of this website is undone in the very near future, i too will be leaving & not bothering to come back.

      • andy19363 on 15/11/2010 - 10:04

        Just takes a change of perception……
        If a deal has few or no positives, one can assume it's likely a bad deal.

        life's now about focusing on good deals, rather than focusing in on 'bad' deals.

        reports for spam, sockpuppeting, etc etc are all still available allowing moderator action to be taken

        praise the good….ignore the bad….

      • Mikinoz on 15/11/2010 - 10:10

        Very perceptive infinite, have to agree mostly its phasing it self out, there is way to much crap and its never organised well.

        For me other sites are picking up where this left off, i dont visit a website to get spammed, least i dont want to

        On the other hand good on you Scotty et all for giving it a go, making changes to help etc obviously its not what i would have done, but you did something instead of just letting it go up its own bum!

      • scotty on 16/11/2010 - 00:10

        I can only assume that by making this decision, one of two reasons were really behind it.

        Sorry but both of your assumptions are wrong. See previous discussions (linked at the top of the thread) for more details.

        Also a lot of discussions on negative votes are not done in public — over Reports and Talk with a Mod forums, etc.

        Anyway. Thanks for the feedback. There is no absolutely perfect system and I understand fully that any change will displease somebody. I apologise if the final design is not be something you want.

        I've told the moderators before the code change that I intend to run it for 2-4 weeks to see how the community reacts. We certainly gets a lot less issues with negative votes :) There will be continuous tuning base on the comments here. Rolling out new code will take time though, as I have been busy at work and will take time off before Christmas.

  • neil on 15/11/2010 - 10:25
    +1

    I see your point about negative votes highlighting deals you don't want to look at. It's a fair point and seemingly one shared by some others in this thread.

    But…making the negative vote change decision is not about either reason infinite. You state you put a negative and explain your reason. That's great and that's how it should work. Unfortunately, there are loads of others who vote neg and put no reason or a non valid reason. Now for this it involved the mod responding to the report of the OP or whoever reported it (in most times NOT a REP), figuring out if its a legitimate negative vote, and if not editing the comment then retracting the vote. We get yelled at for enforcing the rules and its a time consuming process. Then there are the grey area neg votes where it could go 50/50. No one is ever happy, people start talk with a mod threads to go over each negative vote in detail. It's draining and in the scheme of finding a bargain it's irrelevant.

    Not sure what's planned ahead but perhaps:

    Having an option to show all negative votes (May cause inconsitancy)

    Showing the negative vote once a voting threshold has been reached for the comment (may be a bit better) So if 2 positive votes happen to the comment, the neg shows.

    Opposite effect of above removes the negative vote.

    Changing the neg and pos to something psychologically less harsh. People don't respond well to red negs or x's, maybe changing it to thumbs down.

    Keep in mind that every other bargain site on the web (slickdeals, buckscoop, hotukdeals etc.) all use a total vote.

  • anthony on 15/11/2010 - 23:54
    +2

    My thoughts

    So negative votes are now not shown and then the poster who voted negative does not have a negative next to their name?

    What is the point in that?

    If you cant see people have voted negative how are you going to know there is something bad about the deal?
    The deal may still be hidden but only after enough people have clicked negative, if enough people dont click negative it could be a long time before it is removed by moderators.

    If you can not easily see who has voted negative and then easily read why they have voted negative you are not going to be able to read their warning and may proceed with buying something or giving your details to a spam site.
    So there is now no real point in making a negative comment and clicking the negative button because you are not helping anybody as they cannot see your warning unless they look for it.

    Showing the negative vote once a voting threshold has been reached for the comment (may be a bit better) So if 2 positive votes happen to the comment, the neg shows.

    If negative votes are supposed to be an instant warning to users hiding them until enough people think a bad deal is good is not going to help people who see the deal first.

    You can’t edit a comment after 1 hour. Post a new comment if you want to put some amendment.

    I think this could be longer. (Why not make it a week like deals)

    You might see the deal and think it is good so make a comment but later on you look to compare the price and find it cheaper elsewhere.
    Your comment saying it is a good deal will be there to mislead others.

    You might then report it so the mods can delete it which means work for mods (something which you are trying to minimise) or the user could keep their editing rights and correct it them self.

    Reduce the work load on moderators

    More moderators?

    • scotty on 16/11/2010 - 00:26

      What is the point in that?

      Negative votes are still effective in a deal's visibility.

      If you can not easily see who has voted negative…

      For questionable sites, you'll find most comments are negative or trying to suss out. A spam site would be reported and moderators will deal with.

      Now, a negative vote really stands out on deals that have generally positive votes. In those cases a visible negative comment would be voted out pretty quickly as well, which the negate any "instant warning" effects.

      I think this (limiting comment editing to 1 hour) could be longer.

      On most other forum systems, comments/posts stop being editable after something like 5 minutes! :) We let the deal editing to have longer limit as (1) deals/forum topics are actually versioned so we can see what gets edited (2) O.P. usually wants to update the offer to reflect the status (adding "Soldout" in the title for example) that will benefit others. It's a lot harder and less useful to track comment changes.

      As of your "price matching" case, what's wrong with just adding another comment?

      More moderators?

      Moderators don't scale that well.

      • billymm on 17/11/2010 - 22:39
        +1

        Firstly let me say Ive think you & the other mods have done a great job on the site & also must spend a lot of time maintaining it… 2 thumbs up for that

        |Negative votes are still effective in a deal’s visibility.
        arent the negative votes indended for whether something is a deal/bargain or not, not to decide whether something should be displayed

        If the negatives are going to be hidden then so should the positives otherwise the purpose of voting is lopsided - if all viewers of a deal are going to see are postitive votes. The negs may still count to whether something is eventually hidden/removed but until the neg votes hit that "magic number" the deal will "look" good to bargain hunters until they do their own research. Isnt this site here to help people find/post bargains?

        I think that just the total of negatives/positives should be shown at the top & only members can vote (so mods can see if votes are misused) - not who posted what vote

      • anthony on 18/11/2010 - 20:05

        Now, a negative vote really stands out on deals that have generally positive votes

        Which would be a good thing if the deal posted is not actually a good deal.
        People could very easily see why someone voted negative making it easy to identify why the deal might not be good.

        Yes this assumes everyone uses the negative button correctly.

        Showing the negative vote once a voting threshold has been reached for the comment (may be a bit better) So if 2 positive votes happen to the comment, the neg shows.

        If by comment you mean the comment explaining why they voted negative that could work.

        I originally thought you meant if a deal has X positives the negative votes would show but i think i was wrong in thinking this.

        As of your “price matching” case, what’s wrong with just adding another comment?

        If the comment saying the deal was good it would be at the top of the thread and then the new comment saying the deal was bad would be at the bottom.
        More people will see the top comment saying the deal was good rather than the corrected comment saying the deal actually was not good.

  • stumo on 16/11/2010 - 19:13
    +6

    I'd prefer if the total number of negs on a deal were still visible. It is really misleading and kind of crap to keep the total number of positives visible, but always zero negs.

    I understand about the anti-neg fighting/trolling situation requiring too much mod time, but maybe you need more mods? or at least add more weight to the existing self-modding system, eg. if a neg comment on a deal gets negged itself so many times compared to the pos votes the comment gets, then remove the neg.

    At least then there would be a good point to having negs on comments, cause right now that in itself is causing grief, and will probably be the next to go.

  • SydGuy on 18/11/2010 - 13:02
    +3

    Yeah I love this site but dont like this new change of not being able to see -ve votes. It makes deals look lop sided, you cant easily see the community's opinion on a deal as all you see is +ve votes, you cant easily see if someone has voted negative becuase they have found something cheaper, you cant easily the integrity of the reps by quickly looking though their past deals, and it does not stop fight - eg http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/34443 I would like to see the bringing back of visible negative votes. This site has always been vote negative if you dont like it (and have a valid reason), positive if you like it, and dont vote for neutral. Now all i see is people liking it and being neutral - I dont know how many people really think its a bad deal, and their reasons why - we (like the mods) dont have time to read though every comment, and need to get a snap shot of the deals.

  • anthony on 18/11/2010 - 20:11
    +2

    Updated: OzBargain is now running with the updated code.

    Can I make a suggestion for the next code release?

    Well I will anyway :-)

    I think more people incorrectly submit deals under apparel than incorrectly use negative votes but this is still "broken"

    Why not have the 'Category' selection empty/blank and make it a mandatory field, that way people are forced to select a category rather than use the default apparel category.

    • anthony on 03/12/2010 - 17:33

      Just submitted a deal and noticed this has changed.

      Well done scotty :-)

  • SomeGuyOnOzB on 21/11/2010 - 00:35
    +1

    I'm still getting across the change myself.

    Personally, I liked being able to look up the negs to see if there was a valid reason to avoid a deal.

    Admittedly, I tended to find lots of negs for invalid reasons. (Though I would find some very useful and just plain valid negs too)

    There was a lot of time lost to revoking a number of those negs, explaining why the vote was revoked. Some discussions were logical; some found people who ended up being completely irrational and were not interested in listening. :S

    I agree that there is much benefit in revoking the negatives vote concept; but I would like to see something so people could flag issues.

    I do agree that OzBargain is getting flooded with too much junk these days and at the least, improved filtration is needed as soon as possible.

    However, I also realize that's a potentially major and very time consuming change … and I think Scotty's still tied up with work and family commitments, let alone sleep and working on OzBargain.

  • scotty on 23/11/2010 - 01:31
    +3

    The same topic is also discussed in this thread here.

    Due to community feedback, I am now bringing back the visible negative votes, i.e. pretty much reverting the change, if that is what you guys want. Hopefully we don't get a different group of people coming in complaining about the negative votes :)

    • billymm on 03/12/2010 - 01:39

      <code>&gt; I am now bringing back the visible negative votes</code>

      thankyou

  • bobsi18 on 13/12/2010 - 08:47

    Whilst I understand why the negative votes were removed, I just wanted to chime in and suggest something else? I didn't see this mentioned above…

    I currently look at deals based on:
    - how many positive votes; and
    - how many negative votes (and why they were voted negative)

    If you wanted to hide who voted negative, how many negative votes (for mod reasons etc), could you change it so that each deal is given a "score", something like [positive vote] - [negative vote] (with a cap on it, so that it can't go below zero)? Or maybe something scaled by percentage or similar?

    A deal that has 5 positive votes and 2 negative votes will only be a 3, versus a deal that has 50 positive votes and 2 negative votes will be a 48 - obviously in this case the negs don't impact it as much.

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