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Hello, CavesOfNarshe Admin Team:

While I'm not necessarily saying to steal this idea, I nevertheless see the value in it: is
it possible to modify your posting software so that users could rate threads based on
interest? Sometimes a thread is interesting and 'shareable', but short of PMing everyone
or posting, there aren't a whole lot of ways to show active interest in the forum postings.
Views is somewhat along these lines, but because it's cumulative it doesn't really sort the
postings by user interest. I know this is very Web2.0 bandwagon, but sometimes I log
into the usually fascinating CavesOfNarshe forums and have to digg (hint-hint) through
to find content.

I couldn't guarantee that this will appeal to the CoN userbase, but perhaps the margin
poll could be used to determine whether users would like such a feature?

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Putting the A's in W lm rt: A11smart, Jobclass: Retailer.

This actually follows up to an idea I had a while back. I was planning on digging through Invasion's third-party plug-ins and if necessary, write the plug-in myself. vBB has the 'rate this thread' feature, but that didn't seem to be all that impressive. My thought was to create a thumbs up or down feature at the post level, to give an impression for the number of people that liked or disliked the post.

Technologically... it shouldn't be that expensive or cause a heavy load. It's not being indexed or anything. It might have the downside of causing groupthink, or those silly forums with reputation meters so that people are pretty much afraid of posting anything remotely controversial. Finally... it might not get much use.

It was originally aimed at the fanfic section only, allowing folks with little to say but "I like" to avoid spamming; just click a thumbs-up button. This avoids the whole groupthink issue that might take hold if implemented on a wider scale.

There has to be a plug-in already written... *goes digging*

Edit

I seem to have IPB confused with phpBB. I am certainly not up to date on whether there's even a plug-in community for IPB... and almost no wish to ever touch php again without a decent framework.

This post has been edited by Elessar on 19th October 2006 04:57

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Visions of Peace - Four Generals, One Empire, and the Returners caught in the middle.

I actually think that might have been a feature of these forums that we never used. Back when we installed these forums, there really were no such things as blogs, and I had never seen a forum where the ratings were turned on and people actually *used* them. I'm not so sure that people would use them now, either - a forum has a tendency to have a very different dynamic than the structure of a blog.

In any event, I'm not really planning on hacking these forums further. I can't really do any CoN work at all until the basketball season starts, because I'm now moving from my normal 50 hour weeks (between work and freelance) to 70 or so in a mad rush to get everything done in the next week and a half. Once I am back to CoN, I will be working on developing the content of the site, and not the forums just yet - anyone who's been here long enough knows that the forums have always been secondary to my goals.

Anyway, I'm not adverse to the idea in principle. Elessar speaks truth in terms of aiming it towards creative forums, which is why Fanart on the main site (yes, Virginia, there is a main site) has had a rating feature since 2001. We hope to eventually expand that to fiction as well. And, in a perfect world, site submissions would no longer be glued to the forums, so rating them here might not be all that useful in a year or two; it's hard to say for now.

And yes, there is or was a large hack community for IPB. Not so much for this version any more - we've never upgraded because we stopped liking their business model. Of course, it's only PHP. Tiddles and I could hack any number of things in ourselves if we felt like re-learning the framework.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

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