How to help HOP provide better search results

Dear all,

I have added a rating system (previously hidden)
So users who have over 50 posts themselves can rate a thread.

I ask that those people should visit threads that they think are informative or very informative and rate them highly. Best to highly rate the information page rather than a thread that has multiple links to other pages.

If you come across a thread that should be deleted please either click the notify moderator button for immediate removal or rate the thread as "bad" so it can be automatically removed by a program I will write later.

The rating selector can be found at the bottom of the page just below the "Extra information" area or just above the quick reply form.
Also in the "Extra information" box is printed the current rating of the page (the Average of everyones votes).

The following forums have been exclude from the rating system
"Social Chat" and "Introduction"
Deleting old "Social Chat" threads will also happen once they have not been replied to in a long time.

My next project is a change to the post new thread page.
Page one will ask for a title of their thread
Page two will search topics that have an informative or very informative rating which have a similar topic
then display those results
with suggestion for the user to first check those threads before continuing to make a new thread.
below that will be the usual post new thread forms etc

I will not implement for a while until there are enough ratings in the system.

Hope that all makes sense and thanks for all the help and suggestions in making HOP a better place.

Regards

Malcolm

Oh Malcolm! you clever clogs!

And Malcolm there has been a thread about doing searches already, maybe you should do a search

Thanks for your endearing patience on this topic

could i suggest to speed up searches having several rated lists for common terms such as

contact staff
3bt weave/3 beat weave/3 bt weave (and other such variations all falling under the same category)
lynx
mullen
hyperloop
wibble
steve/steves move
glow staff
coloured flames

etc etc

this would also make it simpler for searching to see if a new post has already been answered by searching for matching keywords in the post made with the lists of highly rated posts.

when new terms are formalised a mod could click an add term button so that a new list is generated

having key terms would make it possible to write a script to search and match existing threads for mergining/deleting purposes rather than having to do it manually.

what would be cool for increasing the articles section is a sticky thread at the top of the page for discussion clarification video links etc of a topic which then gets edited into an article and the sticky then deleted. im sure theres more than enough ppl who would be happy to do it, also this would mean that commonly asked questions could then be linked to the correct article by the title search for new posts, with the added bonus of newbies being able to find the information they want without have to sift through all the other random social comments

I've found a UBB template for the FAQ online.

Should have an example by the end of the day (it being 4:30am now, and time to sleep) I'll have a go at adding stuff on the rating system as far as I'm able.

can i also suggest moving the thread rating bit to above where the quick reply is so that everyone who doesnt read this post will see it as if i hadnt read this thread i wouldnt have noticed it

Benjamen,
Great ideas

Just thinking that people might not know what "OK" means.
Especiallly if english is not a first language (like me)
Better alternative to OK?

Excellent work Malcolm.

ratings systems rock and are a direct approach to that problematic info overload that you kinda get on the internet or during a medical procedure.

Wonderful

oooh!!! power!!!!



just kidding.........

thank-you malcolm - excellent solution




cole. x

Great work Malcolm, thanks

I think ok is quite international so it should be fine.

My suggestion would be to encourage people to write out the words in the title cause when I was a newbie on here I was quite confused by btb ttn and stuff like that even though I could do some of them; I'd NEVER have searched for abbreviations and would've double-posted instead.

This thread is 'Very informative.'

woot
excellent idea

Thanks Malcolm!

Thanks! Will make life a lot easier. I agree about the abreviations, they can bo very confusing!

Great idea

Beutiful idea! I'll rate this thread as "Very informative"

maybe instead of having
ok
incorrect
not useful
infomration
very informative

having

5 - Very informative
4 - Informative
3 - Useful
2 - Not useful
1 - Incorrect

that way by rating the options in order it will be more intuitive to people who speak less english and dont understand all the words.

But Ben, what about all the other words which didn't make it onto your list?

i thought i was going mad when i saw that before.. thinking.. "i swear that wasn't there before.."

good idea Malcom!

positive forward looking Pyro: nice work Malcolm! and good suggestion about the sticky index posts Cole - that sounds like a good idea.

Bitter Pyro: so years ago I was shouted down for being a 'do a search or else it will stuff up the search engine fascist'. People are now whinging about the lack of relevance in the search engine. Yeah good one guys. And now that Ive relaxed a bit on the duplicate posts thing (although Ive locked and deleted several of these in the past two weeks) we are being told we arent doing our jobs. Which way do you want it guys? more moderation and less freedom? or more freedom and less moderation? either way the mods cop it.

Can I just ask a question really quick?

What exactly does this rating system do? I can see what I rated a thread, but I can't see what anybody else rated it. Is that someplace I missed? Does it affect the order of the search results?

are threads that are already old going to be deleted as well? It'd probably help things if all the locked threads like the music ones, coloured flames and such were fully deleted automatically.

I agree, I think there are quite a lot of threads lurking that could do with deleting, although I don't know how you could do it automatically. But then I don't really know about these things.

To the mods - don't worry about the things people say, you do a grand job that the majority fully appreciate, just remeber, you can't please all of the people, all of the time!

Sparky- no you're not meant to see other peoples results, the ratings are just to establish which threads are relavent and which aren't so the most relavent and useful ones will come up when searching and the repeats and uninformative ones can be removed. That is how I understand it anyway. You are meant to be able to see how you rated the thread however, it will appear where the submit once was.

I have a question, how do you report a post when you find a repeat or one in the wrong place? Is there no easy button to do this, or would that cause too many problems, maybe you could only let those with a certain number of posts to do it, like the ratings thing.

Also good call on the fire topics thing- changing it to 1000 views, its much more sensible, instead of every topic having it! (although a bit depressing to see all the flames have gone from my threads! ) edit-on second thoughts, maybe take the 1000 down to 500, as its abit excessive and its only really the social chat games and introductions that seem to get flames, or even 700 or something -edit-

one last thing, is there anyway of having another button, where you can rate a thread at the same time as posting, as its really fustrating to type a message, rate the topic and then loose what you've just written (I keep forgetting about it otherwise), and most people will return to the forum, rather than view their post, so are less likley to rate the topic. Just a thought.

Feel free to disregard the above as neccesary!

Wait, I'm confused, what does rating a thread do?

I think it'd be helpful if the rating showed up when someone does a search.

I just searched "Colored Flames" and, of course, got a ton of threads. If I could see the ratings, I could go to a good one first. Maybe the search engine could sort by rating.

Just throwing stuff out there because I'm excited by the good ideas.

nice idea nyc, i think it might take a while for the rating system to be effective with the results it gives, as only a few threads would have recieved ratings so far. from what i understand the threads where rated before by mods/malcolm but we couldnt see it so those ratings that have been made probably wont have had much of an effect yet.

this does pose an interesting problem with new relevant threads not showing up on the search engine if they havnt been rated much but have fallen off the threads on the first page displayed (i for one dont read more than the first page) perhaps the rating on the search engine could be a function of time?

maybe all the old ratings need to be reset?