DARKNRGY
Existential Existence
Well that was weird, I accidentally deleted my own post! Re-posting:
I have nothing to bring to the table except repetitive nudges towards:
1) non-competitive avatar arenas (public avatar gallery without having to enter the contest part of the arenas)
2) re-evaluation of <3/</3 system
and
3) static pose for zOMG summon buddies since it looks like they're not going to get any in-game functions
biggrin That is all. This post doesn't need a reply...
Hope you all enjoyed the easter weekend!
We are not actively working on all three of these, but I can comment on 1 and 2 because we did talk about it recently. These are just my personal observations.
1) One of the ideas that was kicked around was .. basically a vote-up for avatars. Although we actually were initially thinking about it in terms of a leaderboard so it still was competitive. We did think there was some value in letting people vote-up avatars though - sort of a <3 button that would make the avatar owner feel warm and fuzzy. It could go into a gallery but I suspect the best way to display it would be by number of votes. Or rather a "rank" which is just a more sophisticated voting system that has some decay, etc. Out of the recent ideas we reviewed that one made it to the list of things we want to explore but won't be working on immediately.
2) The concern with <3/</3 is understandable. A lot of times a positive-only feedback (like button) is the best way to go because people can't grief others with the negative vote. The thinking was this: In the context of a forum thread, if we only looked at up-votes, it would essentially be a popularity contest. A thread could potentially be very good but not have a very good score because it doesn't have a lot of visibility. That's the purpose of the down-vote - to control for visibility.
With that said, I think it could be better. If we did not show the number of votes and instead just showed a "rank", the negative feedback mechanism would be abstracted and therefore less fruitful for the troll. We could also potentially remove the down-vote, but we would need to come up with another way to control for visibility - possibly by counting the number of views.
So again, these are sort of on our radar but not being actively pursued as projects. I just thought I'd share.
1) Avatar ranking seems like a hassle though, some people just want a place to store avatars in a public gallery so they can show it off to friends, without putting the avatar into any sort of ranking system. Instead of having a place to show people their avatars, they save screenshots of their avatars (or tekteks) to their journals, random threads, etc.....why not give people a space/place to do this on an official Gaia page? It would be used by a lot of people I think. It might even re-direct a lot of new traffic to the arenas page if ones gallery were hosted in the same area (but still separate, like how Original and Cosplay arenas are separate.
2) If the purpose for </3 is to control for visibility I think that's not a really good purpose to have a </3 button. As it is, people rarely <3 a thread unless it is custom to or the OP asks for <3's, so unless someone has 100 mules and <3's all their threads I don't think there will be much problem with popular status. Popular threads will be eventually gain popular thread status though regardless of </3's, at least in forums outside of SF, because if one wants their thread to have popular status, one will simply gain the necessary votes by asking nice people. So as it is, IMO </3 does not really do much by the way of controlling visibility, at least for threads outside of SF. Getting 100+ people to <3 a thread is a really tough feat, you know? And even in SF I think most people gauge popularity/importance of an issue by page
views numbers more so than by <3/</3 (unless we're talking about "like" popularity of a thread...but even then, in SF, the popular status -visible purple tag- of an idea is pretty much a no-brainer).
But that is really cool you are thinking about alternatives and WOOO!! Yes, it could be better. Those are some good ideas and I hope an idea shines out of the ones you have that works well for the community, that could have good potential as a project to work on.
biggrin
Thanks for the reply
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