Forums / Maintenance / Suggest Ideas

I really want this to happen.

Can you elaborate on this a bit better? If I get it correct, you wish for an option that allows a person to switch or reset his vote in case of a missclick or change of opinion?

It isn't the first time this request popped up, and I can see myself agreeing with it a bit. It's not really necessary, but I don't think it would be much of a bother to implant into the site either.

@RandomMan

Yes, that is the way I mean it, its like Reddit or YouTube.

Lets say if you accidentally disliked/liked/Forum Post a comment or post that you didn't do it by accident, you can click it and you can undislike and unlike it. Preety simple.

Technically, probably not. It means we need to store who contributed each point to the rated thing and allow them to change it. Seeing as our server currently doesn't update your profile pic/username change in the forums for around an hour, that would be kind of difficult.

I'm not a coder at all.

Yeah I do agree this would take a long time to code and actually make live update from the server, but who knows, it might be possible.

But it already does this. Didn't you notice that once you vote on a post, the voting buttons change to indicate how you voted? Not only that, but I can go back to thread posts from three years ago that I voted on, and my vote will still show. I don't know what the issue is, but vote tracking is not it.

(As a database designer, my assumption is that there's a table somewhere on the back end with each entry being a userID, a postID*, and a boolean value. I don't know why it would be difficult to allow entries in the table to be changed.)

From the asterisk above, it's worth noting that each post has its own ID that is separate from the thread ID. This actually allows some quirky tampering with the forums if you realize the implications, which I've yet to see anybody but myself utilize. Totally separate issue, though.

I think the issue MDF was more talking about was the same thing James talked about in your "Mods' Eyes Only" thread, on how (I quote:) "Search results are cached for an hour".

The case is, this isn't the only area where this happens. Nick changes, updates in karma, reaching a new title. It takes time for these things to update on the site unless you force then (like for example saving your profile edits to force karma to update).

The fear is that the possibility of changing and resetting karma constantly may result in giving more positive/negative karma than was intended, or that those with bad ideas may exploit to negative karma bomb.

There was for example an issue in the past that constant faving and un-faving of media would result in negative favs over time. A bug that was shamelessly exploited by numerous users, to the point that some images would get 3 digits in negative favs. This might be the same on karma (we can't be certain on that though).

Well, the fact that this has been brought up repeatedly and not "fixed" indicates to me that there is a reason why; I'm just saying that difficulty in tracking who made the votes should not be the issue unless there's some really weird design happening in the back-end. (Which honestly, there is. Have you ever looked at the page source for any KYM page? Try it, and search the page for "thumbs"; whatever is going on there is blowing my mind.)

Could these problems be solved by requiring a time-delay between making your vote, and then changing it? It would only have to be for a few seconds to a minute to, if not eliminate that kind of spamming, at least frustrate attempts to do it on a scale large enough to pose a problem.

Wait, the "unfavoriting" was (and perhaps still is) causing trouble, but you can still do that. That suggests to me that the issue is separate. And while I see what Platus is saying, if anything, the time delay is the opposite of what is needed, like how non-mods can't edit a post after ten minutes. Most people who want to change their votes want to within a minute because they hit the wrong button or misunderstood something, right?

That is exactly the situation I was thinking of. If you hit the wrong button, then you can just wait a few seconds and change it (which is a huge improvement over the way it works now). But if you are trying to spam, then that small time delay will add up and make manipulating the system very time consuming.

the like and dislike buttons are TOO DAMN CLOSE!

I agree with this, I was about to suggest this myself!