New A2K annoyances

Testing... I just hit "quote" and got the whole thing. I think you may have to enable the quote feature...?

Yep! Profile --> preferences --> "show quote button"

Thanks!

Some time ago, it was explained why the quote button was an "opt-in" feature.

Not sure why it's not the default.

I'm afraid I have to revive an old annoyance about voting down threads: From surfing through the "New Topics" page, I'm getting the sense that "Droid" threads are getting voted down disproportionately. I guess that makes sense in a narrowly technical way. People use "thumbs down" to hide threads they don't care to read, and it stands to reason that some of us aren't interested in technical discussions about one specific smartphone.

But in terms of community-building, this is destructive. It signals to new sub-communities that their topics are unwelcome, adding needless insult to the injury of losing their old forum. And to the extent that the new members pay attention to those votes, it chills the very contributions for which A2K incorporated them to begin with. Since Robert has announced his intent to include more communities in the future, I suggest that the A2K software use "thumbs down" exclusively for hiding topics. And that it stop counting them against a thread's displayed popularity.

I've explained elsewhere (so will keep it real brief here) that we are going to address that challenge (of supporting unpopular niche communities better than we do now, which I've described elsewhere as our biggest social challenge on a2k) in a variety of ways, likely including:

1) The option to just hide, not vote down a post (as suggested by Monger the week the site opened). The option to vote down is needed, in order to let the community censure topics, but for those who use it just to hide topics we'd like to make an option that just does that).
2) The option to filter tags entirely (again, I think this is one he suggested right off the bat too). This should let people just hide all topics from niches like the droid forum, crosswords or water softeners if they want and they don't have to vote each one down individually.
3) A different ratings system using a weighted Bayesian algorithm (short version is that most of the 0's would just be around 5.0 in the new system and be less psychologically negative, while also limiting some of the downfalls of the current ratings system). It's basically a weighed percentage so it won't ever be able to reach 0.

All of those changes have been in our plans for a long time, but all are really big deals, so are taking a while to get around to.

Sounds fair. Thanks!

Interestingly reread ... threading remains elusive.