Submission voting system has now been removed (temporarily) due to someone's request.
Because I'm kind of in hurry and somewhat lazy, I'll just quote myself quoting something else here.
It's not the votes that decide; it's the explanations people provide. The votes are just there to steer the judges' attention, and since the number of submissions compared to the number of judges is so much more manageable now than it used to be, the numbers are not really needed now.
Also, people have been bickering over votes rather than the content of the submission, and that's hardly productive. I hope this gets us into a more productive direction!
Joined: 4/25/2004
Posts: 615
Location: The Netherlands
Not that I voted that often, but allowing people to vote can at least give the runner an idea (as well as the judges). Maybe putting that message at the voting system linking to the whole reason thing is a better option?
Maybe it is a good idea to remove the voting system. Some people were clearly not taking it seriously. "It's that time of the month, so I'm voting no."
OTOH, I hope this decision will not cause the *comments* people post to submissions to be drastically reduced. Less comments means the judges will not have a good perspective on the overall opinion of the submission.
Maybe I should add "post a YES reply" / "post a NO reply" / "post a MEH reply" buttons to where the poll was, and those would simply start composing a reply to the thread with "Yes vote" etc. prefilled automatically in the post :)
It's a good idea but it won't necessarily work in the intended way. For example someone could post a YES reply and and type "." so there vote can be registered. It might also cause a significant increase in fanboy posts like "Best game ever, replace every run on the site and anyone who critizises can STFU". I think if the post was highlighted in some way like a green border for YES and a red border for NO, then it might be better than being linked directly to a poll.
I vote yes for removing the poll
And meh to adding the buttons -- couldn't hurt to try it I guess, but it would interesting to see how many people don't both to add content and spam the discussion with terse "Voted Yes" replies -- well that happens now anyways :)
They have always been able to spam such posts via the "postreply" button, just adding "Voted Yes" if no "YES" button is available.
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days
<adelikat> no doubt
<adelikat> klmz, they still do
Forgive my inquiry as I am unfamiliar with the particulars behind the judging process, but wouldn't any judge who reads the discussions catch that sort of nonsense right away? At least with this system, anyone who votes without voicing an opinion is immediately obvious. I agree some sort of signifier indicating how they made a lazy-way-out vote would be helpful, but either way, the people who do that sort of thing would be manipulating the system and be obvious about it, and if the staff wanted they could take administrative action at that point.
I'm only wondering--I'm far from an anybody here, so it's just a curiosity, not any sort of expectation on my part. Still, it seems a much better system than the prior one, at least to me...
Joined: 11/27/2004
Posts: 688
Location: WA State, USA
Another idea is to have the Subject line on the Post Reply page be a bullet list to choose from Yes, Meh, No, and N/A, thus leaving the post for the reasoning for the vote, and not the vote itself.
However, something tells me that it would be difficult to implement. :/
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
All thanks to OoT!
Yeah, good job Bisqwit. There's just one problem... you should either remove the "MEH" option or implement something similar to this:
Posted a MEH reply
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
It won't take a rejection to start a flame war, just the submission of a movie for a high-profile game.
I do prefer this method of gathering opinion, however.
I strongly disagree with removing the poll. The inability to vote anonymously has a strong tendency to quash desire to state opinions contrary to that which has the most appearant support.
Additionally, even with no votes currently cast, it can make it somewhat less friendly to vote no, because then the author might take it personally and have it influence their opinion of you in future, et cetera.
With the poll system, because people have the ability to vote "no" without posting, it's much easier to get the first "no" vote in. After a few "no" votes have been cast, and show up on the vote result, it becomes psychologically and socially much easier for any individual to vote no and post their reason. Whereas without the quasi-anonymous poll, anyone who votes against the popular trend may face ostracism for it, and anyone who votes no may face the wrath of the submission's author.
Put together, the result, plain and simple, is most likely to be a drastic increase in the (already present) tendency for the workbench voting to be skewed heavily away from the negative.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
I agree with keeping the votes, but for completely different reasons. I don't even count 'no' votes without an explanation (unless it are many, and the explanation has already been stated by others at the topic). I think especially 'no' votes need an explanation, as it is this explanation that is most important to judging the movie.
There are currently lots of people who just vote, and don't post anything, and I think not being able to vote will mean not hearing anything from them, and thus especially missing out on yes votes, which the author could see as a sign of appreciation of his movie.
I know that some people will randomly vote yes, if they like the game, the TASer or whatever, even if the actual TAS might not be that good... and I know that the final judgement might be different than what the votes suggest... but everyone knows this. I think both the voters and the judges take it into account, so even though the votes might not be that important for judging the movie, I still think it's nice to know what the votes are, and they might indeed (like I thought their purpose was) be of some small assistence of the judges decision.
I think there SHOULD be a numeric representation of votes. An uneditable, unclickable counter fo sorts... just to make the judge's job easier when trying to figure out how many yeses and nos have aquired for run X.
I like to think that people here are mature enough to be able to accept constructive criticism. I know there's a lot of arguments bubbling beneath the surface, but it's hard to complain about someone pointing out an improvement in your movie when they're right (you can complain about their tone all you like, of course).
The problem is that the Workbench isn't really being used to examine the quality of a movie, but rather to argue over whether it deserves publication. Frankly, that's not our decision - it falls down to the moderators. What we should be doing is finding any possible improvements in the movie; the moderators then decide if those improvements are significant enough to warrant not publishing the movie.
This doesn't address issues of bad game choice; I'm not entirely certain what the hypothetical ideal system would be there. But it's clear to me that a lot of the arguing and bad feelings on the Workbench threads these days come down to people arguing over what belongs on the site and what doesn't. That kind of discussion doesn't belong on the Workbench; it belongs on the Site forum, where, being abstracted from any particular run, discussions should be much less heated.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.