note
kudra
I am a firm believer in the use of search, but reading this does make me
think it would be nice to have other means of examining discussions. In
particular, it would be nice to see how the monastery perceives an idea,
and what vroom's intentions are regarding it. However, I don't think that
it needs to be as complex as what you described. Rather, it could be
little more than a listing of topics along the lines of Q&A or the
tutorials page.
<p>
Unfortunately these two sections require maintenance. I would rather see
a mostly automated solution for discussions. For example, discussions
could be automatically added to the page after they are a week old.
I say a week because that gives time for posts to be moved out of
discussion if they don't belong there, to be retitled, and for people to
respond, while at the same time leaving little danger that the idea
will be reposted in that time. I do think the page would need to
be editable, either by the site documentation clan, editors, or maybe
just [turnstep] <tt>:)</tt>. Maintenance would involve things like
moving repeated discussions to be listed with the older instance.
<p>
I see the listings consisting as a few components: title, popularity
and status. To go in to more detail:
<ul>
<li><strong>Title of the article</strong><br>
This would simply be the title the author gives, which would be a link
to the post. People editing the page could rename it if needed, and
move a title to be listed with another title if they addressed the same
thing.</li>
<li><strong>Popularity</strong><br>
Popularity is one of the potential ways to order the page (and in
my opinion more useful than by date or alphabetically) and so extra
care should be taken in automatically generating a rating. However,
this is probably the most difficult part to automate correctly. Rather
than introduce a new system for this, I would suggest using the existing
mechanism--voting. The problem with this proposal is that some people
vote on discussions based upon how articulate the person was (I know
I recently read someone urging for this kind of voting, but I can't
seem to find it to link to it), whereas others vote upon whether they'd
[id://20974|like the idea implemented] (see the discussion section),
and this idea relies upon the second voting pattern. Specifically,
I would suggest just giving each idea a word ranking based upon how
its reputation relates to norm (with the exact relationship to be
worked out by looking at the reputations and responses to existing
discussions).</li>
<li><strong>Status</strong><br>
I'm concerned about the idea of this becoming a todo list for vroom.
I do think it is nice for the users to see how the site is developing,
but I also think that it is up to vroom to decide how he spends his
time. I would like to see this serve as maybe a reminder of possible
ideas for him, rather than a list of things he needs to do. The status
field would be for the rest of us, who would like at least minor indications
of how the site is developing. A simple comment from vroom along the
lines of 'good idea, I should do this sometime' or 'nope, not going to
happen' would take up very little of his time and would give a small
idea of future plans.</li>
</ul>
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