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 Administrative / General / 4819
    Article scoring —Todd Lehman
   Last night I made up a little prototype test thingy for collaborative ranking (or scoring) of news articles in the system as being positive, neutral, or negative. (Nothing fancy, just about 20 lines of DB tracking code.) Its "underneath" (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general) ! 
   
        Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
     (...) ^^^ (...) Er, I meant a literal "and" there, not an "and then." That is, people ought IMHO to be able to see the current score without first voting -- that's an important thing, especially if they're reviewing their vote later, etc. --Todd (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
   
        Re: Article scoring —Richard Franks
     (...) Sounds funky! What would be nice is a Top (X) messages of the hour/day/week/month/etc page. Although, would that bias then be an unfair one? Ie - as traffic gets busier, more and more people might just decide to view the the days most popular (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
    
         Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
     (...) You mean a positive-feedback loop producing progressively higher and higher values for popular articles? That's what the sqrt() function is for -- to dampen by applying a nonlinear but still monotonically increasing function to the divisor. (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
    
         Re: Article scoring —Shiri Dori
      (...) No, I think he means: create a place where the most positive-feedback messages of the day/week/time unit are displayed, so that people don't have to read all the letters and check each scoring individually, but find all the 'popular' messages (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
     
          Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
      (...) Wait, are you talking now about the slope of the function or the value of the function? I thought Richard was asking if having a "Top X" list sorted by the value of the scoring function (not its slope or second derivative, which would have (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Shiri Dori
      (...) Oh-- OH! ... that makes it clearer. I was thrown off by Richard's first sentence - "Sounds Funky! Wouldn't it be nice to have..." (...) I agree. It all depends on people's range of interest. I mean, if 100 people responded in a +1 feedback to (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
    
         Re: Article scoring —Richard Franks
     (...) Ah - yep I understood the sqrt part. What I meant is that creating a list of the most popular messages skews the vote - because the most votes will end up being put on items on the list, only because people use the list to browse. From a (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
    
         Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
     (...) I almost get what you're getting at, but I'm stuck on one part of it. In the early stages of an article's appearance, let's say it's position 19 out of 20 on a top-20 page, and let's say only 7 people have voted +1 on it so far. Should it, in (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
    
         Re: Article scoring —Richard Franks
     (...) I'm not sure if referenced votes *should* be weighted differently, I just thought I'd throw it in :) Hmm.. if you did weight top-20 page posts differently, then *really* cool posts in low-traffic groups would still get ignored.. unless you (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
   
        Re: Article scoring —Shiri Dori
     In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes: <interesting (to me) yet long techie details snipped> Great! I like this and agree to the reasoning, 'specially the sqrt part of more people voting influencing more. (...) ;-) (...) I agree, cool! (...) (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
    
         Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
     (...) Oh -- while I was out grocery shopping I just realized this: What is sqrt(n)? It's nothing more than a fancy way of writing n^(1/2). So: What if the exponent didn't have to be exactly 1/2, but instead was allowed to vary? Then what dynamics (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
    
         Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
     Upon more reflection, I'm thinking that the "square-rooted-average" sum(V,1,n) w = ---...--- sqrt(n) isn't so great afterall. Its biggest plus is that it distinguishes nicely between sets of votes which have the same average and a different number (...) (24 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
    
         Re: Article scoring —Dan Boger
      In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes: [snip a lot of math] (...) where in here does it take into account how many people are in the group? Can you weigh in the number of people who are subscribed to that group? Since they are the ones most (...) (24 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
     
          Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
      (...) Implicitly in the n variable; nowhere explicitly. (...) Well, it's nearly impossible to know the number of people subscribed to a given group, and it's even more impossible to know how many people have read and understood a given message. It (...) (24 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Steve Bliss
      (...) That was (almost) my first question/concern, as well. (...) Hmm. I'd like to see something available, at least through SMTP, assuming users-of-newsreaders could vote by forwarding messages to one (or more) vote-accounts. Then again, I haven't (...) (24 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
    
         Re: Article scoring —Shiri Dori
      Wow, that's cool! The geek in me is waking up... So basically what you said here, is that every message gets one vote from the system as a softner - and that the vote is always zero. Wow. Again, cool. -Shiri (a real geek at heart) (24 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
      (...) Ya, except that the one vote from the system will probably be implicit (rather than explicit), and applied only on-the-fly while calculating the final rating, otherwise every article would show with a score of zero and one mysterious vote. In (...) (24 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Steve Bliss
      (...) And it at least as much sense to have an implicit 'indifferent' vote from the system as it does to have a special rule for the case of zero votes. Steve (24 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
       (...) Well, the neat thing is, either way, there actually isn't a special case after all. That is, in the specific case of zero votes, there doesn't have to be a logic-fork because the sum of zero votes is 0, and dividing 0 by n+1 (n=0) is still 0. (...) (24 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
      (...) ^^^...^^^ (...) Steve, I'm glad you mentioned that -- because from a "makes sense" point of view, I think it's much harder to explain to voters that the article's score is sum(V,1,n)/(n+1) [n voters] than it is simply to explain that the (...) (24 years ago, 8-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Steve Bliss
      (...) (hey, anything to help out) [snipped all the stuff I agree with] (...) How about radio buttons instead of a drop-down list? Seems more approachable for the non-geeks among us. (...) You could let people choose a score from 1 to 10. This is (...) (24 years ago, 8-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
      (...) OH! Yes, radio buttons. When the number of choices is small, maybe that's the way to go. OTOH, radio buttons in GUI web browsers are smaller "targets" than list boxes. Does MSIE know how to automagically group text associated with a radio (...) (24 years ago, 8-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Dan Boger
       (...) IIRC, from my days of dabbling with java, you could make a radiobox, and make the lable to it a link with no HREF, just with a ONCLICK java script thing, that will select the appropriate radio button. Will that work? (...) The thing is, if (...) (24 years ago, 9-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
      
           Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
       (...) I think it could all be done in JavaScript, ya. I wouldn't want to _require_ JavaScript for something like article scoring, but the nice thing about it in this case is that adding it wouldn't hurt; it would degrade gracefully to normal plain (...) (24 years ago, 9-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Steve Bliss
      (...) Hmm. Thinking back to the desired slider interface, you could put a good number of radio buttons horizontally across a page. The voter could click in the desired range. Something like: Very Bad Neutral Very Good O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O (...) (24 years ago, 9-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
       (...) That would rock!! (...) I don't think the HTML would be too heavy, but it could get pretty nasty on the web browser (depending on how many buttons there were per article). I seem to remember the Fibblesnork LEGO Survey pages (which each have (...) (24 years ago, 9-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
      
           Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
        (...) OK, a couple of more thoughts on the [-100,+100] vs. [0,100] choice... I'm finding it increasingly difficult to defend the position of [-100,+100] due to a number of reasons. One which I don't think came up yet is how a new or casual user (...) (24 years ago, 10-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
       
            Re: Article scoring —Shiri Dori
         (...) <snip> (...) Yes, it makes a lot of sense, and I agree. (...) Right. (...) Meaning...? (...) I wouldn't be too sure it's so complex... then again, I'm a math geek so I wouldn't know ;-) (...) The last two are, IMO, HUGE advantadges for the (...) (24 years ago, 10-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
        
             Re: Article scoring —Steve Bliss
          (...) If numbers are avoided on the voting UI, this 'first vote effect' won't be so noticeable, because people won't be immediately aware of the math behind the voting system. There'll probably be the occasional question (because someone just read (...) (24 years ago, 10-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
        
             Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
         (...) A typographically correct minus sign is 1 en wide, which is typically about twice the width of a hyphen in most typefaces. HTML has the &#150; entity which is 1 en wide, and the &#151; entity which is 1 em wide, but AFAIK these aren't (...) (24 years ago, 12-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
       
            Re: Article scoring —Tony Priestman
         On Fri, 10 Mar 2000, Todd Lehman (<Fr6srt.IrF@lugnet.com>) wrote at 03:38:17 (...) I think this has been at the back of my mind all along. I don't use the web i/f, so I've mostly avoided commenting. (24 years ago, 10-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
        
             Re: Article scoring —Steve Bliss
         (...) I thought about that too, but I figured that: 1. Most (not necessarily all, but most) people who would get hurt feelings would tend to post indifferent posts. 2. Unless a post is strongly 'bad', people aren't going to give it a negative vote. (...) (24 years ago, 10-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
       
            Re: Article scoring —Jacob Sparre Andersen
        Todd: [ ... ] (...) Although I find the [-100,+100] range more intuitive, I think you are right that [0,+100] is the range to use for article scoring. Play well, Jacob (who never claimed to be ordinary ;-) ---...--- -- E-mail: sparre@cats.nbi.dk -- (...) (24 years ago, 12-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
      
           Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
       (...) OK, looks like this is going to work great! On the screen, it's looking much cleaner than what I had before with the drop-down list. A not-too-big-yet-not-to-small number of radio buttons with a neat numeric spread is 6, which yields the (...) (24 years ago, 13-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
      
           Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
        (...) OK, pruning this down to be as simple as possible -- while still retaining the option to include an edit box for fine-tuning later down the road -- it turns out that a six-position set of radio buttons is really slick. :) Eliminating the (...) (24 years ago, 13-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
      
           Re: Article scoring —Larry Pieniazek
        (...) "submitted opinions:" ?? "Shared opinions:" ?? (24 years ago, 13-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Tony Priestman
      On Thu, 9 Mar 2000, Steve Bliss (<ctgfcsop8uaj5lc1dc...25o1pt@4ax .com>) wrote at 15:47:34 (...) Perhaps if the numbers were mapped to a coloured indicator? You could have an orange-red for high scores, & blue-green for lows, with a spectrum in (...) (24 years ago, 9-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
      (...) Interesting idea with the blue, BTW -- although it's generally not a great idea to use blue, purple, or magenta text on white-background web pages (because of traditional HTML link colors), there might actually be an advantage in using blue (...) (24 years ago, 26-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
    
         Re: Article scoring —Steve Bliss
     (...) Isn't that redundant? Steve Bliss (24 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.off-topic.fun)
    
         Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
     (...) Yah, pretty much, I guess. :) Although _Eye_of_the_Needle_ first season wasn't bad, was it? --Todd (24 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.off-topic.fun)
    
         Re: Article scoring —Steve Bliss
     (...) Yeah, that one was good. Actually, there have been a number of good Voyager episodes. And some real stinkers. My vote for the worst episode: _The_Omega_Directive_. Steve (24 years ago, 7-Mar-00, to lugnet.off-topic.fun)
   
        Re: Article scoring —Jeremy H. Sproat
     (...) The only reason I read Slashdot is because of the article scoring. Not a bad system, that. But I'm enough of a narcissist that I'd be prone to artificially boost the score on my own messages. And I suspect I'm not alone. (You know who you are. (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
    
         Re: Article scoring —Richard Franks
      (...) Maybe a simple IP check? It's not perfect, but if someone goes to all the trouble of getting different IP addresses to vote from, then maybe they have something important to say! I wonder if someone would click their market.auction posting (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
     
          Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
      (...) It'll just use the Member ID to verify who you are. All magically and transparently through cookies. You have to be logged in, of course, and only Members can moderate (cast votes). (...) The system would enforce one vote per person, so the (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
    
         Re: Article scoring —Todd Lehman
     (...) IMHO, it absolutely should be allowed, yes! The worst you could artificially boost the scores on your own messages is relatively tiny anyway -- once a few other people also have cast votes. I would also argue that it's not necessarily (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
    
         Re: Article scoring —Richard Franks
      (...) Ah, that makes *all* the difference! The danger of someone taking out 100 LUGNET memberships to skew the votes and always have the most 'interesting' messages.. isn't really a danger! Richard (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
     
          Re: Article scoring —Shiri Dori
      (...) LOL! I'd be willing to endure that as long as it supports lugnet ;-) -Shiri (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
    
         Re: Article scoring —David Schilling
      (...) Besides just having the final vote result (score), it would also be nice to know how many people have actually voted. Another very useful feature would be to be able to sort posts in different ways. Right now they are just listed in (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
    
         Re: Article scoring —Steve Bliss
     (...) In that case, provide a method for a poster to pre-vote on their message when they post it. Steve (24 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
   
        Re: Article scoring —Tony Priestman
   On Sat, 4 Mar 2000, Todd Lehman (<FqvI8u.LzE@lugnet.com>) wrote at 01:17:18 (...) So what's it for? A surrogate for me-too posts? Speaking as an NNTP person, I juge articles by the number of replies they get, and I wouldn't see any of this at all. (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
   
        Re: Article scoring —Richard Franks
   (...) Does this make you read or avoid them? :) Would it be possible to have a thread view that showed the 'best' articles? E.G., I don't have time to read through all of the religious debate on off-topic, but I wouldn't mind reading through some of (...) (24 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
 

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