Potential Changes to the Vote Ratio Badge

As you may or may not know, TA has lately been host to some hearty discussion regarding solution voting. The TA staff have been listening and we want to try and improve the situation for as many people as possible. The disparity between the various viewpoints in the discussion suggests that this may not be entirely simple so we’re going to test a few ideas out.

There are a couple of things we plan to do, on a trial basis, which will become permanent if they work well. The first is to display votes as the sum of the positive and negative votes rather than 2 separate figures. This is mainly to try and avoid the issue where one or two negative votes on an otherwise unblemished solution can feel like a big red mark.

The second item we wish to address is the vote ratio badge. Many of the contributors to the voting discussion seem confident that the vote ratio badge is the primary source of concern. For this reason, we are holding a vote to decide what course of action is best, and you will find the vote at the bottom of this post.



Note: These are some of the other suggestions which we are not going to act upon at the moment -

We will not be introducing forced commenting. Our concerns include the fact that people can just write nonsense to get past it, the unbalance it would incur to votes, unless we apply it to positive votes too, and how off putting it is to people’s overall experience. It would work in a perfect world but unfortunately that’s not the reality we live in.

We will not be removing negative votes altogether. We still place a lot of value in the ability to give critical feedback, which of course includes negative feedback. We feel it’s important that people still have the option to show that they disagree with a solution for whatever reason.

We may revisit these at some point if it turns out we need to put more substantial measures in place.