Initially, I liked the 1-10 rating idea, but after thinking about it, there's a flaw. I always use the little icon which lets me look at posts that came in since I logged on. And if no one else has looked at the post, then what would I get. Suppose 1 person looked at the post and gave it a 1 and I have my filter set to 5, I wouldn't see it. Then if 10 other people came along and gave it a 10, I still wouldn't see it by looking at the latest. It would be nice to see things that my filter rejected earlier, but are now acceptable, but how would I see older posts if I'm only looking at newer posts without seeing everything I've already seenall over again along with the one that is now acceptable?
Unfortunately, it would chase off some good posters also. Quite a few times, I've come across a good post from someone whoe has posted only a handful of times. I'm sure if this person had to put up $$$ in the beginning, he probably wouldn't have posted at all.
Well you could just set a condition that every post must have at least X number of votes before it gets filtered by user preferences.
Then I could miss out on some timely information or miss out on posts that other people feel it's not even worth their time to rate. But if I were to be able to do something like that, I'd want any posts that I hadn't viewed in the past and then came up to my rating requirement to be showed along with any new posts that met the requirements from the start. At some point Baron is looking at all these posts and thinking "Geeeez!!! Do these guys have any idea how difficult this would be to implement???"
And it's the 4th of July weekend! What Baron's really thinking is if it's worth it to modify a system for a bunch of people like us who have nothing better to do on a glorious 4th of July weekend than post on ET.:eek:
oh i completely agree this is time well spent thinking and devising complex post-avoidance algorithms ... just quickly passing over those you have no interest in is too difficult.
As I said, it hasn't hurt SI any, or TMF, for that matter. And quite a few posters who have left might be interested in coming back. Rejecting an idea out of hand just because one doesn't like it is a bit short-sighted.
There are a few flaws with trying to implement a rating system: 1. As mentioned earlier - what one person thinks is "worthless" may not be to someone else - so who's to gauge this? So if a post (or a poster) is valuable to a small group of (maybe junior) users, but perhaps not globally "valuable" to the larger group of readers - what happens? 2. Who will participate? Suppose only a small number of people bother to take the time to rate posts (or posters). Neilsen has TV shows rated by a comparatively small group of people - and look what that's produced 3. Why wouldn't the spammers simply introduce a bunch more IDs and then rate their spam highly?? This becomes even more effective if most people are too busy to try to rate every damn post they read (as will likely happen). Baron would also have to keep track of which IDs rated each post (or poster) and prevent them from rating it more than once. 4. What's your rating threshold?? If one person ranks something at 10 and another ranks it at 0 - the ranking's a 5?? Based on two people? And of course that can float around quite a bit until a large number of ratings are accumulated. But then, what's "enough" ratings to make it meaningful - especially when the spammers could try to swamp the rating system using even more IDs. Personally, I'd rather the moderators just got even more aggressive about deleting spam, fighting, and wildly off-topic posts. Subtract deleted posts from a poster's total. And then maybe set some posting limit before URLs can be included in a post. You might cut out some of the spam that way and if moderators removed obviously off-topic and/or severly obtuse posts from threads, then all threads in general might benefit. Perhaps on the complain page, add option buttons to indicate why there's a complaint about a given post (off-topic being one of the options).
How can we improve Elitetrader... seriously... SERIOUSLY Stop complaining to Baron and send stupid requests to give him time to work on ET itself. You're all taking his time and delaying what really is needed in ET.
I don't know what your basis is for saying that. SI is boring, bunch of geeks discussing best brand of pocket protector.