Sorting by votes ...

[UncleYoda]

as in Technical Discussion, is dumb.  We see replies before the posts they're replying to.  Not everyone replying is directly replying to the OP.

[WRXR255]

Yeah, you gotta do a dance of getting to the OP post, selecting by date, then navigate to the recent posts.

To me its a solution that was looking for a problem to be added to newer forum front ends, but it is what it is.

Edited August 9 by WRXR255
Grammer - im on beer #2 so was needed

[BoxCar]

2 hours ago, WRXR255 said:

Yeah, you gotta do a dance of getting to the OP post, selecting by date, then navigate to the recent posts.

To me its a solution that was looking for a problem to be added to newer forum front ends, but it is what it is.

I agree. The current default sort by votes is IMO asinine as it makes following the thread extremely difficult.

[amaff]

It's pretty crap. And you have to do the dance every single time you look at the thread. Really stupid way to order a discussion forum.

[SteveShannon]

4 hours ago, UncleYoda said:

as in Technical Discussion, is dumb.  We see replies before the posts they're replying to.  Not everyone replying is directly replying to the OP.

No, the question is always on top. 
Second, as I understand it, people ask technical questions hoping to get an accurate answer and they benefit from having the most nearly correct answer voted to the top. 

[amaff]

1 minute ago, SteveShannon said:

No, the question is always on top. 
Second, as I understand it, people ask technical questions hoping to get an accurate answer and they benefit from having the most nearly correct answer voted to the top. 

 

Right, but almost no one uses the votes, and it almost always turns into an actual discussion, where having them ordered by 'validity' is not really helpful.

[OffRoaderX]

1 minute ago, amaff said:

and it almost always turns into a pissing match to see who thinks they're the smartest in the room

There, I fixed that for you.

[amaff]

Also that, yes.

[SteveShannon]

11 minutes ago, amaff said:

 

Right, but almost no one uses the votes, and it almost always turns into an actual discussion, where having them ordered by 'validity' is not really helpful.

So, use the votes and pass the word so others do also. 

[WRKC935]

Yeah, the idea of the voted answer being on top just below the question is it's HOPEFULLY the most correct answer.  The idea behind that is again HOPEFULLY someone will search for the question they have and if someone else has already ask it, which is typically the case. It will talke them to the question where someone else ask it and then give them the answer.  Last HOPEFULLY, that will fill their request with out asking the same stuff over and over.  But that is almost as rare as people getting their posts voted up the list.

 

 

[marcspaz]

1 hour ago, OffRoaderX said:

There, I fixed that for you.

 

If I'm the smartest guy in the room, its probably because I'm alone.

[UncleYoda]

11 hours ago, SteveShannon said:

No, the question is always on top. 
Second, as I understand it, people ask technical questions hoping to get an accurate answer and they benefit from having the most nearly correct answer voted to the top. 

I didn't say anything about the OP not being on top.  But replies to replies do drift from the original post.

 

I've never seen a forum category handled this way and IMO there is little to no benefit to it.

[marcspaz]

1 hour ago, UncleYoda said:

I didn't say anything about the OP not being on top.  But replies to replies do drift from the original post.

 

I've never seen a forum category handled this way and IMO there is little to no benefit to it.

 

There are a lot of technical forums were they offer this service.  A user posts a question to a problem and the correct answer (the one used to resolve the problem) gets voted as the correct answer and moved just below the question post. It's very common. 

[UncleYoda]

I have seen it on other types of sites (Q&A, Reddit) but not standard forum software (Vbulletin, etc.) which is categorized, threaded topics.  Anyway, it's no longer an issue for me; I'm done with posting in that section.

[WRQC527]

22 hours ago, UncleYoda said:

as in Technical Discussion, is dumb.  We see replies before the posts they're replying to.  Not everyone replying is directly replying to the OP.

Sorting by votes often gets weaponized, if you will. I've seen it quite often. Some people post things that are so off-topic, so irritating, or so irrelevant that they get down-voted to the bottom of the pile. Or they're just so universally disliked that anything they post gets down-voted. It's sort of a passive-aggressive way to fight back anonymously. It's the MyGMRS equivalent of getting voted off the island.

[UncleYoda]

I mostly agree, but I do not see the off-topic or irritating (especially useless wisecracks) getting voted down or ganged-up on in the sections that don't have voting.  I hate all the BS that is allowed to be posted here.  It makes this site just a playground for the forum regulars and drives other people away.  But I'm putting them all on ignore (only works though if logged in).  I really don't need this forum anyway.

[marcspaz]

I will only vote down an answer if it is not only wrong, but could possibly cause problems for people who don't know any better and try to use the bad information.  And yes, the ignore feature is pretty handy.

[WRQC527]

1 hour ago, UncleYoda said:

I do not see the off-topic or irritating (especially useless wisecracks) getting voted down or ganged-up on in the sections that don't have voting. 

Mayhaps that's because there is no voting in those sections. And yes, there is ganging up on some folks in sections that don't have voting. Just recently there was some hillbilly who came in here ranting about how he wasn't interested in following any FCC rules. He pretty quickly went away because he was ganged up on, in addition to being thrown out of his repeater club after 48 hours and ending up on a number of ignore user lists here.

[OffRoaderX]

6 minutes ago, WRQC527 said:

there was some hillbilly

We prefer the term "Geographically-challenged rural lifestyle enthusiast".

thank you for your understanding and compassion.

[WRQC527]

3 hours ago, OffRoaderX said:

We prefer the term "Geographically-challenged rural lifestyle enthusiast".

thank you for your understanding and compassion.

Thanks Jethro, I'll make a note of it.

By the way, do you know how we know toothpaste was invented by geographically-challenged rural lifestyle enthusiasts? Because otherwise it would be called teethpaste.

[WRXB215]

Stackoverflow is a technical discussion forum. It uses a voting system just like @SteveShannon described and it is working just fine. Nothing wrong with having just one area on this site with the same voting system. And as someone pointed out, you can still sort by date/time.