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A bit about the new comment rating system

A bit about the new comment rating system

Thumbs up or down?

With the Buzzer blog’s redesign on Monday, you may have noticed a new comment rating system on the blog. It’s a blog plugin called Comment Rating, and it now gives you the ability to go “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on other comments.

We put this in just so more people can quietly participate in discussions—however, I’ve discovered that Comment Rating actually changes the way comments are presented based on the ratings received! Well-liked, poorly rated, and hotly debated comments show up differently.

I wasn’t quite aware that this functionality was part of the plugin, so I think we should all just test it out to see if we like it. But for now, here’s an explanation of how the comments are shown with the new rating system.

Note, Mon June 28: After discussion below, I’ve decided to remove the “Dislike” function on the comment ratings. Ergo you can’t have “hotly debated” or “poorly liked” comments anymore, but you can be “highly rated” still. I’ve left the rest up below for posterity’s sake.

Highly rated comments

A highly rated comment.

Highly-rated comments get a pink background, and are determined by the following formula: (Likes – Dislikes) are greater than or equal to 4.

Hotly debated comments

A hotly debated comment.

Hotly-debated comments get an orange background, and are determined by the following formula: (Likes + Dislikes) are greater than or equal to 8.

Poorly-rated comments

A poorly-liked comment.

Poorly-rated comments get hidden! They are determined by the following formula: (Dislikes – Likes) are greater than or equal to 3.

I’m not totally sure whether these comments should be hidden… however, this has amazing possibilities for community spam moderation!

Update: After hearing from several people in the comments, I’m in agreement that these comments should NOT be hidden. So the threshold is now set to (Dislikes – Likes) is greater than or equal to 20, which hopefully should not be reached in common use.

For the future…

Feel free to keep me in the loop on how you think the comment rating system is going. Also, I am able to adjust the thresholds that govern which is a highly-rated, hotly debated, and poorly-liked comment, so we could do some fine tuning there as we see how things progress.

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