Remove the User Rating and add something worth having?

Moots on 01/11/2013 - 19:22

Seems OzBargain is forever updating stuff to make it more popular, like a faster search bla bla? Guess that'll get better SEO or whatever to be honest. Old search was 3.5secs new search 0.35 seconds, I hardly use it enough to complain about how slow it is., Users have silly features. What is "User Rating". No one even uses it… Why not implement something that people will use, it's great and all that the staff and reps are getting new badges and stuff. Still, no improvement for everyday users… We look at the exact same plain features minute in minute out. Even our "dots" cough, 'badges' are pretty crap and even all badges don't fit on someones popup profile because they don't fit in the box.

The features that are implemented, hardly users know about because it's not publish like being able to quote a comment by link.

Site Discussion

Comments

  • robbyjones on 01/11/2013 - 19:38
    +7

    Lots of criticism there but none of it constructive. What do you want, exactly?

    • johnno07 on 04/11/2013 - 18:58
      +2

      I think he had a bad day and just wanted to vent some useless stuff. Or something.

  • blighst on 01/11/2013 - 19:44
    +10

    Just to piss you off I rated you.

  • evol on 01/11/2013 - 21:10
    +3

    I agree, never really understood what the user rating stars are meant for…Scotty & co care to shed some light? :)

    • scotty on 01/11/2013 - 23:08
      +4

      Well. That was an old piece of code that I'm now turning it off (somehow was left there & exposed to experienced users). It's just an experiment to build "reputation" for the users. To be honest the idea is figure out what's a user's "reputation", and some users might be automatically granted extra abilities depending on the reputation. Similar to what we have Power Users now, except for that the nomination process is done amongst the moderators. I was looking at some algorithms to deduce a user's reputations from various ratings, scores from comments, "karma" value from activities, etc. High reputation means that the user is more inline with the community's value.

      Somehow I got distracted with building other useless stuffs like speeding up the search, and never managed to get back to it. I have now disabled it.

      • donga100 on 03/11/2013 - 21:31
        +6

        I had no idea if it did anything useful but I personally enjoyed giving people ratings just for my own satisfaction. I came to this thread wondering what happened to that feature.

        • johnno07 on 04/11/2013 - 18:54
          +4

          Same here, donga100. I rated people for my own records, so I could know whether to listen to what they were saying or not.

        • foobar on 05/11/2013 - 08:39
          +1

          Same here as well. While not p ublically visible, was a handy reminder of who was a bell end etc.

        • scotty on 05/11/2013 - 10:10
          +1

          Yeah I use it that way personally as well. Currently we are not using the data in any way except for the person who voted for their own records only. It was "experimental" and didn't expect to see a forum post on this…

        • donga100 on 05/11/2013 - 10:44
          +1

          Bring it back and I promise to give you a good rating. :)

        • foobar on 05/11/2013 - 11:04
          +1

          I agree, bring it back as it's obviously useful to some of us, may as well if it doesn't get in the way of anything or cause any problems.

        • johnno07 on 06/11/2013 - 00:47

          Aye aye - bring back the ratings. As it has been said, it doesn't impede anyone who doesn't care about it, but obviously there are a number of people that are missing it. Maybe it could stay private and the mods could refer to the user's overall rating (which only they can see) when dishing out penalties etc.

        • ProspectiveDarkness on 06/11/2013 - 00:49
          +1

          I'd like to see it back too.
          If it's that big of a deal for some people to see something so 'useless', wouldn't it be simple to just make it opt-in?

        • scotty on 06/11/2013 - 11:37
          +2

          In that case I'll make it an opt-in. Will have that back in our next update (end of this week).

  • scrimshaw on 01/11/2013 - 22:07
    +6

    Old search was 3.5secs new search 0.35 seconds,
    I hardly use it enough to complain about how slow it is.

    Might also explain why you have a Black "Duplicator" badge, hint hint nudge nudge.

  • neil on 02/11/2013 - 00:28
    +4

    Hmm, where to start…

    The best way to see what the crew is working on is to check the developments wiki.

    Why not implement something that people will use

    What is your suggestion? We get suggestions and comments every day which we constantly discuss.

    Search by default is supposed to bring the most relevant result (as well as being fast). However, it seems people would rather search for active deals sorted by date as a default. Most bargain sites go by relevance and a little bit of tweaking. However Dealnews defaults to active and recent which I personally think is a good way to go.

    So Scott/Moocher will continue to do their magic and also improve the UI. This will not only help with people posting duplicates but users can also search for products they want to buy that are bargains.

    it's not publish like being able to quote a comment by link.

    Quoting a comment is part of the original markdown that has been in place since the beginning. All formatting is found below the commenting box. However, I do take your point and I will start a thread on how people can format their comments. And perhaps we should start a regular forum post to talk about how to use existing features (Reminders, Want/Have/Had, Front Page subscriptions etc.) like an OzBargain 101?

    So what things have been rolled out to users in the past couple of months?

    Instead of 3 letter denominators we have switched to full titles for better understanding and transparency. It also lets people declare they are Associated with a company without being a Representative of the company. This will be further developed.

    • Added Historical Highs and Lows for products via Priceslice. E.G. This Bing Lee Coffee Machine deal

    • Added mobile site link to footer so people can switch between the 2 (easy one!)

    • Instead of getting markup in emails, they now convert to HTML. Better looking emails.

    • Display net votes in side code blocks to give users a better idea of the total score of deal.

    • Classifieds so people can sell and swap their stuff.

    Lots of bug fixes that wouldn't make sense to explain and battling against a DDOS.

    On the non-technical side, we are constantly discussing with moderators and users feedback to make the site run smoother. The recent duplicate changes helped a lot and we have entirely revamped our voting guidelines from a novel sized 2106 words / 11625 characters down to 618 words/ 3348 characters.

    We are also constantly trying to get free tickets to give out to members (hopefully getting some Taste of Melbourne tix soon) and running contests. Also trying to get our first Melbourne Meetup going which would hopefully become a regular thing.

    Oh and OzBargain has a sister site in beta at the moment which Scott may announce soon. ;)

    • BlazinPast on 02/11/2013 - 01:53
      +3

      Can't wait to here more news on this sister site

  • scotty on 12/11/2013 - 08:41
    +2

    User rating is now back as opt-in only. To have the widget shown on user profile & popup,

    1. Your account must be at least 180 days old AND have at least 2 badges.
    2. You can go to your account settings page, under "OzBargain Settings", turn on "Show user rating widget".
    • foobar on 12/11/2013 - 10:18

      Can confirm it works and old ratings have been preserved.

    • donga100 on 12/11/2013 - 10:19

      I see that the old ratings have been saved, which is good.

    • [Deactivated] on 13/11/2013 - 19:08
      +1

      This feature sounds interesting. I'll look out for it once I get to 180 days.

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