A Final Solution to the Wiki Question

[Beluga]

Maybe (if we don't want to rely on automation) for active threads you could ask volunteers/experts in a specific lolcow to read back the thread, compile a list of informative posts to report to a mod who can then highlight said posts? A "jump to next informative/*insert reaction score* post" would be nice, too.

I also agree with people who suggest using the Kiwi theme's colours but it's just for aesthetic purposes, nbd. Sorry I can't contribute more, I'm very unimaginative.

 

[heyilikeyourmom]

I will say this: it shouldn’t be applied outside of lolcow and community watch type threads. Part of the fun of the rest of the site is that people have an equal platform to share their thoughts, whether they’re incredibly dumb or (in my case) works of unfettered sexually stimulating genius.

 

[BoingBoingBoi]

I was mostly looking for information on how people would like to wiki-tize the OPs but it was made pretty clear from the posts that the idea of highlighting the best posts in large threads for expedient reading was much more desired so I've started working on that.

As a stage one for this extension, I'm running an automated process every hour to look through active threads and start paginating it into best ofs.

To make this more fair and to adjust for new site activity over time, each thread is broken up into n pages (currently 3) and the most positively reacted n posts from those pages are identified. Those posts are the ones with gold borders in recently active threads. Expect some wonkiness in the newest pages of a thread, as I've not done anything to (for instance) stop the first post on the 4th page of a thread from getting highlighted if it has no subsequent posts.

I'm doing this now so people can give feedback on how my idea works before I begin figuring out how I want to use this data useful. I am debating between adding a totally new threaded view of just the best posts, or adding a button that says "jump to next highlight" while keeping you in the real view of the thread. I am leaning towards the latter.

highlighting the best posts in a thread to make it easier for people to catch-up or get to know a cow/topic seems like the best of both worlds. minimal extra work beyond the forum, but a bit more streamlined

 

[vertexwindi]

The problem with manually highlighting posts is that what fucking mod is gonna sit through hundreds, or even thousands of pages just to highlight that shit? Even doing it for just one thread is a gigantic chore. Nobody's got time for that shit.

 

[Haramburger]

The problem with manually highlighting posts is that what fucking mod is gonna sit through hundreds, or even thousands of pages just to highlight that shit? Even doing it for just one thread is a gigantic chore. Nobody's got time for that shit.

If they're pre-sifted, I'd say it's a one hour job for a mod to go through a link list and highlight the posts per 1000 pages. But that's an hour of suffering and tedious work even if you were being paid. I wouldn't expect a mod to and agree with your post(manual excel and database assignments are the worst).

 

[Coleslaw]

I will say this: it shouldn’t be applied outside of lolcow and community watch type threads. Part of the fun of the rest of the site is that people have an equal platform to share their thoughts, whether they’re incredibly dumb or (in my case) works of unfettered sexually stimulating genius.

We also could use that to mark new stories in megathreads.

 

[Null]

I've made some changes to the system as a bit of a stopgap as people were complaining very loudly about the gold. It's a bit more subtle. I am probably going to remove the green top border once the ability to jump to the next highlight is added. The border is just there now so people can see what the system likes as it is now.

Some things left on my to-do list before moving to cap it off with the feature to jump to next highlight:
- Determine if I can easily add a "reaction count" column so I can evaluate posts on absolute value instead of aggregated.
- Rebuild every post's reaction score because just changing the value of a rating does not do that retroactively on posts, just the user's total reaction score.
- Make it so that moderator events (merging, splitting, deletions) may flag a thread for a full highlight rescan instead of just picking off where it left off.

 

[polonium]

This whole idea is great for cow threads and community watch threads. Lot of people and groups I’d love to learn more about, but most of those threads are packed with filler and like a thousand pages. No way I’m the only one who feels that way.

It's exactly the reason megathreads and merging threads on "similar" topics is a bad idea. You end up with a too many extra posts, each of which relies on the context of the ones before so you either have to slog through it, abandon it, or read bits and pieces and try to work out what's going on from inferences. I definitely find the barrier to reading some of the more popular lolcow threads is that I don't have hours to spend informing myself on the backstory and the last dozen pages of a thread are useless without it, so you just go meh and scroll past.

This might be an interesting way to mitigate that problem.

 

[Sheriff of CWCville]

I feel as if the gold post go a good ways in being able to easily put together encyclopedic entries. Maybe even include a way to filter the thread to only display gold posts for the ease of people putting these potential entries together.

I will say this much, either system is a welcome addition imo. It’s been a pretty big barrier of entry knowing to really experience the full effect of the cow that I’ll need to dig thru pages and pages of commentary just to happen upon relevant posts.

 

[Beluga]

I've made some changes to the system as a bit of a stopgap as people were complaining very loudly about the gold. It's a bit more subtle. I am probably going to remove the green top border once the ability to jump to the next highlight is added. The border is just there now so people can see what the system likes as it is now.

I personally wouldn't remove the border, it highlights the post even more, but again, it's just a cosmetic feature.

 

[Agarathium1066]

I personally did not mind the gold borders but I can see someone having an issue with it. Is it possible for this to be an account side toggle to allow the 'brighter' borders for notable posts?

 

[Null]

No. Not everything can be an option. Use a custom CSS extension.

 

[Cheeseburger Picnic]

Adding an "Update/Happening" sticker that can be weighed more heavily in the formula you're using to determine highlighted posts might be really useful for what you're trying to achieve with this feature, also would be helpful to people compiling wiki entries down the line since it sounds like you're still interested in that.

 

[0 0]

Now that this is a system, do you think it would be possible to make a button for threads that only shows highlighted posts for casual lurkers who just want to skim through for important posts?

 

[James Smith]

I hastily switched it over to 'reaction score'. Originally it was just 'reactions', XenForo doesn't keep reaction counts in any accessible field. I think that it'd be better to highlight a post with a ridiculously low score or one that is very contentious with a 0 effective rating but 100 bad/good ratings applied to it.

I still plan on making it total reactions the general barometer.

I'd imagine you can make it ignore deleted posts; if you can ignore deleted shitty posts with lots of reactions those posts won't negatively interact with the feature.

 

[Null]

It already ignores deleted posts mate.

 

[James Smith]

I personally did not mind the gold borders but I can see someone having an issue with it. Is it possible for this to be an account side toggle to allow the 'brighter' borders for notable posts?

If you use a custom CSS extension to change it you can currently use the CSS selector .hb-react-threadHighlight and set the property border-top-color to whatever you want; you can set it to red or yellow or something that will work for your taste.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

I've made some changes to the system as a bit of a stopgap as people were complaining very loudly about the gold. It's a bit more subtle. I am probably going to remove the green top border once the ability to jump to the next highlight is added. The border is just there now so people can see what the system likes as it is now.

Some things left on my to-do list before moving to cap it off with the feature to jump to next highlight:
- Determine if I can easily add a "reaction count" column so I can evaluate posts on absolute value instead of aggregated.
- Rebuild every post's reaction score because just changing the value of a rating does not do that retroactively on posts, just the user's total reaction score.
- Make it so that moderator events (merging, splitting, deletions) may flag a thread for a full highlight rescan instead of just picking off where it left off.

The gold border was maybe a bit much, but this new one is basically the same design as the reply box in the bottom. As much as we hate ratings here, it'd at least slightly nudge people into a direction of "hey kid want gold? dont type dogshit".

The green line easily gets lost in even a slow downwards scroll.

 

[Namekian George Floyd]

I'm a complete moron when it comes to this stuff but maybe just making sorting through the threads easier would rid us of the need for a wiki. All of the posts with real meat usually get a bunch of informative reacts so maybe make a setting for threads where only posts with a certain amount of informative reacts are shown. Of course there might be a problem if certain posts don't get enough of those informative reacts so maybe also set certain trustworthy users up with a special informative react that automatically sends whatever they react to. to being there when sorted by being informative. They wouldn't be mods, they'd just be trusted to judge which posts are important if the normal users missed something.
I don't know shit about site design or if what I just said is even possible but I think if there was just a way to separate people's opinions on a certain cow from the actual, objective information in a thread then a that'd probably be better than a wiki post.

 

[Barbarella]

I will say this: it shouldn’t be applied outside of lolcow and community watch type threads. Part of the fun of the rest of the site is that people have an equal platform to share their thoughts, whether they’re incredibly dumb or (in my case) works of unfettered sexually stimulating genius.

There are mega threads in other areas, such a Beauty Parlor (Chantel and Onision comes to mind) that this could be very handy for. We are always yelling to newbies to read the thread and not ask the same questions over and over, and this would actually make it possible to catch up.

Of course, it’s not necessary for the off-topic chat areas.

But, I saw one in BP yesterday and it’s gone today so I hope Null hasn’t changed his mind about that section.

I wonder if you could add some sort of button which people could click if a highlighted post doesn’t really enhance the knowledge of a cow. Rather than mods having to read a whole thread, they could just read that post and decide, “does this tell me something new, and advance knowledge, or not?” That way @Null, you won’t have to worry so much about the number of ratings when it’s just a joke or whatever. It can be reported as unnecessary highlight, mod can remove it. It won’t be long until it’s clean. .

Love the idea if implementation is simple