A Final Solution to the Wiki Question

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Null said:
The initial problem with the wiki idea is that people do not want to donate their time. Out of this entire thread, maybe 2 or 3 people have valiantly stepped forward for some sort of autopilot wageless job
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I think I found the problem and it's not people donating their time. That last part, "autopilot wageless job." This entire site survives off the userbase and their contributions: making threads, supplying information, OC, even just making quality funnies. People do this because we do get something back for what we do. People try to make people laugh just because making people laugh is a very rewarding experience, doing some kind of work for a community is rewarding when the community genuinely appreciates you for it, etc.

Are you a fan of capitalism? Reward for work. I'm not saying to pay the people for doing some kind of task to make the site better (surely not that you could anyway because you're surely a broke faggot) but perhaps there is something that could be done for users here who contribute in some meaningful way. Doing some kind of job that condenses the shit and makes things readable and gives an entrypoint to new users would be one hell of a task and I think everyone here can agree that would be some serious work. We are at least lucky enough to have users here who have been around long enough to know considerable history and would be able to make worthwhile contributions.

I have no idea what the "reward for work" in question could be. To reiterate I'm not considering pay and I highly doubt a lot of people would even want that, and we have enough trouble here regarding payment related shit for that to be remotely an option. The problem is that I actually have no idea what the reward would be if not money. But just take it as some food for thought. Or don't, it's whatever.
 
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I like the green. this will stay functioning in BP, right? I feel it's really needed in some of those threads.
 
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skiddlez said:
I have no idea what the "reward for work" in question could be. To reiterate I'm not considering pay and I highly doubt a lot of people would even want that, and we have enough trouble here regarding payment related shit for that to be remotely an option. The problem is that I actually have no idea what the reward would be if not money. But just take it as some food for thought. Or don't, it's whatever.
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People like their stickers and shit but that's not really something that translates to a wiki. Contributions are in a faceless ledger on a back page instead of upfront next to each paragraph. I'll think about it but there's a ton of problems regarding a wiki.

cuddle striker said:
this will stay functioning in BP, right?
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Yes.
 
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skiddlez said:
I think I found the problem and it's not people donating their time. That last part, "autopilot wageless job." This entire site survives off the userbase and their contributions: making threads, supplying information, OC, even just making quality funnies. People do this because we do get something back for what we do. People try to make people laugh just because making people laugh is a very rewarding experience, doing some kind of work for a community is rewarding when the community genuinely appreciates you for it, etc.

Are you a fan of capitalism? Reward for work. I'm not saying to pay the people for doing some kind of task to make the site better (surely not that you could anyway because you're surely a broke faggot) but perhaps there is something that could be done for users here who contribute in some meaningful way. Doing some kind of job that condenses the shit and makes things readable and gives an entrypoint to new users would be one hell of a task and I think everyone here can agree that would be some serious work. We are at least lucky enough to have users here who have been around long enough to know considerable history and would be able to make worthwhile contributions.

I have no idea what the "reward for work" in question could be. To reiterate I'm not considering pay and I highly doubt a lot of people would even want that, and we have enough trouble here regarding payment related shit for that to be remotely an option. The problem is that I actually have no idea what the reward would be if not money. But just take it as some food for thought. Or don't, it's whatever.
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See, that's why I like the way this feature is shaping out. Your recognition for making a good post is being the highlighted post everyone's going to read - either because you did an especially noteworthy zinger or you provided some new information, or summarised something in a way people found useful. Each person who wants to acknowledge it just has to click a rating and scroll on, which they pretty much do now anyway, nobody has to actually go out of their way.

It's the best of all worlds, because it requires no additional effort from moderators, provides some feedback about who is a good poster, it's not that easy to game it and once @Null has set it in motion it shouldn't need much in the way of fiddling with to keep it going.
 
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Null said:
that's not really something that translates to a wiki. Contributions are in a faceless ledger on a back page instead of upfront next to each paragraph.
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Precisely, wiki kind of work is faceless, thankless work. Not to mention it's boring as shit. More or less I'm saying that it's really unrewarding, whereas posting content is often much more rewarding. Maybe someone has an idea on how to fix that problem.

polonium said:
See, that's why I like the way this feature is shaping out. Your recognition for making a good post is being the highlighted post everyone's going to read - either because you did an especially noteworthy zinger or you provided some new information, or summarised something in a way people found useful. Each person who wants to acknowledge it just has to click a rating and scroll on, which they pretty much do now anyway, nobody has to actually go out of their way.

It's the best of all worlds, because it requires no additional effort from moderators, provides some feedback about who is a good poster, it's not that easy to game it and once @Null has set it in motion it shouldn't need much in the way of fiddling with to keep it going.
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I'm not quite so sure that ratings are necessarily a good enough indicator. They have been entirely useless in terms of functionality until recently, therefore people have kinda treated them as such. It will be interesting to see if this actually translates to the better posts getting pulled out among the garbage, but I'm not very optimistic about that.

For example, plenty of useless posts have shitloads of ratings because they are the first reply to a thread that was featured (back when we had featured threads) or became exceptionally popular. Some of my posts are these, just the first reply, gaining shitloads of rates not because it was any good or anything. A few of them were actually funny but definitely none of them were informative. The first reply to any thread is usually never contributing a damn thing other than quick wit.

That's just one scenario I can think of. There are surely others. I don't know how good of a metric ratings are for literally anything other than post visibility. Posts that have been viewed heavily have shitloads of rates.
 
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skiddlez said:
I have no idea what the "reward for work" in question could be. To reiterate I'm not considering pay and I highly doubt a lot of people would even want that, and we have enough trouble here regarding payment related shit for that to be remotely an option. The problem is that I actually have no idea what the reward would be if not money. But just take it as some food for thought. Or don't, it's whatever.
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You could offer the True & Honest Fan privileges to people who don't have it yet (or some other kind of sticker) but volunteer to help. However, I think there's a huge difference between contributing to a thread with some screenshots and a quip, and sifting through thousands of posts to compile into a decent Wiki page. I personally love KF but right now I just wouldn't have the time to do a satisfying wiki entry even if I wanted to.
 
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Query OK, 4875639 rows affected (54 min 59.239 sec)
Rows matched: 5754510 Changed: 4875639 Warnings: 0

I had to pull a lot of strings to get updating the entire post table (5.7m rows) to compile data from the reaction table (32m rows) to work in under an hour lol, but now that it's done reaction highlighting should be based off total score count instead of aggregate score value. I'm going to run a much, much, much slow process to recalculate post scores based on their new rating values in case I decide against this.
 
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skiddlez said:
For example, plenty of useless posts have shitloads of ratings because they are the first reply to a thread that was featured (back when we had featured threads) or became exceptionally popular. Some of my posts are these, just the first reply, gaining shitloads of rates not because it was any good or anything. A few of them were actually funny but definitely none of them were informative. The first reply to any thread is usually never contributing a damn thing other than quick wit.
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There are a lot of lolcows who have some really obvious, easy joke that can be made out of them, like they're fat or have a ridiculous face, and so the top few posts are just calling them fat or ugly which, while true, is not particularly insightful or useful. Often there are threads with bad beginnings that only became good because of stuff the cow did long after their thread started.
 
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An update on this.
Null said:
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.
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I've made changes so that it's possible to highlight posts based on reaction count over score. The system is going through and fully recalculating reaction scores so that if I feel the current metric is inadequate, my backup idea is ready to go. It's going to take several days for the database to finish going through the entire body of posts on the site. I've had it running for a few hours and we're only at 272,739 out of some 5.7 million.

You should already be seeing the new highlighting preference and it should include horrifically bad posts. It won't be drastic but I'm hoping it'll be more entertaining than just "good" posts.

Tomorrow I'm going to work on the less noticeable moderation/backend chore list and once I'm happy with everything I'll figure out how I want to do "jump to next highlight".
 
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