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[Toady One]

After some mess with the split and merge topics button, this now has its own thread, sort of.

[Draco18s]

After some mess with the split and merge topics button, this now has its own thread, sort of.

Toady is a god!

[BlackSash]

Thx Toady.

Yesterday was Koninginnedag ("Queen's day") which is a Dutch public holiday, meaning I didn't do squat all day really. New improvements however include functioning voting system, working item adding and removing and a start on the administration frontend.

I'll put up the latest version (have set up a SVN repository for it at home) later today, with the login checks disabled so you can all see what it actually looks like.

[Tormy]

Hm, the current system is very user friendly and simple, what is the problem with it? 

[BlackSash]

Hm, the current system is very user friendly and simple, what is the problem with it? 

Well, purely from my point of view:

The current site is one *huge* list, which works but has the (AFAIC) major drawback that only the first 30 or so items get any attention. Very few people actually look even halfway down the list. Resulting in a lot of good ideas that don't get the attention they deserve.

Aditionally, selecting the issues you want is laborious; I sometimes forget which items I selected and scrolling through the massive page trying to find the one thing you may not want in lieu of something more interesting you came across a few minutes later is a chore I'd rather avoid. (Yes that is a proper sentence, read it again if you didn't get it the first time round )

Huge lists are not user friendly, at all. One way to work around this is to work with pagination, which raises it's own issues (forgetfulness again), another is to minimize the amount of text displayed, shorten the list, and find other ways to give people the info they need for decisions.

I chose to always display your chosen items in a separate list. Thereby always keeping them in plain view and reducing the amount of scrolling and reading back the current system has.

I am not an usability expert, but that is what bugs me about the current system.

And finally, as mentioned above: I always had an idea like this in my head, the current voting system just was the spark of inspiration I needed to start the actual building.
I am building this in my free time, building code that will probably be GPL'd in the future and Toady or anyone else is in no way obliged to use it. If the users here reject it that is fine: i'll finish it anyway and put it on SF for anyone who wants it.

Until that time though, I'll build it specifically for here, so that we may enjoy a simple and user-friendly graphical system for making our wishes known to Toady and Three-Toe.

[BlackSash]

Lots of work done today:

• Got the actual voting system working, it's all drag n drop, there are no buttons to push.
• Now fully integrated into the SMF system (though can be used standalone).
• Records and tallies votes as people make them. Basically as close to realtime as any PHP app can be.
• Lots of security additions, removed some extraneous code.

I attempted to make this app as secure as possible, especially as it's still in early testing phase, so the item add feature is disabled. You can fill in the boxes but no new items will be added to the database.

Keep in mind that if you use this system and find that the items you chose do not _stay_ chosen, that's because you do not have an userid. It works correctly if you are logged into the accompanying forum. I disabled the user security so you can see how it works.

Here it is!

Any and all ideas and suggestions are welcome.

[Silverionmox]

My votes don't stick, although I'm logged in. Using Opera on XP.

[Draco18s]

Looking at it I have two that stick (the same two regardless of what I voted).  Logged in, FireFox 3.

[Dame de la Licorne]

Looks good.  But how are you planning on displaying the voters' general preferences?  By displaying the number of votes next to the topic, by color, something else?

[BlackSash]

My votes don't stick, although I'm logged in. Using Opera on XP.

Looking at it I have two that stick (the same two regardless of what I voted).  Logged in, FireFox 3.

As noted in my last update: votes do not stick because even though you are logged into the DF forums, you are _not_ logged into _my_ forums which is what it's linked to. I could probably ask Toady to add a copy to these forums but it's not production ready yet.

Again: this is known and is at the moment correct behaviour.

Looks good.  But how are you planning on displaying the voters' general preferences?  By displaying the number of votes next to the topic, by color, something else?

Well the simplest way is exactly the same as the current system: popular items float to the top as people vote for them. I have added the number of votes in parentheses after the title, but I agree it should be a bit clearer.
Also the background colour changes according to the rankings: starting with a very light background and turning progressively darker up to a cutoff. Currently the top 5 items are highlighted in this way but it can be any number of items and any combination of colours that I can write into an expression easily. Changing colours like that is a fancy bit of math but it worked out allright like this.

Any suggestions?

[zagibu]

What you have so far is very promising. I find it a bit tedious to have to drag stuff around to read descriptions, though. Maybe you could simply display the description when an item is clicked in the list? Or by hovering over it?

Do I understand it correctly that it encompasses two different voting systems, one, the three direct votes, and two, the ordering of the items in the list? If so, how are you calculating an item's position? Will we be able to see two different rankings for the different mechanisms or are you somehow merging the two into one ranked list?

I'm also really curious how you will tackle the "long list" problem.

[Draco18s]

Could we also get some list sorting buttons?

Alphabetical
Popular
Most Recent

In both ascending and descending come to mind.

[BlackSash]

What you have so far is very promising. I find it a bit tedious to have to drag stuff around to read descriptions, though. Maybe you could simply display the description when an item is clicked in the list? Or by hovering over it?

Sure, this is a possibility I have been thinking about. Shouldn't be too difficult to do.

Do I understand it correctly that it encompasses two different voting systems, one, the three direct votes, and two, the ordering of the items in the list? If so, how are you calculating an item's position? Will we be able to see two different rankings for the different mechanisms or are you somehow merging the two into one ranked list?

Basically right now there is a difference between the overall rankings, shown on the statistics page, and your personal rankings, on the user page. The user page currently shows all items that are enabled and puts them simply in the order of their ID. This can be changed to anything, really. Probably the default order of date entered would be most useful, so recently entered items will end up on top.

The statistics shows all items ordered by their overall vote count. I agree that it doesn't look much at the moment but that is mostly due to the fact that everyone is currently voting with 1 single user, and therefore constantly overriding one anothers votes. There is not much I can do about that at the moment. I have however tested it on my server where I made additional accounts and voted for different things. Items with many votes will end up way at the top, while the rest, with either fewer or even no votes, sink to the bottom. In that respect this system is exactly like the current one. I cannot think of any reason to change that, either...

I'm also really curious how you will tackle the "long list" problem.

So am I: I'm playing with several designs at the moment, but since my main gripe with the current system is the fact that your chosen items move off screen as you read the list, I've at least tackled that problem by making your chosen items always visible. I see no really usable way of displaying the amounts of data we have now on a small page; there will have to be *some* scrolling, somewhere. I've confined the actual scrolling to the source list, instead of the full page.

[BlackSash]

Getting somewhere now... Administration interface is underway, and a few changed have been made to the user page. I am also rebuilding the voting system to, as requested, show item details when clicking on a list item, rather than having to drag it.

This should make it easier to select the things you want, with as few interactions as possible. Changes have been mostly added to SVN, so I'll update the online version to reflect the new version somewhere this weekend.

[BlackSash]

Made a small update to FiPo. Please read it for the latest and greatest