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Lower the bar for voting

asked 2014-10-21 19:47:25 +0000

Kaligule gravatar image

updated 2014-10-21 19:52:26 +0000

Lets face it - this forum is a silent place: There not many questions and equally many answers. And thats ok. Hey, it is a forum about a window manager, after all.

Most of the users (98.5%) have not enough karma (<10) to upvote someting. And since there few upvotes it gets even harder to get the carma to do so. As a result, nothing is voted at all and good answers do not raise to the top.

I suggest to lower the amount of karma that is needed to vote threads and answers. It is 10 at the moment. Let it be 2. It motivates people to discuss more. And if we get a troll problem we can undo it easily.

And lower the bar to post links, too. Its ridiculous, why is the bar for linking 30 points? Not even 0.5% of the users have that.

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I agree with you, but this sort of dicussion I think belongs on the bug tracker at http://bugs.i3wm.org/

TonyC gravatar imageTonyC ( 2014-10-21 22:13:45 +0000 )edit

I agree wholeheartedly and am disappointed by unfounded resistance to act on the matter. Its a vicious cycle - you don't participate because you are unlikely to have any ability to do so in a meaningful way since the product simply isn't popular enough.

faust gravatar imagefaust ( 2015-03-30 12:34:37 +0000 )edit

I would have upvoted this, but of course I don't have enough Karma. Like almost everyone else.

faust gravatar imagefaust ( 2015-03-30 12:57:01 +0000 )edit

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answered 2014-10-22 12:42:51 +0000

Adaephon gravatar image

At the moment there seem to be 24587 users on this site. Seem to be, because most of these accounts are inactive. And yes, only 345 of them (slightly more than 1.4 %) may vote. Changing the requirement from 10 karma to 2 karma would allow another 67 users (slightly more than 0.27 %) to vote, not changing much when compared to the number of all users (still 98.3 % are unable to vote).

Another way to see it is that already over 80 % percent of all users that have more than the minimum of 1 karma point are able to vote.

As new user you can reach 11 karma with one single upvote to any of your questions or answers. Even 16 if your answer is just accepted. So I think the bar for voting is already ridiculously low.

The only way - barring down-votes - to even get to a karma score between 1 and 11 is by accepting an answer, for which 2 karma points are awarded. And I do not think that it should be possible to essentially award oneself voting permissions easily (or any permission for that matter).


As for the permissions to post links. I agree that it could probably be lowered a bit without "bad things"™ happening. But there are ways to post URLs without them being made to links automatically and usually someone with edit permissions will fix them. (At least I do, after checking the destination). I would not drop the requirement entirely, as the occasional spam message is bad enough without there being actual links in them.

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You guys are kidding, right? Talk about forcing a format where it is highly ineffective - for the sake of mimicking other sites.

faust gravatar imagefaust ( 2015-03-30 12:32:30 +0000 )edit

The purpose of this site is to be the FAQ for i3, to do deliver answers to questions. So a format that focuses on exactly that is hardly ineffective. Which format would be better suited in your opinion? Keeping in mind that discussions should be held on the mailing list and on IRC.

Adaephon gravatar imageAdaephon ( 2015-03-30 14:17:20 +0000 )edit
1

answered 2014-10-22 15:47:16 +0000

ANOKNUSA gravatar image

I would have to concur with Adaephon. I fail to see how allowing more people to silently click a link would result in more discussion. I reached enough karma to vote and post links in a couple days, and I did it by asking a single interesting question and answering a few others.

I can think of two reasons as to why traffic here might be low. These are based on the two categories of posters I've seen here most often:

  • Most of the questions I've answered come from people who haven't read the User's Guide, and seem to assume i3 is capable of/designed for something it is not.

  • Some of the posters clearly don't understand what i3 is prior to installing it. i3 almost seems to be the "gateway" tiling window manager of choice, and there seem to be a lot of people who install i3 before they've discerned the difference between a desktop environment like GNOME and a stand-alone, tiling window manager like i3. Hence they ask quite a few questions not directly related to the window manager, not understanding that setting wallpapers/connecting to networks/configuring printing/tweaking fonts/auto-mounting drives/changing icons and themes/whatever does not fall within the window manager's purview.

There's some overlap between those groups, but it seems to me that these two groups of posters produce two kinds of people: Those who read the documentation after asking something here, and learn everything they need to know from it; and those who conclude that i3 just isn't for them. In both cases, their activity here ceases. This isn't necessarily a bad thing---good documentation is one of the stated goals of the i3 developers, and the realization of that goal pretty much makes this forum obsolete. Nearly everything else---that stuff not related to i3---can be discovered via a search engine, or the wiki/forums of one's distro of choice.

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Asked: 2014-10-21 19:47:25 +0000

Seen: 612 times

Last updated: Oct 22 '14