Improve Ideastorm voting system

September 25, 2012

Posted By:  caspar347

2 Votes

Status: Archived

Promote

I know that the title does not word it well, but it seems that if your idea does not get 10+ votes before it is shoved out of the "recent ideas" section it goes unnoticed by anyone that doesn't look at the actual list of recent ideas. While I don't actually have an idea on what to do about this, I would like to bring it to the attention of others.

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  • Sep 26, 2012     Comment Link

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    Posted By: IdeaStorm Moderator Cy_J

    No need to thank me, I'm just doing my job.  I should be thanking you for starting the conversation so we could discuss it.  :)
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  • Sep 25, 2012     Comment Link

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    Posted By: caspar347

    Oh. I didn't think of it that way. Wow, now the main page makes a lot more sense. Thank you for answering my question!
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  • Sep 25, 2012     Comment Link

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    Posted By: IdeaStorm Moderator Cy_J

    Thanks for the idea caspar347.  Let me explain a bit about the history of the home page in case you or anyone else reading this is not aware.  

    When the site launched in 2007 the home page contained only the popular ideas and all the recent submittions were kept on a seperate page.  Each one of those pages held 20 ideas including the entire wording and the ability to vote without entering the idea itself.  The popular ideas list on the home page was determined solely on the number of votes received which at the time accounted for 10 points each.  Over time the point values would deteriorate until each vote was only worth one point.  The process was hidden on the back end to avoid the confusion of visiters seeing point values drop on their ideas over time. The problem was that unless a recent idea made the home page quickly it would become lost in the stream of new ideas (much like you explain). It was also noticed that the ideas on the home page kept getting votes while the recent ideas were not getting the same attention.  It seemed that people would visit the home page, vote on the ideas on the page and then move on rather than to look at the recent content.  

    When the site was upgraded this year, steps were taken in an attempt to improve this process.  The first step was to have the home page be a combination of recent and trending ideas as well as the featured content which could be ideas, Storm Sessions, Idea Partners or Rockstars.  This way if someone visits the home page we have 3 ways to draw them further into the site in order to view more content.  The second step was to remove the ability to vote without entering the idea itself.  By having the user enter the idea itself it leads to the possibility that they will also read any comments or idea extensions on the idea and hopefully join the conversation.  The third step was to change the trending ideas to rank ideas not only by vote count but also to factor in the number of comments.  That way if two ideas have the same vote value the one with more comments will appear higher in the list.  We also changed the way votes were displayed to only show the true number rather than the factor of ten that the onld point system displayed.  I think it gives visiters a more accurate sense of the popularity of an idea as many times people would think that ideas had received 10 times more votes than it really had on the old site.  The last change was taking away the option to demote an idea which deducted points rather than promote it.  On the old site a new idea would sometimes be demoted quickly which would give it a score of zero.  Many times I would see an idea that did not seem unreasonable go into negative points after such an early fate.  I can even point out some ideas Dell actually used that are in the low or negative points due to the demotions.  

    Overall I think that the site gives a better chance to new ideas than the old version but I am open to discussion on how the process can change in the future.