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Rating comments

A day off today. Rather clear out junk from the house, I’ve tried installing a comments rating system.

If you like a comment, you can click the green Thumbs Up; if you dislike it, you can click the red Thumbs Down.

Looks like it won’t let you vote on a comment posted from the same IP address you’re at.

Feedback welcome.

(For more about comments on this blog, see the comment rules)

Update 23/7/2010: It didn’t really work out.

By Daniel Bowen

Transport blogger / campaigner and spokesperson for the Public Transport Users Association / professional geek.
Bunurong land, Melbourne, Australia.
Opinions on this blog are all mine.

12 replies on “Rating comments”

I’ve always shied away from comment rating systems. I figure if someone doesn’t like or likes a comment I’d rather encourage them to respond to it rather then press a ‘don’t like/like’ button.

Personally I don’t mind the like button, but I dislike the dislike button. Pressing like is an easy way to express approval especially when the person has nothing more meaningful to contribute to the discussion. I disapprove of the dislike button because it seems impolite and I think people should explain why they dislike a post instead of using meaningless 1click criticism.

@mikeys, no, I can’t see who votes for what. It does record IP addresses in the database, but not in an easily readable form. (Though I’m no whiz with MySQL.)

Can’t we have a horizontal thumb as well? :^) And the don’t like could be a middle finger icon.

Uh, I’m starting to notice a few hidden due to bad rating comments. Naturally I presume you’ve got a decent spam system in place so I’m curious to see what was flagged as dislike.

Usually seems to be an opinion that’s against the herd… hiding these opinions might not be the smartest thing to do. Kinda annoying for readers like me that like to read all sides.

(I also just accidentally clicked the thumbs down button on one comment I wanted to read when I should have clicked the ‘show anyway’ text)…

-Oz

I didn’t think you’d be seeing any hidden, as I set that to -5, and I haven’t seen any go that low.

That said, I think it’s problematic, and I don’t like the way it seems to lock your click and make it impossible to turn it off. And I don’t think many people are voting anyway.

What I’m going to do is switch it to the Thumbs-up only option and see how that runs for a week.

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