best replies should appear first in a thread. - page 5.

m2017

legendary

Activity: 1792

Merit: 1296

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Quote from: Zoomic on September 26, 2023, 10:54:47 AM

I have this habit of reading through many replies to a thread before I will respond. At the course of reading through few pages of a thread before replying, I discovered that;

The earliest replies get more attention and earn more merit
Some of the replies from pages 3 upwards are repetition of what others said in pages 1 and 2.
I also understood that some of the quality contributors sometimes arrive late and their replies get buried easily

I therefore propose that, if possible, the arrangement of replies to a thread should be based on the number of merits that reply earned in that very thread. This will tend to sort the quality replies to appear in the first page no matter what time it was made. Even if the reply appeared on page 7, just 1 merit to that reply will send it to page 1. This will also help researchers to meet the most relevant posts in the first page, without having to search through tones o replies.
This sounds good to me but it may not go well with some other persons, I decided to drop the suggestion here. Although, I don't know much about the SMF version of the forum, but with the way people complain about it, it seems it doesn't allow some certain things to be incorporated to the forum.

It's an interesting ~~scientific~~ forum research you did, though. What is the sample? How many topics have you looked at to come to these conclusions? I'm willing to bet not much.

You touched on a very interesting topic and it would be great to conduct a full-fledged study on this topic. For example, by automating the process, because manually, by a person, it will take forever.

But nuances arise. How to evaluate the usefulness of posts? Merit is not a 100% objective measure of usefulness. Especially in the hands of merit sources, who sometimes throw away merit in batches left and right, which casts doubt on the usefulness of certain posts.

The idea of ranking posts based on merit seems interesting (moving posts with merit to the front pages), but wouldn't that disrupt the natural flow of discussion on the forum and create confusion in the sequence of posts? That is, it will turn out that the answers to the questions will be in front (the first pages) of the questions themselves. In my opinion, this will create chaos with posts.

robelneo

legendary

Activity: 3416

Merit: 1225

There is a modification for this already

Best Answer In fact other forums are already implementing this, if I have a forum I will never implement this as it will not encourage diversity in response readers will just focus on that one reply disregarding all the other incoming replies that could be better than the best reply and besides discussion begets new discussion within a discussion, if you have this it will discourage that.

Faisal2202

hero member

Activity: 1232

Merit: 475

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You do have good thinking, and I have also observed that too, but not everything is about merits. Sometimes, I try to make the first post to see how many members agree with my point of view and how many don't. Because when there are 10 or 20 posts that are mostly made on some topic, then I make mine. I don't get to know anyone's thoughts about it. Like, what do they think about my reply?

That's why I try to make posts that will remain on the first page.

And talking about your suggestion, I don't like it, and I don't want it to be implemented. Because this would become some sort of discrimination. Because not every member tries to copy others' replies, but unintentionally their context ends up the same. And that's not fully true that only the first two posts make good merits, I have seen many threads where people get merits even on the second and third pages.

The point is, we are here to add value and to learn from others, but yeah, merits also matter, and we cannot ignore that fact. But our first priority should not be based on merit.

NeuroticFish

legendary

Activity: 3668

Merit: 6382

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And who or what decides which are the best replies? Because it's clearly neither the length nor the rank of the poster that could be added into the equation.
I hope that you don't expect somebody (moderator?) would read every post and give it some points/ranking, right?

PS. You already said that the first posts get most merits and imho this makes the rule you've proposed somewhat annihilating itself.

Zoomic

sr. member

Activity: 616

Merit: 271

I have this habit of reading through many replies to a thread before I will respond. At the course of reading through few pages of a thread before replying, I discovered that;

The earliest replies get more attention and earn more merit
Some of the replies from pages 3 upwards are repetition of what others said in pages 1 and 2.
I also understood that some of the quality contributors sometimes arrive late and their replies get buried easily

I therefore propose that, if possible, the arrangement of replies to a thread should be based on the number of merits that reply earned in that very thread. This will tend to sort the quality replies to appear in the first page no matter what time it was made. Even if the reply appeared on page 7, just 1 merit to that reply will send it to page 1. This will also help researchers to meet the most relevant posts in the first page, without having to search through tones o replies.
This sounds good to me but it may not go well with some other persons, I decided to drop the suggestion here. Although, I don't know much about the SMF version of the forum, but with the way people complain about it, it seems it doesn't allow some certain things to be incorporated to the forum.

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