Public Polls for large updates

[Franix]

As a result of the recent update regarding the changes of the reputation system, a lot of members has become angry with it, because they have lost a lot of rep and will lose more. This was a big update to the site and it changes a lot for old members that has majority legacy reputation.

A lot of legacy reputation has been left by people that are inactive, and it is a hassle to message each and every one of them and beg them to update their rep so it won't get removed. This is what sparked a ton of debate and anger. Just reading shoutbox I can see a lot of members that are not pleased with this update.

For the future I suggest before doing any large updates that will change something essential on the site, do an official public vote on it. If it doesn't get the majority of the members to agree to the new update, don't push it as it's clearly not wanted.

Also, do a vote on this reputation thing. I, and a lot of other members, want this reverted.

 

[Sloth]

I doubt they'll ever accept this. Sometimes there has to be change for the betterment of the site that users may not like or agree with, but it still needs to be done. Alongside that polls can be easily manipulated and abused to favor a certain outcome.

 

[Justis]

The announcement to purge the feedback from our old corrupted system has already been retracted. There’s nothing to revert.
The current suggestion is not to remove the feedback, it’s to give that widely abused content immunity from moderation, keep it public, but just have it greyed, and allow everyone to choose how they see it in their totals, so we can prompt them with a warning about its abusive history. If we’re going to stop fighting the abuse of our old system, it needs to at least be systematically differentiated and our future members informed of why.

I doubt they'll ever accept this. Sometimes there has to be change for the betterment of the site that users may not like or agree with, but it still needs to be done. Alongside that polls can be easily manipulated and abused to favor a certain outcome.

Indeed; not everyone in this community cares about this websites’ future users. Not everyone feels a responsibility towards bettering the platform and ensuring that it will succeed beyond the term that they plan to be active here.
A yes-man is someone who blindly follows along with what everyone else says, because he lacks the expertise and confidence to make an informed decision. The owner of a successful company needs to be capable of more than just nodding their head.

The community’s opinion should always be taken into great consideration, but a large group of primarily children don't necessarily make the best managerial decisions for the future of such a complex platform, and they’re certainly not always right.

 

[Mick]

Back about a year ago we introduced some pretty radical changes to the way that we handle reputation. We made all reputation left by banned members be marked as uncounted in your reputation totals and disabled the reporting functionality to reduce abuse and targeted. The changes that we made were certainly controversial at the time, but looking back I'm a firm believer that the changes we made back then were the best that we could have made.

Our reputation system is very far from being perfect in its current state, and we fully recognise that. Since it's introduction we've changed many policies and spent countless hours developing new custom systems, such as disputing feedback.

At the moment we aren't planning to do any more development for our site until we can migrate to XF2. We're also not going to be making any changes to our policies surrounding reputation. Our system is stable at the moment, and making a change now when we're going to be redeveloping everything shortly isn't beneficial. Perhaps once we move to XF2 and have fixed all the bugs that come with that and have more time for some new development and to consider the impact that instituting new policies will result in.

Until then, I'll move this to denied. Once we migrate to XF2 if you feel that this is still relevant please create a new suggestion thread and we can look into it once again. Thank you to everyone for your support and criticism of our systems, it is definitely the best way for us to improve.

Thank you,