Transparency on Member Stats

[wk057]

I don't believe members should be allowed to block other members from viewing their forum profile, specifically the stats on post ratings.

People should be able to see the stats on people they're dealing with, not be allowed to hide them from other members. The signal to noise ratio of this forum has already gotten tremendously bad over the past few years... and this doesn't help.

I've noticed that the bulk of the trolls here on this forum (and I won't sugar coat it, there are plenty of trolls here) use this to hide the fact that a vast majority of their posts are garbage (and thus disliked) as well as hide that they dislike virtually every post they come across that doesn't fit their narratives. People should be aware of this information so they know who's posts to take seriously and who's to take with a grain (or pile) of salt.

I've no issue with people not providing personal info in their profile, disabling commenting, hiding their last online status, etc... but the post ratings stats should be 100% available for other forum members one way or another.

Please correct this. Either adjust everyone to "Members Only", or make the ratings stats available regardless of if their profile is viewable or not (such as add them to the profile popup that's viewable for everyone regardless of this setting).

Thanks.

TL;DR - Please remove the option "People You Follow Only" from the "View your details on your profile page" setting, and adjust everyone who used this setting to "Members Only" so that users can see the post ratings stats of people they're dealing with for transparency purposes.

Or: Make the post ratings stats available on the popup when clicking on a user's name, outside of their profile.

@doug @danny

 

[MP3Mike]

I 100% agree with this. Post rating stats should be viewable for every user by every user.

 

[MP3Mike]

In fact I would even like the rating stats to be listed in the little profile section on the left of every post. (But I can see where that could make the post taller than it needs to be. But I would rather have the rating stats than the avatar picture.)

 

[bxr140]

Meh. In my experience on TMC (and pretty much everywhere on the internet), statistics are very much NOT an indication of the quality or validity of one's posts. Long timers say dumb *sugar* all the time, noobs say brilliant *sugar* all the time.

You can't control everything, and you'll go mad trying to control trolls. If someone says something dumb, challenge it with facts and logic or just let it go.

 

[wk057]

Meh. In my experience on TMC (and pretty much everywhere on the internet), statistics are very much NOT an indication of the quality or validity of one's posts. Long timers say dumb *sugar* all the time, noobs say brilliant *sugar* all the time.

You can't control everything, and you'll go mad trying to control trolls. If someone says something dumb, challenge it with facts and logic or just let it go.

Obviously challenging trolls with facts and logic doesn't work... otherwise they wouldn't be trolls.

And really, I know this isn't going to "control trolls", really. It's just another tool to help people choose their battles.

There's just no reason to allow a user to hide this information. I could write a script to dig through a user's posts and tally all of the post ratings, if I really wanted to. It's not like this information is private. It should be readily available, though. Another metric, like post count, that members can take into account as they see fit... but since it involves other members overall, I think it has a bit more value to it than post count.

 

[bxr140]

It's just another tool to help people choose their battles.

Sure, agree. Flip side, its not clear to me there's actually someone that would benefit from this tool. Most people can pretty easily sniff out trolls, and its hard to imagine those who can't actually looking up user statistics just in case.

I'll admit I usually stay in my particular corners of TMC (you caught me on a lucky day where I clicked on 'new posts' ), but I just don't see this as a widespread problem. Certainly not wide enough to start a thread on it!

 

[wk057]

Mainly just something simple the forum admins can quickly and easily do to improve things, even slightly. Even if the benefits to this change are minimal (which is debatable, since I think it'd be great, considering it's pretty common for the persistent trolls to hide their ratings this way), there aren't any detriments at all to making everyone's ratings available. What's the point of the ratings if you can't see them anyway? I'd say remove the ratings entirely, or make them available 100%.

 

[wk057]

In fact I would even like the rating stats to be listed in the little profile section on the left of every post. (But I can see where that could make the post taller than it needs to be. But I would rather have the rating stats than the avatar picture.)

Somehow I missed this post originally (was checking back on this thread to bump it and probably bug @doug with another tag ...). This is actually what many other forums I frequent do. You can see at a glance right in the thread who the trolls are, who the newbies are, and who the legitimate contributors are. This would be great to have here.

The ratings system definitely isn't perfect, but it does average out pretty well to be more useful than not. There's no point in having a rating system at all if the stats aren't viewable, though, so this needs some kind of fix.

 

[doug]

Thanks for the suggestion. We're doing a major update in the next few weeks, so will revisit after that.

 

[MP3Mike]

Thanks for the suggestion. We're doing a major update in the next few weeks, so will revisit after that.

@doug did the major update get completed? If so, have you given any thought to the possibility of making the ratings more visible?

 

[wk057]

@doug did the major update get completed? If so, have you given any thought to the possibility of making the ratings more visible?

Yeah, would be helpful. More of the trolls are trying to hiding their stats.