Enhance WordPress: Voting to make lengthy forum discussions more comprehensible

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  dontgetfooledagain · Member · Jun 17, 2016 at 1:02 am

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  Many forum discussions suffer from:

  1. repetition,

  2. needlessly verbose contributions,

  3. posts which do not address the topic under discussion, and

  4. ad hominem attacks

  As a consequence, someone viewing a page could be dissuaded from making the effort to read through all of the contributions and miss those which may be really helpful.

  One possible solution is for WordPress to be enhanced as follows:

  Only those contributions judged by visitors to be informative and insightful to be published in full on that page. Those posts, judged to be repetitive, needlessly verbose, etc., could be published only in summary on that page, with the full post published elsewhere and linked to. Where even more visitors judge the contribution adversely rather than favourably, the contribution summary could be posted in a smaller font. That way, as posts judged more adversely by visitors are displayed less prominently, the forum page would be more comprehensible to visitors, less familiar with the subject matter, without anyone’s opinion being censored.

  Site visitors would be given more say by allowing each visitor to indicate using a check box whether he/she finds another contribution, informative, repetitive, misleading, irrelevant or whatever. Possibly a value of -1 could be assigned to each ‘vote’ for repetitive, misleading or irrelevant and a value of +1 could be assigned to each vote for informative. A larger range of numerical values could be used.

  Of course such a voting system could be abused by automated processes on the Internet. A possible solution is as follows:

  Where a large number of votes start being made in a short period of time from a single IP address or network, those votes could automatically be given a fraction (say 10%, 1%) of the worth of other votes or disregarded altogether.