Going to implement the new mod soon!

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Going to implement the new mod soon!

Post by Jorg »

Hi guys!

Sorry for the long wait, I have been busy myself. I am going to implement UpCase's latest genius invention, called "The Answered Questions Mod" soon which means this weekend or tomorrow when I have some time then.

The Answered Questions Mod is basically for moderators and people who really make a hobby of answering as much posts as possible. It allows the user to mark a post as "Answered" which makes it an interesting post for people to search for because it contains a solution. The user can also call a post "Assisted Answer" which means it contains a partial solution to the problem. It will also help people who enthousiastically answer posts to see that some posts are already answered instead of receiving more comments and such.

To make answering more fun, UpCase decided to add a wxAwards system. What this means is that people who answer a post to the original's poster's satisfaction he/she gets 5 wxAwards points. An assisting answer gets 2 wxAward points.

These points don't make you more powerful, but it is a nice status to have. It tells people how good you are, and how many posts you have succesfully answered.

By tomorrow (in the weekend) somewhere the board will go down for a brief period of time as I will backup the old database, and apply new SQL commands to extend it, and also upload UpCase's version of the new php code.

So when that happens, at least I announced it ;-)

Regards,
-Jorgen
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Post by Tyler »

Hey Jorgen,

Awesome! Thanks to upCASE for his hard work and also to you for installing it. I think this is really going to be a nice feature.

Now I'll have to go back to all my old questions and give credit to all those people who helped me. :D

-Tyler
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Re: Going to implement the new mod soon!

Post by upCASE »

Hi!
So far so good, I hope you will like what I did :D

Two small additions:
Jorg wrote: To make answering more fun, UpCase decided to add a wxAwards system. What this means is that people who answer a post to the original's poster's satisfaction he/she gets 5 wxAwards points. An assisting answer gets 2 wxAward points.
"Assisted answer" get 1 wxAward :D
Jorg wrote: These points don't make you more powerful, but it is a nice status to have. It tells people how good you are, and how many posts you have succesfully answered.
In fact wxAward don't give you power, but the user rank is now based on these points.

What does that mean??
It means that normaly the rank is based on the number of total posts a user made. Not the ranks (which we will have to adapt I guess) will be decided upon the wxAwards a user has scored.

Jorg: We didn't decide if users will loose their rank and start with zero, or if we award them some wxAwards, so their rank will be the same. If the rank should be the same, well, I guess one more UPDATE on the user table has to be done. Should I write such an UPDATE?
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Post by Jorg »

I don't know what the best idea would be for the rank. Ryan seems to be pretty proud of his 800+ post count. Is there any way we can "downgrade" that to wxAwards using some kind of weighed factor?

I will also adjust the "rank names" accordingly, do you have any ideas how to call them with relation to the wxAwards ?

- Jorgen
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Post by upCASE »

Hi!
Jorg wrote:I don't know what the best idea would be for the rank. Ryan seems to be pretty proud of his 800+ post count. Is there any way we can "downgrade" that to wxAwards using some kind of weighed factor?
In fact I proud of my count, too. The count will be the same and shown, Ryans rank will still be moderator :D
I'd simply try and set the initial wxAwards to the minimum rank level of the corresponding rank the user allready has.
Jorg wrote: I will also adjust the "rank names" accordingly, do you have any ideas how to call them with relation to the wxAwards ?
The name can be the same, but I guess the minimums for the ranks would have to change as getting 5 points for an answered question would speed up rank ascension.
I don't have much time today, but I'll see what I can do.
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Post by leio »

As for giving initial points from post counts, I'm not sure if that would be needed.
As I understood there will be a "view posts that do not have an accepted answer" kind of post listing, and probably once the mod is in, people will start looking at that listing, and tick even very old answers as accepted, to shorten the list and such. So even old answers would be awarded over time.
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Post by upCASE »

Hi!
leio wrote:As for giving initial points from post counts, I'm not sure if that would be needed.
As I understood there will be a "view posts that do not have an accepted answer" kind of post listing, and probably once the mod is in, people will start looking at that listing, and tick even very old answers as accepted, to shorten the list and such. So even old answers would be awarded over time.
That was true for an older version... Ryan suggested that we should have a new posting type. Postings can be "Normal", "Question" (can be answered), "Sticky" and "Announcement".
As only questions can be answered and old posts typically are "Normal", no points can be awarded.

I justed checked: Only 38 people have a posting count over 50 which gives them a higher rank. For the rest it would still be the same. Question is if these 38 people mind having a beginners rank again and have to wait until they get points for a higher rank. Maybe linking the rank to the awards wasn't such a good idea after all. I thought this could give them a more powerfull meaning..

Anyway: Off for the weekend :D
Jorg: I hope everything works out well with implementing the changes. Let's discuss the problems on monday.
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Post by Jorg »

Hi UpCase,

I will start this afternoon to see if I can get it to work. Have a nice weekend!

ps. I was thinking of making a small sql script that could perform a formula where the postcount is recalculated to wxAwards. For example, divide all post counts with 5 or 10. This would give Ryan and me 90 wxAwards.

On the other hand, I don't mind losing my postcount and reset it to 0. I won't be the most valuable poster here anyway, I answer what I can but mostly you or Ry (and others) are the best solvers around ! ;-)

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Post by SnakeChomp »

You should really modify the "Answered question mod" to include appropriate tooltips (alt descriptions) for the images you show. I hovered my mouse over the "?" and CheckMark icons of an unanswered and answered post, but both of them said "New posts". This will confuse anybody new to the site who doesn't know we have an "Answered question" deal because the icons will seem foreign to them. They should probably say "Unanswered Question - New Posts" and "Answered Question - New Posts"
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Post by leio »

Would be also nice if a questions icon would exist for viewed and not viewed. In other words, be different like they are in case of normal posts for example.
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Post by Ryan Norton »

Also, questions/answers should no go above stickies LOL
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Post by Tyler »

leio wrote:Would be also nice if a questions icon would exist for viewed and not viewed. In other words, be different like they are in case of normal posts for example.
Yea I noticed this too. I think there is a difference though. There is a little arrow icon (about 1mm^2) to the left of the topic title (not in the same table cell as the icon). Maybe it was just my eyes but I could have sworn this little itty bitty arrow left after the post was read. I don't know, but it was too small to spot the first time too. lol
Ryan Norton wrote:Also, questions/answers should no go above stickies
That was cracking me up too. I was looking at it trying to figure out what I was missing. lol
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Post by KevinHock »

I think I may have found a bug with the Questions mod. When you Preview a post, it seems that even if you selected "Normal" prior to previewing, the "Question" button gets selected again on the preview page. At least that's what happened to me trying to post about the wx book in the announcements forum.
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Post by upCASE »

Thanks Kevin.
I'll add that to the bug tracker asap.
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Post by Jorg »

Ok, all changes on the test forum are now merged to the main forum.

I think the best way of applying the changes, is merging the code base every weekend, so we have some time to test and fix the bugs.

Now the user cannot get points when answering his/her own post, and some cosmetical changes are applied, the icon size should be ok, and some typos are fixed.

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