Allowing page hits to lower a page score could have the undesired effect of penalizing contributors who share/promote their material outside of SummitPost - for instance, through links on blogs, Tweets, Facebook, etc. Big-picture wise, I can't imagine we want to discourage traffic to the site...

Page score calculation
I very much doubt if many people will actually change their voting behavior. Firstly, people don't change their behavior easily, secondly I presume only a minority will actually read enough of this discussion to even think about voting differently.

And then there might be those that do think about it, but decide that, since almost all of us used to vote 10 or nothing at all, starting to vote differently now may be unfair to new pages with respect to old ones.

That said, even if people keep voting the way they are now, I'm in favor of the new formulas to calculate page score from votes. The mere fact that they solve many of the known problems associated with votes other than 10 is a big improvement.

Power point calculation
As for the calculation of power points from page scores, while I value some types of contributions more than others, I would be hard pressed to say how much more I value which type.

Personally I find mountains and areas the most useful contributions, yet I spend more time browsing and reading trip reports, because I find a well written TR more entertaining than even the best description of a mountain or area that I have never visited or even contemplated visiting. So, while judging mountain and area pages primarily on usefulness, but trip reports on entertainment value, how could I possibly say which object type is worth more?

I won't go into the same detail for every other object types, as that would only obfuscate things. This thread has brought forward several opinions and arguments to change relative value of some types with regard to others, or even ignore some types in the calculation. I don't have a strong opinion as to what would be best for SP, but I'm inclined to think that it really doesn't matter much. I've posted a lot of images and albums, and while I enjoy it when people show their appreciation by voting or commenting on them, getting no points anymore wouldn't stop me from posting even one single picture or album.

Allowing page hits to lower a page score could have the undesired effect of penalizing contributors who share/promote their material outside of SummitPost - for instance, through links on blogs, Tweets, Facebook, etc. Big-picture wise, I can't imagine we want to discourage traffic to the site...

Don't forget about the media either. I would guess that most of the hits on my Bluejohn Canyon page (which if it weren't for the accident/movie would be a very obscure page) and photos were due to the movie 127 Hours and several news stories. Every time there's an accident, movie, news story, avalanche, or whatever, hits will go way up on whatever page.

Good points. A lot of us in Colorado link different pages through 14ers.com (a high traffic site), to answer questions, when someone is looking for beta on XX mountain. When someone ask for information on "Mount Powell" (for example) or something, it's easier to just post the SP link.

I guess the voting system doesn't need to be over complicated.

Bob Sihler wrote:

I am almost certain that currently only the owner gets the points. Everyone else gets zero. I've been admin on pages and given the rights to others, and the admins never saw point totals increase. I can definitely tell that the owner doesn't get partial points.

I am almost positive this is correct. It may have been different back when, though.

There is an easy way to test. I have a dummy account that I used to use for working on pages under the radar (never used for voting or trolling). I will give admin privs to it for some of my pages and see if there are any point changes tomorrow.

I agree that co-maintainers should split points.

No points for my admin-privileged avatar.

For a while, admin was like "co-owner" and received half of the points.

Then, it changed without notice or explanation.

I would like to see it possible to co-own pages once again.

Do we have an estimated "Go Live" date for the voting changes? I've largely been abstaining from voting awaiting the new system...and hoping we see more honest/realistic voting and better/more granular use of the entire scale.

Sarah you should probably still give my recent pages a 10/10. Better than doing nothing.

I assume it will be soon, but I don't know when. Tonight some folks looked at the new template to review the changes that will take place. It's almost finished, but there are a few additions that should be worked out. As you might know, we are trying to create as few angry folks as possible. Until a day or so ago the main menu was completely broken in IE8 and IE7! This is because they did not support the HTML5 tag "Nav". There were some other issues that needed to be addressed that are now fixed. In the web world us developers try hard at what we do with the little time that we have on our side.

Products typically have expected release dates. Why not SP? Because they set up everything way in advanced. They keep the news locked away from the public until everything is ready to go. In this case the news went public before there was any work done on the new template (not to discredit Matt for his optimizations he might have made before all this was known). This was to let folks know that something was being done and that Matt does care about the well being of SummitPost. I've had a lot of email conversations with him lately which it is very obvious to me that he cares about SP more than he's given credit.

Were doing what we can to make the changes as stable as possible before releasing the new version. We know some issues will arise right away (unfortunately). Some of them being changes needed to SP pages due to using deprecated code. But making this jump will ensure a better future for SP. Bad practices will some day catch up to us which is why we need to make the changes now rather than later. It's been an honor being apart of the project. Continue to vote appropriately on content and make change when the time is right. We've pumped a lot of hours into this and are quite eager ourselves to release this.

But the important thing for both myself and everyone else is to be patient! I once heard "Good Things take Time. Great things happen all at once!"

Montana Matt wrote:Right, but the plan was to only count hits for LOGGED IN users. Search engine traffic and traffic coming from 14ers.com isn't going to likely have many SP members who are logged into their account coming to the page that way.

I might have missed something, did not have time to go back and read the origin for this....but I disagree with this statement if in fact it is relating to what gets exposed on SP. Matt, currently the front page is full of nothing but tit for tat voting regarding photos. Which equals members "logged in" voting habits. In contrast, what you want are those photos that over time gain traction in Google for being news worthy or interesting or helpful...representing SP. That is a truly dynamic site, one void of club like behavior, inclusive, not exclusive to the few willing to spend time via tit for tat voting. That is the biggest complaint I get about SP in the field...it is stagnant and uninteresting....and why you see the same type of photos by the same characters over and over.

I do agree, using hits over votes is by far the best measure to what photos and beta pages should be displayed on the front....that would be a huge improvement to the site.

I think you make another good point Dow, that there is no incredible need for the photos on the front page to have been submitted in the last day or week. I think it is good if some are (as long as we can end the tit for tat games which predominate).

Matt is implementing photo of the moment soon, which I think will help. But as I think about the mechanism more I realize it won't solve all the problems. I know both Bob Sihler and Matt are interested in this just as you and I are, and I am continueing to discuss possibilities with them. Matt is working on conversion to SPv3 right now so we are going to wait and see what the impact of POTM is, and then continue with additional changes as we learn what worked and what didn't.

If you have specific ideas it would be good to lay them out. Sounds like chosing a random photo with the most hits in the last month that hasn't been on the front page yet? But hits can be manipulated too.

Personally I would like to see the featured beta pages given more structure. I think it is great they are changing more frequently now, but if there was an identifiable slot for a mountain page, a route page, a technical route, a new submission, a revamped page, etc... I think that would be well received.

With POTM I am trying to develop a mechanism that a photo like this can make the front page (which doesn't have many hit either BTW). We aren't there yet... but I hope we are on the way.

http://www.summitpost.org/arete-rochefo ... 0/c-324762

Not trying to open up a proverbial "can of worms," but just another example of how "whacked out" the present voting is :

my current photo of a prominent Arizona landform was nearly "beat out" by a dog ... yes, a dog !

Hey, not that I don't like dogs, but the last time I checked this was a MOUNTAIN and ROCKS site (?) .... .....

You voted on the dog lcarreau. And commented on it. What are you complaining about?

You can't blame people for playing by the rules that they are given. We are all part of that process... we just need to develop the best set of rules so that site participation is maximized and good contributions are acknowledged. And I like seeing bits of members' personal lives in their photos!

mrchad9 wrote:Sarah you should probably still give my recent pages a 10/10. Better than doing nothing.

If you'd post photos of your fine self instead of your little teddy bear, I might consider doing so...

If voters who vote are kept anonymous than people will care less about voting on particular people's photos, and might actually try to make sure they vote on the BEST photo to make it.