yeah, it's possible.

If you're willing to code it, then I vote for the "any adjective" rule as well.  The worry would be modfights, but we can always change back if we don't like it.

Since we're on the topic again, I'd still prefer -2 through +2 additive to 1-5 averaged.  And if we do that then a separate main tab "Best" of highest-rated recent comments anywhere on the site would be good, to make it easier to check if I missed something.  With the current scoring,  the rating number is pretty much useless, and people seem to keep thinking I'm being sarcastic when I'm not.

I'm reasonably happy with what we've got, but it gets to be tiresome trying to fit the least wrong of 8 adjectives a post.

I agree with your recommendations. 1 and 2 should have negative connotations. They don't. In fact a guy who simply posts a torrent of obscenity and its quickly given several -1, obnoxious..es by the peanut gallery can have his post ranked higher than a non-modded one.  That's not good.

How about every post automatically starts life with a 3.0 rating?  Then 1 and 2 would be negative, 4 and 5 positive.

I guess I can get behind that. With regret. Which will have to be washed away with a couple bottles of rum. While listening to some Creedence.

Unless an editor suppressed them, jason's comments in the diary section that drew tons of 1 offtopics got deprecated unless you are logged in.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

Nah, if you're not logged in, then the settings are defaulted to that stupid "highest ratings first" view.

Speaking of which, is there a way to permanently change the view settings so it's not defaulted when the cookies expire?

- derumi (del-me)
"Bobby Fischer? Man, that guy is crazy!" - Mike Tyson

Speaking of which, is there a way to permanently change the view settings so it's not defaulted when the cookies expire?

If your cookie expires, how could the site know who you are and what your idiosyncratic preferences are for viewing stories?

I would like to make the cookie last longer than 2 weeks.  20 years, maybe.

If your cookie expires, how could the site know who you are and what your idiosyncratic preferences are for viewing stories?

The site should know who I am when I log in, but insists that I must see "highest rated posts" first until I change it once again. Logging back in isn't as big of a deal, but trying to make sense of wtf I'm reading and who people are responding to is annoying.

I'd rather the cookies never expire on my home computers, but I guess the current trend is to have login cookies do so more often than less.

- derumi (del-me)
"Bobby Fischer? Man, that guy is crazy!" - Mike Tyson

The whole Scoop preferences thing is a total mess, an ongoing disaster, a complete mystery.  It was like that before I got there.  Not only do I not understand how it works, I don't really understand how it is supposed to work, so I'm not sure how to fix it.  When the Palin thread went over 150 comments or so it suddenly started doing a funky page display that I couldn't fix no matter how much I tweaked my own settings.  And if you go into the "interface" portion of the Preferences page, you see a bazillion settings, about half of which do absolutely nothing.  (Some of that's my fault.)

I'd still prefer -2 through +2 additive to 1-5 averaged

I looked at this once at it seemed that re-coding the 1-5 scale would be really tough.  It's hard-coded into several places in the code, and the database as well.  Could you please in your head just subtract 3 from every rating you see?  

Couldn't we just change it in the presentation layer?

Posts start at a rating of three, and real ratings in the database and in average/mojo calculations are in the range 1-5 - but for display we'd just subtract 3 right before display - this would result in a displayed range of -2 to 2, with a default of 0.

You'd need not change anything in the database or the calculation engine, just the display.  

You'd have to change the values displayed in the rating drop down and update the code that does the ratings to actually add 3 back before it updates the database.  Alternatively you could just create 4 rating icons, thumbs down/thumbs up (-1/+1) - two thumbs down, two thumbs up (-2/+2) and hide the numbers altogether.

Try this -- when viewing a story page, paste this into your location bar:

javascript:(function(){$("td.xcmtinfo>h3>a:contains(.)").each(function(i,x){$(x).html(($(x).ht ml()-3).toPrecision(3));});})()

Ok, that was cool - talk about presentation layer :)  So this walks the DOM and replaces the ratings in the browser right?  You could load this on every page.  What about the rating drop downs?

Couldn't we just change it in the presentation layer?

I think I remember looking into that already, though I suppose I could look again.  The problem is that the ancient Scoop code, written in 2001, doesn't have a clearly isolated "presentation layer" like modern MVC style web applications have; instead, control logic, data models, and HTML generation are all smooshed together in an ungodly mass of Perl.  Many parts of the code display ratings: the story view page, the comment view page (the one that shows you each rater's vote), the user info page, the drop-down menus for ratings, the verification code for rating submission, Mojo calculation...  it will be possible to track all this down and change it, but, holy crap, it's a big job.  

And frankly I don't see the benefit; what does a scale of -2 to 2 communicate that a scale of 1-5 does not communicate?  Aren't we getting dangerously close to a Spinal Tap "this one goes to 11" situation?

I presume you were talking about defaulting posts to 3.0/0 earlier in this thread.  This is an improvement, but doesn't come close to addressing the problem.

Take for example a post scored 5 vs one scored 5,5,5,5,4.  The second post is obviously scored much higher, but it gets a 4.8/5, losing to the first one at 5.0/1.

If, on the other hand, posts default to 3.0/2, you have essentially the same result as an additive system, at the cost of a slight loss of clarity to site newbies.  The first post above gets scored as 3.67/3, while the second is scored as 4.29/7, so that posts sort in line with how we value their ratings.

Also, so long as we're on the topic of site improvements, I miss strikethrough font availability.  Also, calling unreviewed discussion posts "Diary" invites the confusion that it's something different from the news stories on the "Front Page", and I would think we would have less confusion with a name like "Back Page" to go with our "Front Page".

As has been pointed out, there is a setting in preferences/comments to set the default comment view styles, but these are ignored following cookie deletion and re-logging in.   Actually, I lean in favor of a rather quick cookie deletion time like we have now, simply because it forces users to remain aware of where to find their password, so they are less likely to be locked out due to a cookie deletion after they haven't had to look up their password for two years and their hard drive crashed.

Finally, in Opera, I am unable to set the view style back to the "Front Page" style which has the hotness-ranked stories without hitting "reset to defaults".  Here is the source code the site sends me for the radio button.

<P><B>Start page:</B>
      <SELECT name="start_page" size="1"
        <OPTION value="__main__">Front Page</OPTION>
        <OPTION value="__all__">Everything</OPTION>
        <OPTION value="!Diary"></OPTION>
        <OPTION value="Diary">Diaries</OPTION>
        <OPTION value="__all__">Everything</OPTION>
        <OPTION value="advertisements">Adverts</OPTION>
        <OPTION value="news" SELECTED>News</OPTION>
      </SELECT>
<BR></P>

The culprit is the failure of the SELECT tag to include a closing ">", which causes Opera to drop the first option, which happens to be the option  with the hotness ratings.  Aditionally, and these a minor matters, it is unclear to me why we want to have TWO separate buttons named "Everything" to go to the blog-type format, what the difference is between this page and the one labeled "News" which as far as I can tell is exactly identical, and why we want to have a button named "Adverts" and a blank button which submits value "!Diary" which cause the front page to generate errors.

If the posts are defaulted to 3 (with subsequent ratings overriding, so a 5 or 1 isn't an impossibility), I can see this working.

- derumi (del-me)
"Bobby Fischer? Man, that guy is crazy!" - Mike Tyson

Actually, I think it'd be kinda cool if you could never actually reach 1.0 or 5.0, just get infinitely closer.

In fact, that'd be brilliant because then it would automatically factor in how many people had rated something 1 or 5, something neither tnt's nor plastic's current system does but something a lot of people have always wanted.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

It is possible to write a bookmarklet that will automatically give every comment you see a particular rating.  In theory, someone could use this to massively rate everything a 3.

(The authorship of this bookmarklet is left as an exercise for the reader.  I myself have used it only once--when "jason" was trying to arrange a meeting with the Argonauts).

yeah, I would really like to see a highly rated or at least recent comments link section

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.