Steve;

Your points are well taken and I agree with your overall message. However, I do feel that a person who asked a question is in a better position to understand if the problem was solved then any of us. As originally stated many answers were given to a specific problem but none was the correct answer. This will occur and suggestions from others although not “correct” may lead a developer to find the correct answer. I will concede there may be 10 correct answers but that is a part of programming. One of the 10 may be a pet answer to one programmer. The important thing is to solve the problem at hand.

I do not like the point system and got a bit of flack for saying so. I do think it is up to the person posing the problem to understand what the solution is. I do have enough faith in the abilities of others for them to realize when his/her problem has been solved. It is helpful to the development community using this forum to indicate a solution. The solution may not have come from any one suggestion.

You seem to be calling for a professional forum such as one might be a part of in the engineering world where we both have background. I do not believe software development can be equated in the same manner as disciplines such as engineering. You can get away with a lot in software that the hardware world would never tolerate. This is far from an IEEE group. Even the experts cannot always agree. By my way of thinking if you solve a problem then get on with life. Perhaps what we need is a larger "Hackers Guide" and no forum at all. Forums may not be practical for programming development.

In engineering we are trained in a number of disciplines one being thinking in concise terms – problem/solution being one of them. If we want a software forum with reduced noise and superfluous messages we require two things. Limit who may participate and have one person respond to the problems. That will reduce the number of messages. Even that is not a perfect solution. :)

Tom







>In my opinion that's incorrect, and I point to the ridiculous state of affairs that exists now as clear evidence of that. As things exist now, we've mostly got beginners assigning points, assuming they know how to assign them which, in fact, most clearly don't.
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>The person who posted the question is more than likely *not* the person in the best position to know if an answer is valid. Moreover the notion that only the thread originators are in the position to assign scores is naive and dumb. The statement about "solution by committee" is also an incorrect take. That's the only way concensus about non-trivial things is ever achieved, by balancing the forces and measuring the resultant balance point.
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>Were that not enough, currently there is no way for anyone to mark bogus responses. This means that, on balance, bogus responses reverberate at the same volume as correct answers since these are all not marked either way. What's worse, bogus answers generate give-and-take that tends to make threads longer and more personal, and all of this is bad news for signal-to-noise.
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>Remember Joe Bob? Joe Bob would never have existed for the majority of us if a few early-readers could filter out the crap for the rest of us. If the UT had a customizable squelch filter to render invisible all posts with, say, (Thumbs Down-Thumbs Up) >= 5, most people would never read or be exposed to the garbage and we'd all be better served. Right now the only way to flush rats like Joe Bob is to expose and red-carpet them publicly, which is odious and disgusting work.
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>More to the point, as things are now, there is no way that the UT can scale to more than say 400 messages per day per forum. There is no way to crank-up the signal to noise ratio that is essential for a 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 message per day forum to emerge. In other words, no amount of advertising and positioning will ever make the UT grow beyond a few hundred messages per day because that's seems to be the point where it's not physically or economically manageable for most members to gloam maybe a half-dozen nuggets from an average session or day of UT reading. That's terrible value by any standard of measurement.
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>The UT has a fundamental problem: There is no way to greatly ratchet the signal to noise ratio, and hence no way to rachet the value proposition. As things are now, the UT has a vast pool of veritable experts being haphazardly graded generally by beginners (thread originators), and thousands of messages per week that all reverberate at the same volume (not graded either way) in thread displays and in archived searches. What a waste!
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>I bet if you made it wide open (Thumbs up, thumbs down, one person one vote per message) Sergey would still dominate the points, the top 10 would remain unchanged, and we could all implement creative strategies to better manage our time online. The benefit of this would be immediate: Less time searching for nuggets translates into more time for dispensing advice, and that advice would be better considered since it's potentially gonna get peer-reviewed by everyone. That's a win-win proposition for all parties, especially the UT.
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>Personally I'm interested mostly in reading great content. If all of us had more flexible ways to identify that content for all the others, we'd all be better served.
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>(Note: I think this is a pretty good message. I certainly spent a lot of time thinking about it, and composing it. There is currently no way for you or others to gloss it, or smack it, other than to make this mis-named and drifting thread longer. The only arbiter is Claudio Rola, the thread originator. The UT points system is just silly.)
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>**--** Steve
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>>The person who posted the problem/solution is in the best position to know if an answer is valid. One thumb up would be an indication of resolution. Two thumbs are not needed unless it is those two guys on television reviewing the “movie of the week”! :) I notice those guys do not often agree. That is the problem with "solution by committee"!
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>>If you must have "two thumbs" involved then one thumb up and one down will be for an "almost solution". Of course I am under the presumption that dumps = thumbs.
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>>Tom
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>>>>...After considering various answers, some helped to set him on the corrct path but NONE were themselves the answer. In order to 'close' the thread WITH THE FINAL ANSWER he writes the final message WITH THE RIGHT ANSWER. He thinks it would be valuable to be able to "mark" that as the correct answer so that future readers would have the benefit of seeing the mark to get the answer quickly. He feels that the 3-stars would do OK for this (no points required) but currently he has no way to put the 3 stars on the message.
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>>>>I agree with Claudio that being able to mark the correct (full) solution would be useful to all.
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>>>I will let him confirm this statement. You may be right by mentioning it. However, someone else mentioned that it was mostly a two dumps up/two dumps down approach such as rating a message. So, those are two different things. So, I just want to make sure we all understand the same thing.