@studnicky
i agree totally with keeping the down voting system.
I doubt we will be able to leave a comment or something on someones work look at my topic i made and read Cyprezz' replies
http://www.planetminecraft.com/forums/idea-for-pmc-t1748.html

I wouldn't go so far as to remove the down-vote system, but I absolutely would like to see it changed. I noticed while looking at some skins (both my own and others) that several very well-made skins were receiving down-votes with no explanation or criticism, while many very nice skins were getting several hundred views and downloads with absolutely no up-votes or comments at all. Halucid seems to believe that the members down-voting his skins are doing so simply because he is a moderator now, but that does not quite explain why my own were getting down-voted (My TF2 Blue Medic got 3 down-votes in a matter of hours?)

While I do not have many other types of submissions, it seems that they would fit into the same paradigm of voting. I'll be uploading some of my structures into the projects section once I get a backup copy of our server from my friend, and I guess I'll have to see what happens then.

In terms of helping users identify what are actually popular/unpopular items, or finding well-made material, I would propose the following:

1. Downloads should count as partial or full upvotes. If someone downloads your work, they like it. They may not up-vote it, but they liked it enough to check it out. Manual up-votes should not "stack" with automatic up-votes, but the option should exist to up-vote without downloading (i.e., you really like a skin or texture pack someone made, but do not feel like replacing your own that you already have with it).

2. Down-votes should require a comment. Even a short text entry to tell the creator why you decided you didn't like their work would be nice. I often find myself voting on and critiquing other user's submissions, and I always tell them what it is that I like or dislike about what they have done. Some users have actually sent me PM's asking specifically for my opinions on their work, and others have reacted very well to the criticism and updated their posts with better looking work. It makes me happy to think that I am contributing to the overall quality of work published on this site.
(Now that I think about it, though, my own comments could be why I'm getting down-votes all of a sudden, from the less mature or open members of the site. Meh.)

I feel that requiring more than just a simple button-push would discourage trolling/leaderboard manipulation. If possible, these comments should be kept anonymous - it would create a clear distinction between comments from users, and comments tied to negative votes, and hopefully provide some insight to those submitting content as to what exactly it is they are doing wrong, without creating hard-feelings.

3. The vote button itself should be more centered and noticeable. As it stands, the user's attention is directed towards the preview and/or images, the description, and the download/favorite buttons. The vote widget is rather out-of-sight, and it seems as though many users simply ignore it's presence. The page-flow of objects at the top is skipped over as the viewer's attention jumps immediately to the previews and utility buttons, so perhaps the vote button (or rating bar, that would be nice, too [something like a 1-5 or 1-10?]) should be located within the object description, directly below the preview, or grouped with the other utility buttons.

Thoughts?

But if Cyprezz removed the downvote system really bad projects (not naming any)won't be able to be improved.
But i really want the reason for voting to be implemented to the site, it would really help me :/
Ah well,what can i do?
Why yes i do like dragons

Hehe sry about that but I just thought I would voice my opinion about the whole subject of voting - as you say Cyprezz does have some good points, but I agree with you that there should be reasons for downvotes - but in general downvoting never works and should just be removed imo.
Btw charzhoopz I think you like dragons lol

Yeah,i made a post about this after this one (i didn't search through) about a month ago. And Cyprezz had some very good points,as he does here,but my initial question was for someone to have to give a reason to why they downvote,so it was in the same relation to this,but just slightly different.
Btw ffkid,this topic was dead for almost a month until you posted xD

I agree that a reason should be given for why someone does not like a design, or actually get rid of the whole downvote system altogether - considering that most people (as a real life example) would complain about bad service, but would rarely say about any good service they've had. Downvotes just create hate towards other members as I have found from experience, disheartens people, and dissuades them from continuing their work - there are too many vote trolls on here to make the voting system a valid method of finding out how many people like texture packs/skins/servers etc.

That's true, which is why a rating system would make more sense, although there is still room for abuse there. There really is no perfect option unfortunately as just about anything can be abused, but sadly with the only option to point out flaws or criticize a server being comments, which is certain to attract retaliation from the servers players, there's just no good option to bring that to light.

I agree, especially with servers. As it stands only upvotes are even allowed with servers, so all you get are the players spamming their servers upvote and no real option for those who feel a servers administration or environment was negative.

A rating system would be good instead of the simple up/down votes.

Cyprezz, when I think of a catalogue, I think of something where (at your whim, as the site owner) you can feature a style of skin (OMG, CREEPER MADNESS! all the creeper skins you ever wanted!) for a while, then switch off to something different. I'd like a table of contents where I can select all the game-related skins, or tv-related skins, or cartoon-related skins for example. Every time I tried to use the search feature it would only pop up the most recent skins, and if nothing in my catagory was recent, it was ignored. I KNOW there are fabulous skins buried 1000 deep in there, but I'm not going to go looking through all of them to find them. If the real show of what people like is the number of downloads, the way to get downloads on the old stuff is to feature it as well as the popular stuff.

Does that make any sense at all? I'm still nursing my first coffee of the day.

Yeah i like the Catalog idea
also i agree with you cyprezz without the dislikes, likes wont mean as much (if you get what im saying?)

Carole, sure. How can we make a better catalog?

There are tags for skins but of course it's up to the creator to come up with and enter them. There's a category to see just female skins. Maybe try the popular filter and narrow it to this week or month. After selecting the filters sprinkle in a keyword search and the filters will stay on. How can we make a better catalog? Different ways of exploring / seeing them?

I haven't tried it before but I eventually want to show / recommend content based on the community actions. The site would analyze our interests compared to other members based on our favorites, upvotes, subscriptions, etc. Tip of the iceberg example: If you upvoted 3 skins and another member also upvoted all 3, it might be reasonable to assume you have similar interests in skins. Did either member upvote skins the other has not? Recommend them. If the members then upvote the recommendation, the bond becomes stronger. Toss in a few other ways of matching interests and ideally the site gets better at making recommendation. It wouldn't be a one to one relationship either, it would pool all members, group interests and evolve / learn over time. It would be fun to code and see how good it could get at making recommendations.

On the downvote topic, I'm warming up to the idea of requiring a reason for a downvote. I could make it simply popup a simple form and the reason would be posted as a public comment with some indicator that it's linked to a downvote. I don't want to get rid of downvotes because I think there is more value in keeping them than switching to a "like" only situation. Servers are recommend only because they are complex, constantly evolving communities and banned greifers like to downvote.

um... maybe I'm just really blase about stuff like this, but votes don't interest me one way or the other. I'll certainly upvote (and favourite) things that make me smile or I think are really well done, but I don't give a rat's hind end about what people think about MY stuff. If *I* liked it enough to post it, that's good enough for me. If other people like it enough to download it, cool. Voting? Not interested. What would be more interesting to ME is if there was a way to better search the skins, add extra tags, make them easier to reference, etc, so when I'm looking for a girl skin to use, I can FIND one. You know, rather than make my own, when I'm feeling lazy. I think a catalogue of skins would rock... can we have a catalogue of skins Cyprezz? can we huh? please?

Would a change more like Deviantart style where your 'vote' must be accompanied by a comment or at least your name be better?

i don't know if this has been mentioned or not but a little form that when a down vote is cast the member that down voted the project,skin or texture pack has to fill out with the information along the lines of

what do you dislike about this submission:..................

what they could improve:................

just a simple form of information that is submitted to the author in a sense it could also deter trolls because they are always down voting they will get sick a tired of filling out the form

I'm maybe too emotional but I keep getting bugged by the few downvotes I get.
I mean, we all distribute our work to the community for free, I find it's a harsh attitude to come and say to the author and everyone else that you don't like the work he's offering for free and never forced you to use. The anonymity and the simplicity of casting a vote permits and encourages this here but in real life if you visit a free art gallerie that you end up not liking, you don't go tell the artist and everyone at the gallerie entrance that you don't like his paintings. Actually you don't even anonymously go tag the entry wall with "this is bad art". Why is it considered a normal thing on the internet ?

If downvotes were at least accompanied by comments, that would be useful for the entry author. I actually like to know why people don't like what I'm doing, even if it's just a difference in tastes. But voting down anonymously just feels aggressive.

And again, it's not even especially useful to visitors to see how many downvotes an entry has. There are many other as good indicators of popularity.

you can remove a vote by reclicking the vote button of the vote issued. (click the downvote button again to make it go away)

wait was i being talked about? are my skins really that horrible? goes to cry in a corner. lol.

ML32People have opinions, even if they're biased or driven by negativity.

Ok I don't say that the information is totally uninteresting but let's stand back a bit : what's the (supposed) use of these votes ? It is to help visitors to easily find things that have high chances to interest them. But the biased aspect of a lot of down votes makes the information deceitful. And the number of dowloads, visits, likes, etc, provide enough data to determine popularity.
So, they are quite useless and frustrate the authors... why keeping them ?

ML32Also, Ovocean, you should be able to change your votes. May have been a site error when you tried before.
To test, I just voted down one of my projects then voted it right back up no problem. Let us know if it still doesn't work for you

I don't want to vote up, I want to remove my vote. But thanks !

People have opinions, even if they're biased or driven by negativity. I've gone back and forth with the vote system myself but, IMHO the voting system is better even with the haters out there. The upvotes speak to the overall appeal of the project/texture/skin/server/mod and, if you really 'bring it" with whatever you're working on, we seem to have a very positive community where the haters lose and the upvotes win.

Also, Ovocean, you should be able to change your votes. May have been a site error when you tried before.
To test, I just voted down one of my projects then voted it right back up no problem. Let us know if it still doesn't work for you

I'd suggest to remove the down votes, they bring nothing but negativity ; they are a motivation killer for the author and are often given by hateful/jaleous/biased people.
To illustrate the latter thing, I'll take my own vote against ... I'm sure I wouldn't have sent this down vote if I wasn't in competition with him and jaleous of his popularity. I immediately regretted this vote but there seems to be no way to revoke it.

So what I'd envision instead of the vote system is a single "I like" button.
The likes/views ratio could be used in the popularity formula.

Ok. Glad my suggestions are useful since, while I suspect that not everything in the skin section is original, I don't think taking it out would be good, and the suggestions make it easier for people who host projects to keep from drowning under the other submission types.

Yah, I agree. Members list could use some tweaks. We'll try out your suggestions.

One suggestion would be to change the way the members page displays votes by only showing them from other people. One thing that bugs me, though I am not sure how valid it is, is that the guy with the most votes and views has more that 100 skins with a few views each. I think that displaying the votes minus self votes and maybe average views would be a better solution on the members page. By average I mean total views divided by number of submissions. It is probably just me, but I feel that this site was originally intended to share projects and things that take a certain amount of effort. I agree that texture packs can fall under this, but I disagree with skins, mostly because people make tons of them, and with the exception of a few artists, they are just variations on a theme, like the creeper skins and texture skins. Anyway, I think that showing average views and maybe views by category might be useful. maybe change the popular feed to show a few projects, a few skins, and a texture and Blog or two instead of just the most popular submissions overall.

TL:DR show votes minus self votes and views as an average, with maybe a link to most viewed individual submission with it. Also, my internet usage from my smart phone in no internet land is pretty much just PMC.

Thanks for the suggestion. It will remain anonymous though. Zeranny is right, while it may be interesting to see who likes/dislikes our work, it will inevitably cause drama and influence future votes. Voting is a member-only ability, mainly to help prevent repeat votes.

Incoming wall of text! Read if your interested in the voting system

I do want to discuss the voting system some more.
One issue we've discussed with the current voting system is the imbalance when applied universally across all content types (Projects, Skins, Textures, etc). The imbalance revolves around the obvious fact that a skin is not a project and a project is not a blog post. It is generally easier for someone to submit one type ( skins) over other types (projects, texture packs). Since we get one self vote as soon as our submission goes live, the system seems unfairly favoring quantity over quality. The proposed solution was to remove and prevent self votes.

However, I still have yet to change it. I personally don't think it's broken and no, it's not because I programmed it. I think when we look at it from a technically standpoint it looks unfair but we have to take into account what happens after that initial vote. User feedback and live stats are very powerful over time and ideally give the website a community brain/hivemind and evolving intelligence. Overtime, the accumulated feedback from thousands of interactions is something you can't program only program to allow it to surface. I try to program it to be as unbiased and fair as possible. A simple but direct example is the featured content on the main page; It's chosen by the overall community based on a variety of stats and time, not me. It's unpredictable and since I'm not choosing the featured content, interesting to watch. (I think texture packs are taking it over though but that's a different thread) Getting back to the votes, no voting system will be perfect but here are my thoughts on the the current system and the impact of the initial self vote:

* Different content types do not receive the same attention after they are released. In general, skins rarely receive additional votes from the community while projects and texture packs tend to easily attract votes and have a much longer "life" in the spotlight even when you disregard the update log. The fact that they attract more votes/stats makes sense and it effectively makes them "worth" multiple skins since on average skins rarely see another vote up or down.

* The fact that it's easier to submit a content type also means there is more competition. They have less exposure time on the front page and subsequent pages. They are competing against many alternatives. It is quite the feat to have a skin that stands out.

Self votes:
* It makes sense that you would like your own work and frankly it's nice to start out with "100% like it". If we remove that initial vote, 0% will like your work. It's sort of puts a negative spin on it. For many skins they'll never see it change. No matter how crappy everyone else may think something is, that member took the time to share it with us and deserves an upvote. If it is truly unliked, it will attract down votes.
* Having 1 self vote doesn't affect browsing content by votes/popularity since everything starts on a level playing ground of the 1 vote. A skin doesn't compete with a project when browsing by stats.

There is already a topic about the voting system in the feature request section as far as I remember. Also, I think that commenting is the only thing that does not require login, though that may change. Check out the other thread for the battal info.

I don't think that would be a good ideas as it will cause 'hate' in the community, i.e forum topics saying "OMG WHY DID HE DOWNVOTE ME" with it's point somewhere along the lines of "I thought we were friends". Anonymous voting is needed, but mabye have a system that says how many members and non members voted up/down (if non members can vote)