Problem:
Often when I follow an issue in the Drupal issue queue, I find post by people (sometimes myself) who obviously didn't read all posts. Even worse: Some issues require a read-up of a bunch of related discussions before you can do any reasonable participation. I can't blame anyone for that - time is money! The consequence is that arguments have to be repeated again and again, and discussions go around in circles. We are wasting a lot of time. Time of otherwise expensive experts. And finally, we get suboptimal solutions, because the decision makers have the same problem.
This is why I would appreciate a voting or rating system for issue comments.
I say rating of comments, not rating of issues, because the biggest signal to noise problems are in the comments.
The voting should be multi-dimensional, because usually a reader wants to find the best comments for one specific purpose (summary, patch etc), not just the best comment in general.
Voting Dimensions:
- Original / new contribution, good idea, good research etc. The purpose is to reward the author and give proper attribution. A comment or patch with this rating is maybe not the best one, but the first who came up with a new approach.
- Recommended summary. A summary can repeat a lot from previous comments. It doesn't need to be new or original, but it should allow the reader to skip other posts.
- Recommended patch.
- Important use case / requirement.
- Important argument.
- Excellent proposal / algorithm / concept to solve the problem.
- I support this argument / opinion. This dimension can pull the opinion stuff away from the other dimensions.
Purpose:
- Allow to quickly get an idea of an issue, by reading only the comments highlighted as "summary", and skipping irrelevant or outdated issue comments. This can even mean to skip the starting post, as it often contains unfinished ideas that have been refined in the comments.
- Encourage summary comments which give a complete overview.
- Allow to quickly find recommended patches.
- Reward quality contributions, and show them on the user page.
- Reduce the time wasted on writing the same argument twice or more, only because some people didn't read all comments.
the purpose is NOT to have a rating for each and every single comment, but to highlight those comments that stick out and are worth reading.
Possible technical solutions:
- A new module based on Voting API, similar to Fivestar but multi-dimensional. There have been arguments against Fivestar in the issue voting feature request (see below), maybe the same applies here. It was said that drupal.org shouldn't depend on the Voting API module. And Fivestar in its current form does not allow multiple dimensions.
- Something new and custom only for drupal.org.
Conceptual problems:
Separate trails of solution: We often have the situation that we have 2 or more different approaches to the same problem, each with a series of comments and patches. Usually you want to find the latest and best of each, and compare them. A simple voting system would not help with this, no matter how many dimensions.
New comments supersede old ones: An old comment might still have the best rating, but there might be a newer comment that contains the same information and more.
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Related issues
#42232: Help Maintainers Manage Issue Priority by Encouraging Voting -> the same for issues themselves. Please note that the purpose of this is very different.
#682178: Drupal Strategy Wiki to sort+summarize information from the issue queue. -> this would be an alternative, but it would pull activity away from the issue itself, and not necessarily be helpful.
Comments
Comment #2
michelleAn alternate approach that doesn't require any coding... How about adding a section to the summary for this? Whoever writes the summary should have read the comments to have a good grasp on the issue. That person can just jot down comment numbers for the comments that were key in writing the summary. As the summary gets updated, the list of comment numbers get updated as well.
If we want to make this a tad easier for the writer with just a bit of backend work (hardest part is creating the field type) we could add a field that takes a comment number and a bit of text and so the summarizer just fills in "42 | Added important point about foo." and then it gets added to the list like:
Either the numbers or the whole line would be links to the actual comment. This would allow people to quickly jump to the comments that the summarizer felt were the most important in defining the issue and skip the rest if they like.
I'm not going to mess with the issue title because I don't want to hijack your issue if you don't like this idea. If you would prefer to continue discussing using voting to do this, let me know and I'll remove this and file a new issue. I put it here because I'm suggesting it as an alternate means to the same end.
Michelle
Comment #3
donquixote commentedThis would be something we/you can start with today :)
I think voting would make this a lot easier, though. Also, this would make this information available to all kinds of data processing.
Comment #4
naught101 commentedAlso, it puts the information gathering/creation power in the hands of many, rather than in the hands of the one or two people who have enough time/energy to studiously trawl through all the comments for useful information, and then have an editor war over which parts are more important...
Comment #5
michelleI'm not sure what useful information we're going to get out of people who are voting without having read all the comments closely enough to determine which is the relevant information.
Comment #6
donquixote commentedThe typical case is a person who reads 7 comments, of which 6 are noise, and one is a useful summary. Or, out of x comments, one has a patch that actually works. Or, in a controversy, one person is speaking out what a lot of others had on their minds.
This said, we actually do have comment rating in g.d.o. I don't think it has done any harm so far, but it also has not shown the activity that we would hope for d.o. issues. It is rare that a comment has more than 2 or 3 upvotes, so in general there is no statistical relevance. Whether d.o. will do better than that, we can only try.
Comment #7
basic commentedMoving to webmasters queue
Comment #8
avpadernoI agree with Michelle that votes aren't probably going to give a measure of the comment quality. Given the purpose issue queues have, I find it difficult to get an objective value from votes, which normally are subjective.
Comment #9
drummReacting to comments with emoji is what GitHub and GitLab have established for quick reactions to comments, #2987034: Allow reacting to comments