Extend functionality to allow voting and sorting of topics in category view

[Brady1 (Brady Anthony-Brumfield)]

EDIT: I re-wrote this post entirely. also, I incorrectly stated that with topic-voting, you can’t sort topics in the category page by number of votes. You can.

TLDR; No one needs this feature that badly. But extending post-voting functionality to mimic Reddit’s voting UI on category pages would be ideal

terms

• post voting UI: up and down arrows to the left of the title, # of net votes in the middle
• topic voting UI: blue box with single button to left of title, # of votes in the middle

problems

• the existing topic voting feature UI is ugly, unintuitive, and less functional than it could be.
  • on the category page, the number of votes is nestled under the title like a tag, instead of being a first-class table value like replies or activity values. it’s hidden away
    • this is unintuitive because this number type attribute is not grouped with the other number type attributes, it’s grouped with string attributes (tags). this makes the sorting UI clumsy and fragmented, too, by having a different sorting mechanism than for replies or activity scores
  • no down vote ability
    • hard to root out undesirable topics
  • no ability to vote on topics from the category page
    • would make it easier to collect more data about what people do and dont like
• topic-voting and post-voting have redundant functionality in being able to vote on a topic! you can’t use both plugins simultaneously, or else you get this monstrosity:
  
  
• even if you could use both plugins simultaneously without ruining your UI, the difference in design language between how each plugin displays votes would be confusing

solution

essentially, i want a clone of reddit’s voting UI on both cotegory and topic pages. that is to say, use post-voting’s voting UI on each topic in the category page. Add “votes” column to the table of topics with sort functionality on clicking the header “votes”

implementation

you can accomplish this several ways:

• consolidate their overlapping functionality into a single plugin
  • this is probably infeasible since some people probably like the topic-voting UI and don’t want it changed (why they’d prefer it is beyond me)
• extend post-voting functionality to appearing on the category page

notes

• this feature isn’t that big a deal since you can still sort topics by “top” in category pages, which is a decent substitute by sorting based on votes.

My use case

I am building a Q&A site similar to the purpose of stackOverflow.com, and my goal is to mimic the voting design of reddit. meaning I want the following features, among others:

• users can up/downvote posts and sort accordingly to identify good and bad answers
  • accomplished with post-voting
• users can up/downvote topics in both topic and category pages (and sort in category page) to identify good and bad posts.
  • accomplished with topic-voting, with some limitations and an ugly UI as noted above
  • this helps identify good and bad posts easily, and represents a lot of data to be harvested, given how quickly someone can vote on multiple topics. granted, it is a lower fidelity representation of someone’s interest vs. someone actually following the link to the topic and upvoting there

Currently I use post-voting but not topic-voting

To see our site in action and to better understand the use cases check out act60.co