Exciting news! We've added a new feature to our Landscape Photographer, Nature & Wildlife, and People Photography boards – a voting system to pick a "Featured Thread" each week.
This voting system gives each of you a chance to participate in selecting the featured threads based on your votes. Here's how:
1. Click on the "Vote as Featured Thread" button at the top of the thread.
2. You can vote for as many threads as you like.
The voting lasts for a week, giving all threads equal exposure time. After a week, the button is removed, and the thread is included in the next Friday's vote count.
In case of a tie, the thread with the most replies wins.
If a thread doesn't have the "Vote as Featured Thread" button, it means it has already been exposed and voted on for a week, awaiting the final count on the next Friday.
The winning threads get moved to the top of the board with "Featured" in the subject line and are showcased on our FM Frontpage, Gallery, Twitter, and Facebook.
Check out the example thread to see where the button is located. Happy voting!
I like this idea Fred and really appreciate being able to participate in selecting the "Thread of the Week"
Thanks so much for hosting our support group.
Seriously... thanks for creating this website and these forums, which has become a really enjoyable part of my life.
In the past somebody might get 200+ views on his photo and no comments. That guy would wonder if his pic was awful or (less likely) perfect. Now we have a system to tell him in one click.
Interesting development. I'm still relatively new to this forum and haven't yet figured out how everything works. Are those five thumbnails that appear at the top of the main page also feature threads?
Really great feature, Fred. I feel that comments are down lately (most likely due to people viewing on tablets and phones). This new feature will allow for a quick "like" to let people know they are heading in the right direction.
While more democracy sounds great, I do have some doubts about this Fred. On another forum which I visit, they tried this and it led to some rather childish "vote for me and I'll vote for you" friendships. There was even one man who created a whole legion of aliases to promote himself. I sincerely hope that the people who visit FM are more mature and will vote based on the qualities of the photographs.
So we're voting on a thread; not an image? Not sure I get the point. Seems like there's a couple of measurands already that are indicators of popularity, like number of views and number of posts. In addition to those, I don't get the value of knowing that someone likes the thread, especially since you could have a thread that got a lot of hits (or posts) yet only a few "Likes."
The Quote/Like line in each post really makes the thread look noisy though. It really interrupts the flow.
I guess the whole "Like" thing is inevitable since that is the trendy and low-commitment thing to do on the web these days. I can't help but feel that this is going to highlight even more that FM just isn't very good at the "display and like" thing though. There are so many other sites that do that better. I assume that the Likes are not going to cause the thread to pop to the top of the stack so it will be interesting to see if it actually causes less apparent activity in the threads.
I would encourage you to think more about how you can play to FM's strengths and use that as a differentiator rather than copy trendy features from other sites in a way that highlights FM's weaknesses.
helenica wrote:
While more democracy sounds great, I do have some doubts about this Fred. On another forum which I visit, they tried this and it led to some rather childish "vote for me and I'll vote for you" friendships. There was even one man who created a whole legion of aliases to promote himself. I sincerely hope that the people who visit FM are more mature and will vote based on the qualities of the photographs.
That's a good point. These sorts of things, especially when they're not anonymous, tend to turn out as popularity contests. It's human nature.
Phrasikleia wrote:
That's a good point. These sorts of things, especially when they're not anonymous, tend to turn out as popularity contests. It's human nature.
I already see people continually ( or in fact strategically timed ) post to their own threads just to bump it up to the top so more people could view and comment on their photos. I think having a voting system which would turn into a popularity vote would just increase this behavior.
