I see some problems that need to be addressed.
I implemented the voting+hiding system almost exclusively to deal with
trolls. With that I mean rude users that were posting
angry/unpolite/unfriendly comments, not bad enough to grant a banning, but
still making the forum look very unpleasant to newcomers. If used properly a
voting+hiding system (as inspired by reddit) could work well as a
self-regulating system for a community.
Problems are:
- Users downvoting comments they *disagree* with. Don't do that! Downvotes
are meant for offending comments that don't follow the community guidelines,
not to punish somebody that you don't personally agree with, or to win an
argument.
- The voting widget not coming with any explanation on usage. I now realize
that it is not intuitive enough.
- The voting calculations could be improved so upvotes could balance out
downvotes, thus unhiding wrongly hidden comments (although that is still not
a good fix).
- The hiding code sometimes hides too much, including even the reply form.
I agree with most protests in this thread, on how the system doesn't work
very well, but if only trolling comments were getting hidden then the only
people protesting would be the trolls themselves.
I'm going to rethink the whole thing, and come back to you.
---
Also, while analizing this (thanks magic_banana for your input) it became
obvious that the community guidelines need a rework and should not be in the
wiki but on a protected document. I'll be working on a more thorough and
clean set of guidelines, along with a long overdue update on the legal
statements such as the trademark license.
