Welcome to Codidact Meta!
Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.
Comments on Suggestion for allowing to mark answers as "accepted", "outdated" or "dangerous"
Parent
Suggestion for allowing to mark answers as "accepted", "outdated" or "dangerous"
Currently, it is possible to upvote and downvote answers. That's likely enough in most situations, but there are some cases where you might want to have more than one way to react to a post.
For example, imagine you are on Software Development and an answer suggests a solution that drastically impedes your system's security. Or you are on Electrical Engineering and the answer suggests something that might electrocute you. In these cases, a downvote might not be enough of a signal to warn users of such possible dangers.
Another possible situation is "accepting answers", a concept that exists on most common Q&A sites. Unlike other sites, we decided quite early that a single vote from the asker shouldn't impact answer sort order.
And yet another feature suggested and strongly advocated for by some users is the option of "signed votes", mostly seen as a way for experts or highly reputable community members to give more weight to their votes by publicly endorsing (or refuting) a specific answer.
I think I've got a solution, one that might provide a framework for commmunities to solve all these use cases. We discussed this in chat and tossed some ideas around, and I must say that I absolutely love the current proposal:
Communities will be able to define a small set of "reactions", which can be applied to posts. Default (or recommended) reactions would likely be:
- ☑ This post works for me (= accepting an answer, but not only by OP)
- ⏳ This post is outdated
- ⚠ This post is dangerous
However, communities might want to have different reactions. For example, Cooking might want to have
- 😋 This is tasty
- 🤮 This doesn't taste good
Once applied to answers, there would be a little box/badge above the answer, which contains the selected reaction and a list of users who have chosen that reaction. I used the developer tools in my browser to simulate what this might look like. Imagin, that the tooltip on the first badge says the names of the users choosing that reaction.
Users will be able to choose reactions from a modal that can be opened from a button below the voting buttons. When choosing a reaction, users will be encouraged to add comments, giving details to their vote. This is especially neccessary for marking a post as "dangerous", because other users need to know what exactly is dangerous.
Here are two mockups for how the reactions modal might be presented:
Additionally, when entering a comment into the comment box in the modal, a comment will be posted on the user's behalf, which contains the chosen reaction and comment. (Also seen in the screenshots.)
What do you think of this suggested feature? Do you have any other use cases we should consider if we chose to implement this suggestion?
How should we handle possibly-outdated reactions? No, not by reactions to reactions. An edit to a post made after re …
3y ago
I would like this functionality to extend to 'questions' as well as answers. This was influenced by the post I canno …
3y ago
I was part of that conversation, so my input is mostly reflected in this proposal already. I want to add one thing, abo …
3y ago
Proposal: Integrate the voting system into the reactions feature. Let users react with "this is a good post" or "this is …
3y ago
I kind of like the idea, especially for outdated/obsolete technology. But I'm concerned over how subjective a "dangerous …
3y ago
I like the idea because these have been known issues in other places for some time. However, is it really needed? …
11mo ago
I think reaction might useful in some categories for "question". Here's a category (recipes), since no can answer on tha …
2y ago
There is another aspect that I don't see discussed; accepting answers has the side-effect of helping to optimize/minimiz …
3y ago
I will never use any negative reactions that require my name next to them for the same reason I never explain downvotes, …
3y ago
Post
How should we handle possibly-outdated reactions? No, not by reactions to reactions.
An edit to a post made after reactions were added could change the applicability of those reactions. Somebody might have edited to address a danger or update an out-of-date recommendation. Conversely, somebody might change an answer that worked for someone in a way that makes it not work any more. Or, sometimes what worked for somebody leaving a reaction in 2020 might be outdated and not what the person would do, let alone endorse, in 2022.
All of this is true of votes too; a post can have residual votes that those people wouldn't cast today. But votes aren't public. Reactions are, so I think we owe it to people leaving them to handle obsolescence somehow.
Here are some ideas that occurred to me. We shouldn't do all of them; these are options. None is a complete solution to the issues I've raised:
-
Where we show the names of people who left reactions, also show timestamps, or maybe just the latest timestamp if that's noisy.
-
When we show reactions, indicate that the post was edited after they were left.
-
In the post history, show the reactions that were present pre-edit.
-
Don't show pre-edit reactions immediately, but make them available behind an "older reactions" link. (Can be defeated by a trivial edit. Do we need the idea of a substantial edit? How would we tell?)
-
Make it possible to retract reactions. (We should do that anyway. We let people delete comments and retract votes, after all.) This is like the case where you come across a post you had downvoted and then it was edited but you didn't notice, so now that you've seen it again you retract your vote.
-
Notify people that posts they reacted to have been edited. (Could get noisy; might need a user setting to opt out.)
1 comment thread