Schik
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We have all of these contest polls where we want people to rate stuff, and they're annoying to create and annoying to intrepret the results of.

So I added a new poll type - "Rating". It doesn't let the user provide options, as the options are implicit.

At least for now - and perhaps permanently - the possible range of ratings is a non-configurable 1 through 10. It's what we've been using for contests, and I think we can live with that limitation.

After you've voted or selected "View Results", it will display the number of votes for each rating, as well as the average vote.

As usual, just yell at me if I broke anything.

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Mattcrampy
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Dammit Schik! If you're going to keep throwing my chairs through windows, I'm not letting you around to my house any more!

On the other hand, nice rating poll. I swear DROD.net has the most robust polls out of any internet forum anywhere.

Matt

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Nillo
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That's a whole lot of decimals there.
Hopefully we'll have no more problems with ties in contests now.

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Watcher
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Excellent work.

Mattcrampy wrote:
On the other hand, nice rating poll. I swear DROD.net has the most robust polls out of any internet forum anywhere.

I agree. On all other boards I've seen, a poll can only include one question, with the creator specifying whether the users can select multiple answers. (And the percentage displays tend to be buggy if they can.) Also, this is the only board I know of where you can't view the results before voting.

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DiMono
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There is one thing I like about this new type of poll that nobody's mentioned yet: it's much, much smaller than the radio-button polls. Now it's actually reasonable to have ten polls on a page, as they no longer dominate the thread. Great work!


Edit: Still dominates when you've already voted though... could results be displayed horizontally instead of vertically for this type of poll?

[Edited by DiMono at Local Time:09-25-2004 at 02:14 PM]

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Schik
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DiMono wrote:
Edit: Still dominates when you've already voted though... could results be displayed horizontally instead of vertically for this type of poll?

I took a shot at this. I can't say I'm entirely thrilled with the results, but I'm too tired to try to make it nicer right now.


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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

DiMono
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I think I would do it without displaying the bars, and colouring the columns appropriately based on what percentage each vote received. That would allow them to be a constant width, and would add some colour.

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eytanz
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That, for lack of a better word, is a terrible idea. Colors would be totally arbitrary, while the bars are directly representational of the percentages. Even if I memorize the color list, you'd have to use at least 10 different colors to represent 10% increments and that means at some point there'll be a need to tell two similar shades apart when they're not next to each other which is a difficult task even for people with great vision, let alone anyone whose vision isn't perfect.

[Edited by eytanz at Local Time:09-28-2004 at 01:10 PM]

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leroy00
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I can't really think of a good way to do this; sometimes you just have to make a sacrifice somewhere. Bars of this sort are lent meaning precisely by the fact that they are all displayed with a common starting point such that they provide a visual comparision of that which they represent, in this case voting options, which can be visually parsed faster than numbers. Displaying them this way causes this quality to be lost. One compromise could be to display the bars standing vertically in a horizontal row. This could work for this particular kind of post due to the fact that the category names are all small, i.e. a number between 1 and 10.

If that doesn't work, either sacrifice the bars all together or live with the space mongering. I can't recall having seen more than one poll in a thread, anyway, or am I missing the point?

--leroy

[Edited by leroy00 at Local Time:09-28-2004 at 03:33 PM]

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HSE
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I'm sorry, but what I see does look slightly ugly. It might just be bad DLing on my part, but I'm not a fan of this. How about a drop-down menu which shows us the number of votes for each category?

Schik
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No need to be sorry - it is indeed ugly. I'll be working on something that will hopefully be much better soon.


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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Schik
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Okay, I revamped the bars for this type of poll. Now they're vertical, but relatively short so as to not take up the entire screen. I removed the # of votes display, since it looked clunky, but then re-added it as a mouseover on each bar.

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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

wackhead_uk
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That's very Nice! for multiple question polls, would they be stacked sideways, or upwards?

HSE
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This one looks much better. Almost futuristic, even, what with the metallic-silver bars. Well done Schik.

Mikko
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I would like to point out that despite voting for "1", I actually think this is a good thing. I just thought it would be a better test of the feature to vote for a less obvious option.

eytanz
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This is really nice

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DiMono
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The new display looks excellent. As for having the polls repeat horizontally or vertically, the css tag "float" could find a use here. <table style="float: left;"> would try to fit as many polls in a row as possible, and when it ran out of room it would just loop back down to the next row. Then style="clear: left;" on the table that contains the rest of the thread would make sure it still appears as it's supposed to

Actually, a reasonable example of this may be viewed here using pictures and captions. The centered text at the bottom uses clear:left in order to be centered. Just resize your browser window to see how they interact with each other. ...then explore the site, it has a lot of content

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leroy00
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Very nice job, Schik. I think you've managed to get the best of both worlds, here.

--leroy

[Edited by leroy00 at Local Time:09-30-2004 at 08:58 AM]

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You can hear happiness staggering on down the street -- footless, dressed in red.
-Jimi Hendrix, "The Wind Cries Mary"

DiMono
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One thing the new layout is missing: How many votes does that large bar represent? Though holding the same percentage, 3vs1 is a lot different than 3000vs1000

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Deploy the... I think it's a yellow button... it's usually flashing... it makes the engines go... WHOOSH!

Schik
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As I noted up a few posts, the # of votes is in the mouseover for each bar. So it's not immediately obvious, but it looked too clunky to add it in as another row in the table.

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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Watcher
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Quick suggestion: add the sum of the votes and number of votes after the average vote value. So this particular poll, for example, would read Average Vote 8.28 (207/25). It's not really important, but it might be nice to have.

Also, thanks for converting the current contest vote to a rating poll.

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Today the refrigerator, tomorrow the world!