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PTR
10.2.7
PTR
10.2.6
Beta
New Feature: Guides! Feedback needed
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Post by
Koper
I just deployed our newest feature:
Guides
!
It allows the guides we usually write in blogs to be better organized and also rated, but especially, it allows you to
write your own guide
and earn
4 new achievements
.
This feature will be in a short beta period after which we will announce it on the blog. Your feedback (suggestions, bug reports, adding/removing/renaming categories, etc) is greatly appreciated.
While I'm here let me tell you about a little feature which probably won't make it into the blog post: weighted ratings. I always hate how most websites do ratings: simply an average of all the votes. So let's say I write a guide that has 500 votes, thousands of views, and an average rating of 8.5... A great guide overall. But then let's say someone else comes along and writes a new guide, and that guide receives just a few votes of 10.. Then that guide appears to be better than mine when it's very unlikely to be the case. This makes the rating feature almost useless.
So I went with weighted ratings instead, using a mathematical formula to calculate the rating shown:
$this->rating = (($guideAverageRating * $this->nvotes) + ($globalAverageRating * MIN_VOTES_FOR_RATING)) / ($this->nvotes + MIN_VOTES_FOR_RATING);
(MIN_VOTES_FOR_RATING is 5)
In a few words this means that the fewer votes the guide has the more the weighted rating is "adjusted" to the average rating of all guides. So, if the average rating of all guides is - let's say - 6.0, a guide that received five 10.0 votes will have a weighted rating of 8.0, and a guide that received five 1.0 votes will have a weighted rating of 3.5. If they receive more 10.0 or 1.0 votes, the more they receive the closer they'll get to 10.0 and 1.0 for the weighted rating. I think this system will make ratings much more useful.
So that's all! Give your feedback!
EDIT
: oh, I almost forgot: you'll have access to all the moderator-only markup tags while writing guides.(##RESPBREAK##)2##DELIM##Koper##DELIM##
Post by
Ashelia
Another thing to add: this is just phase one, we are going to probably have more features depending on interest in general from our userbase. This includes special perks like forum ranks/titles, forum integration (so that guides appear in forums like a sticky), and more. Ideas for future features are appreciated, as well as submitting guides you've already written on the forums or elsewhere to this new guide database. This is a project I'm very excited to help unveil and I really hope it takes off with the community's help.
Thanks all! =)(##RESPBREAK##)2##DELIM##Ashelia##DELIM##
Post by
lankybrit
Your guides are fantastic. If you're going to continue to do them, why do we need to?
Cheers.
Post by
446836
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Monday
I do have a question: There seems to be some code that doesn't work. Example: I use the following to center titles:
Notes
It works just fine if it's used in an OP (for example,
one place
where I got it to work), but in a regular it does not. Same with in the guide. I took that guide and cleaned it up a bit just now and intended to submit it with the above table to center my titles, but it didn't work.
Any thoughts? Am I making sense at all?
Post by
Jubilee
Wow, this is great! One question, what's the code and syntax for making those neat tables that all the guides have, the ones that have the different tabs?
Also another question (sorry I lied about there being only one :O), is there a way to indent? On other forums I've seen but that doesn't appear to work for me here.
Post by
OverZealous
While I love the idea of writing guides looking fully as awesome as the ones perculia's been writing, I somehow doubt that they'll be able to keep the same standard. You guys write excellent guides, and I don't see much reason for the community to do so - unless you intend to stop writing guides; in which case it's a great idea. I'd be glad to write guides if it would be beneficial to the general community, but I'm more worried of decreased quality in comparison to official guides.
Anyway, achievements \o/
Post by
asakawa
Good work Koper!
Funden, I'm not sure exactly what the problem you're seeing is but in guides (since Koper mentioned moderator BBCode works) try using
. . .
Jubilee, the BBCode for those is
content
Post by
Monday
Hmph, I'll have to try that. Ty asa.
Post by
lankybrit
First project for someone should be:
A guide to everything in Wow.
With a tab for every aspect of the game.
:)
Cheers.
Post by
115812
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
perculia
I'm writing up this weekend's guide as we speak; I don't plan to stop writing them :)
User-guides pop up now and then which are outside the scope of what I write--maybe it's a gear list for a specific talent tree as opposed to my mega 4.2 gear overview. Someone was talking about 10m guides a few weeks ago too.
It's also a nice way to have the official guides clumped in one spot instead of fishing around the general forums (remind me to put the rare spawn/profession posts under the guide section).
I passed on some tips to Ashelia about what to keep in mind while writing a guide--there should be a FAQ up soon for interested writers.(##RESPBREAK##)140##DELIM##perculia##DELIM##
Post by
Thror
Can I make text wrap around images?
Post by
hatman555
I've looked over the system for about 5 minutes, and at first glance is amazing. It will take me some time to reformat and submit something, so more feedback to come later.
Great work Koper and everyone else who chipped in to make this possible!
Cheers,
Hat
Post by
Jubilee
Can I make text wrap around images?
Use float=right or float=left, if you mean what I think you mean.
Post by
Monday
Ah, that worked perfectly, asakawa! Thanks ^_^
Post by
844932
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Thror
I wish I could check the tags in some of the existing guides. Would help me learn a bunch of things. Like how the thingy with tabs works.
Post by
Interest
I was wondering why there was a Guide tab on the front page. I like it.
Speaking of that, can I flag some of my stuff as guides, like the Evolution of Hunters thread?
we are going to probably have more features depending on
interest
in general
1. I'm a general?
2. You're going to add more features based on me?
Post by
Koper
I was wondering why there was a Guide tab on the front page. I like it.
Speaking of that, can I flag some of my stuff as guides, like the Evolution of Hunters thread?
No, you have to create a new guide and copy & paste the contents.
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