Tonight we’ve introduced a few changes to the HomeCrowd comments system – the main tweak being the removal of the downvote mechanism to put more emphasis on upvoting in order to ensure comments remain useful, entertaining and friendly.
We’ve taken this decision after gathering feedback from the community and undertaking lengthy discussion behind the scenes. We want to ensure there remains a strong focus on positive interaction between community members and to reduce any misuse of the voting system. It appeared that there was clear confusion on how the downvote should be used and the mechanic had also become secondary as an aid to moderation.
Many of the major social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook only have positive feedback options, such as ‘like’ and ‘favourite’ and we’ve decided to follow their lead. As before, please be sure to upvote any comment that you find useful and that you feel benefits the community.
In order to allow users to flag up any comments that they feel warrant moderator attention, we’ve also made a slight change by renaming the “report” button to “flag”. Please use the flag button if you feel a comment post is disruptive or abusive and a moderator will take a look and act on it if required.
Finally, we have removed the publicly displayed reputation level badges. Again, these caused some confusion and while we’ve kept them and the hidden reputation system behind them, the badges can now only be seen within a poster’s profile.
Thank you to everyone for your feedback during the first few weeks of HomeCrowd, it has been invaluable to helping us evolve it. Once the season begins and traffic levels settle, we will hopefully have the opportunity to start adding new features.
