Scratch

blob8108 wrote:

Hi, I just wanted to add some thoughts/questions:
(Sorry if these have been answered!)

How are projects ranked? If tags are weighted, and can have different numbers of votes, and projects can have multiple tags, the ranking seems quite complicated to me.

For example:
Sorting the list of projects on the homepage
Sorting a list of projects with a given tag / (tags?)

Thanks!

On tag pages, projects are in order of relevance to the tag. (instead of sorted by non-specific love-its or views.)
Relevance to the tag is determined by how many scratchers use that tag to organize that project in their bookmarks, and don't vote that tag down after picking other tag(s). 
(So the tag picking UI needs to be very easy to use.  ...mocked up and explained earlier.)

Projects can be ranked to the entire site too: the number of people that bookmarked the project (by choosing one or more tag too bookmark the project with.)
But I think if per tag weighting works well, few will care as much about a front page that tries to interest everyone with everything.  I think we will prefer go to tags that interest us.  People that like Games will go there and not complain about there being too many Art projects.

Combination pages:
Also on the "game" tag page, it can suggest other tags that are also used in "game" projects, like "racing",  so you can go to the "game+racing", for a more focused community.  Then on that page it may also suggest mario, so people that like "game+racing+mario"  projects can go there.
So on combination pages, projects are in order of a combination of the score for each tag. (not sure exactly how yet.  Perhaps by order of the lowest tag; so project A: (game 45, racing 12, mario 16), ranks higher than projectB: (game 853, racing 264, mario 1) because 12>1. ??)

blob8108 wrote:

Is the importance/weighting of a tag dependent on the number of votes it's recieved from multiple projects?

Sorry.  Not sure what you mean.  But I may have answered you above.
Tag pages list projects in order of relevance to the tag, or how many used that tag to bookmark that project.

blob8108 wrote:

Also, if you're considering implementing this, have you looked at couchdb? It's a different kind of database to using SQL/tables, but I kinda prefer it, and it seems to make life easier for scaling too, particularly for 'Views' which are certain lists/ways of listing documents from the database.

Yeah CouchDB is very interesting!  I looked through it more tonight; It might work well for this.

Thanks!

JTxt wrote:

On tag pages, projects are in order of relevance to the tag. (instead of sorted by non-specific love-its or views.)
Relevance to the tag is determined by how many scratchers use that tag to organize that project in their bookmarks, and don't vote that tag down after picking other tag(s).

So on tag pages, if I understand correctly, projects are sorted by the total number of votes that tag has on each project.
Could this perhaps be combined with number of views? Or, seeing as tag votes replace Love-its, the total number of votes on all the tags for that project?
And from what you've said, by picking tags for a project, and not voting down another one, we're assuming that they have 'approved' that tag - but could the user not see the tag, or not bother voting it down?

JTxt wrote:

Projects can be ranked to the entire site too: the number of people that bookmarked the project (by choosing one or more tag too bookmark the project with.)

So on the home page, is this the same as sorting by the total number of tags/votes for that project?

JTxt wrote:

But I think if per tag weighting works well, few will care as much about a front page that tries to interest everyone with everything.  I think we will prefer go to tags that interest us.  People that like Games will go there and not complain about there being too many Art projects.

I agree, this is part of why this is such a good idea. If tags actually work, and aren't spammed as much, then it makes it much easier to find things.

As to voting down - should project authors have greater weight/control over tags on their own projects? (Similar to the way you can delete comments on your projects.) For example, if someone tagged it "waffles" and you thought that tag was irrelevant, then you could simply delete it.

JTxt wrote:

Combination pages:
Also on the "game" tag page, it can suggest other tags that are also used in "game" projects, like "racing",  so you can go to the "game+racing", for a more focused community.  Then on that page it may also suggest mario, so people that like "game+racing+mario"  projects can go there.
So on combination pages, projects are in order of a combination of the score for each tag. (not sure exactly how yet.  Perhaps by order of the lowest tag; so project A: (game 45, racing 12, mario 16), ranks higher than projectB: (game 853, racing 264, mario 1) because 12>1. ??)

Combination pages are cool, but I can't think how you would implement them. in Couch. I'm sure you could do it in SQL though, with some complicated query involving MERGE and JOIN...
And by order of the lowest tag might work - but wouldn't it be better to combine the tags in some way?

JTxt wrote:

blob8108 wrote:

Is the importance/weighting of a tag dependent on the number of votes it's recieved from multiple projects?

Sorry.  Not sure what you mean.  But I may have answered you above.
Tag pages list projects in order of relevance to the tag, or how many used that tag to bookmark that project.

Sorry, just hadn't thought through what I meant. I think I was trying to ask if tags influenced the sorting too.
For example, would a tag with a high total number of votes, such as 'game', be more important than a less popular one? And so a project with a lot of votes for a popular tag might be sorted higher or lower.
I think that's what I was trying to say, but thinking about it now it doesn't make much sense or seem very useful. I'd just ignore it 

JTxt wrote:

Yeah CouchDB is very interesting!  I looked through it more tonight; It might work well for this.

Having had a look, CouchDB is good for certain parts of this, but more awkward for others. There's an interactive demo/emulatorthat also has a good explanation of using views and map/reduce, and you can get a free Couch instance from CouchOne.

I've been playing with it here... I made several views, but some of them are pretty difficult.

I'm not sure about voter weight, but I've added a few other things. Projects could be stored something like this:

{
   "_id": "34cdbb6a436e4c1165a9e5f7ee000d59",
   "_rev": "7-c94264fc9c441c12e6ef77a03a335ad0",
   "type": "project",
   "name": "My First Project!",
   "views": 32,
   "username": "user123",
   "tags": {
       "game": {
           "user123": 1,
           "jimmy": -1,
           "somescratchr": 1
       },
       "waffles": {
           "user123": 1,
           "wafflemeister": -1
       }
   }
}

The .sb files, or any other resources, could be stored as attachments.

Obviously I don't know exactly what you're thinking, so what I've done is just a guess as to how I'd do it. 

Thinking about it, using a relational database (like MySQL) might be a much better way to do this. 

Finally, (sorry for long post!) is there a difference between favourites and bookmarks? I think you mentioned one being a tag, and the other being all the projects you've tagged...

Last edited by blob8108 (2011-01-17 11:49:29)

blob8108 wrote:

JTxt wrote:

On tag pages, projects are in order of relevance to the tag. (instead of sorted by non-specific love-its or views.)
Relevance to the tag is determined by how many scratchers use that tag to organize that project in their bookmarks, and don't vote that tag down after picking other tag(s).

So on tag pages, if I understand correctly, projects are sorted by the total number of votes that tag has on each project.
Could this perhaps be combined with number of views?

Perhaps. Opinion: I don't like views as a measure of popularity or relevance; it only means the content attracted views: perhaps by gimmicks (titles like “I QUIT!” or attractive but irrelevant thumbnails, or by spamming comments/tags/galleries...), or a feedback loop also like in our current system where projects that are top viewed (often because the user is already popular) get more views.  Even when views are because of real merit, the view doesn't say whether the user liked it or why they liked it.  So with FaveTags I've ignored views.  If the user likes it enough to bookmark it, to share it, or it help build or defend their favorite tag groups, they will use the tag widget.  Otherwise they'll let it be.  (I did suggest elsewhere the possibility of using views as a negative vote.  Kind of like a “bounce”.  The score only goes up when people care enough to vote/bookmark/tag.  That may be cool to play with too, but might give too much power to lurkers.)

blob8108 wrote:

Or, seeing as tag votes replace Love-its, the total number of votes on all the tags for that project?
And from what you've said, by picking tags for a project, and not voting down another one, we're assuming that they have 'approved' that tag - but could the user not see the tag, or not bother voting it down?

On tag pages it will just sort by the score of that tag(s) to the project.  Here, we don't care about it's popularity to the entire site, only to whatever tag we're on.

Yeah, I think most will only bother with tags they care about.
Anyone can add a tag, it's like it's nominated for that tag, if others agree they'll use it too; if they're against it they can vote it down or just let it be.  Once a tag has a low enough score, (-5 perhaps) it's hidden, (but can be revealed.)

blob8108 wrote:

JTxt wrote:

Projects can be ranked to the entire site too: the number of people that bookmarked the project (by choosing one or more tag too bookmark the project with.)

So on the home page, is this the same as sorting by the total number of tags/votes for that project?

For relevance to the entire site it would be just the number of users that added or or more tags to bookmark it.
So one person can only vote once, not multiple times if they decided to use multiple tags to bookmark it.
(But I think we would be just fine if entire site relevance for projects was never calculated.)

blob8108 wrote:

JTxt wrote:

But I think if per tag weighting works well, few will care as much about a front page that tries to interest everyone with everything.  I think we will prefer go to tags that interest us.  People that like Games will go there and not complain about there being too many Art projects.

I agree, this is part of why this is such a good idea. If tags actually work, and aren't spammed as much, then it makes it much easier to find things.

As to voting down - should project authors have greater weight/control over tags on their own projects? (Similar to the way you can delete comments on your projects.) For example, if someone tagged it "waffles" and you thought that tag was irrelevant, then you could simply delete it.

YES!  I don't think I've written about that yet.  If the project owner downvotes a tag, it is hidden down with the other voted down tags. (that can be revealed, see mockup.)  Perhaps it should be deleted instead.  Not sure.
Users can still use any tag to categorize their bookmarks regardless of what others think.  (unless it's moderated.)

blob8108 wrote:

JTxt wrote:

Combination pages:
Also on the "game" tag page, it can suggest other tags that are also used in "game" projects, like "racing",  so you can go to the "game+racing", for a more focused community.  Then on that page it may also suggest mario, so people that like "game+racing+mario"  projects can go there.
So on combination pages, projects are in order of a combination of the score for each tag. (not sure exactly how yet.  Perhaps by order of the lowest tag; so project A: (game 45, racing 12, mario 16), ranks higher than projectB: (game 853, racing 264, mario 1) because 12>1. ??)

Combination pages are cool, but I can't think how you would implement them. in Couch. I'm sure you could do it in SQL though, with some complicated query involving MERGE and JOIN...
And by order of the lowest tag might work - but wouldn't it be better to combine the tags in some way?

I mentioned faceted search engines like solr, but yes it can be done in SQL.
I particularly like this approach.

blob8108 wrote:

Having had a look, CouchDB is good for certain parts of this, but more awkward for others. There's an interactive demo/emulatorthat also has a good explanation of using views and map/reduce, and you can get a free Couch instance from CouchOne.

I've been playing with it here... I made several views, but some of them are pretty difficult.

I'm not sure about voter weight, but I've added a few other things. Projects could be stored something like this:

Code:

{
   "_id": "34cdbb6a436e4c1165a9e5f7ee000d59",
   "_rev": "7-c94264fc9c441c12e6ef77a03a335ad0",
   "type": "project",
   "name": "My First Project!",
   "views": 32,
   "username": "user123",
   "tags": {
       "game": {
           "user123": 1,
           "jimmy": -1,
           "somescratchr": 1
       },
       "waffles": {
           "user123": 1,
           "wafflemeister": -1
       }
   }
}

The .sb files, or any other resources, could be stored as attachments.

Obviously I don't know exactly what you're thinking, so what I've done is just a guess as to how I'd do it. 

Thinking about it, using a relational database (like MySQL) might be a much better way to do this. 

Very cool!  Thanks for sharing and tring this out!  Perhaps this would help in figuring out the structure in CouchDB?

blob8108 wrote:

Finally, (sorry for long post!) is there a difference between favorites and bookmarks? I think you mentioned one being a tag, and the other being all the projects you've tagged...

They're the same thing here.
The current scratch has a “Favorites” which is like our bookmarks for projects on our profile page, our personal gallery.  But it doesn't allow us to categorize or prioritize projects.

With FaveTags, when we tag something we're also bookmarking it, we're also promoting them like favorites, depending on the tags we use.  We may like a project because it has an interesting aspect we want to remember, like “interesting+math” but we may only reserve “awesome”, “favorite”, “best” for just a few.
So that's personally, what we think of a project.

But also when we add, confirm or vote down a tag, we're influencing the ranking of the project in those public tag pages.

But also something I haven't elaborated on:
On tag pages, we also need to be able to see :
newly tagged as X,
top tagged as X and filterable by last 24h, week, month, year, all-time.
(Perhaps that many options are not necessary.)
So the query would need to add up and filter tag votes by time ranges, which I think would be costly.  ?
OR, perhaps it could work like drupal's radioactivity module.  The ContentToTagScore (separate table as the tally of all user votes of tags to projects) would have a last24hourScore column which would have a half-life of one day; and lastMonthScore with a half-life of 1 month etc...
So votes would also be added to those columns. All of these 'radioactive' scores would be regularly reduced by the half-life.
(edit: I'm figuring out a more efficient way to do this, not quite ready.)

Make sense?  Thanks for reading my long posts!   

Last edited by JTxt (2011-01-19 14:04:00)

bbbeb wrote:

Maybe if mods could remove tags altogether....

Well, I'm suggesting that tags (and galleries, favorites, love-its) are replaced with a system better designed for social tagging(grouping/categorizing) and promoting of projects.  So that similar types of projects and scratchers can get together more easily...

So tag pages will be sorted by the relevance of projects to the tag instead of a generic "popularity" score like love-its, favorites, and views.

This is an attempt to improve how all this works. 

Again, this may not be the best way.  I'm also inviting everyone to think about this and share better ways this can work.

Last edited by JTxt (2011-01-19 11:30:37)

bbbeb wrote:

JTxt wrote:

bbbeb wrote:

Maybe if mods could remove tags altogether....

Well, I'm suggesting that tags (and galleries, favorites, love-its) are replaced with a system better designed for social tagging(grouping/categorizing) and promoting of projects.  So that similar types of projects and scratchers can get together more easily...

So tag pages will be sorted by the relevance of projects to the tag instead of a generic "popularity" score like love-its, favorites, and views.

This is an attempt to improve how all this works. 

Again, this may not be the best way.  I'm also inviting everyone to think about this and share better ways this can work.

Let me finish.

...then there would be an easy way of moderating it.

And maybe you can show when (date,hour) it happened so that mods can track groups who are secretly harassing people?

Oh, I see that you're talking about moderating tags, not removing all tags, sorry.

Yes, some "bad" tags should be moderated (like curse words) so, they can not be used to bookmark projects, and won't have a tag page.

Some good tags could also be added in mean ways.  (Like,
adding the "cow" tag to a picture of a person.) 
Perhaps there should be a way to flag tags used inappropriately.

But I think usually the community would take care of it themselves.  The people that frequent the "Cow" tag page, would see the irrelevant project in the "Newly tagged as Cow" section. 

If they just ignore it, it will go away, or they can vote it down for "cow" to make it go away faster.  But it won't show in "top tagged as cow", unless many agree. and won't show at all if the owner of the project voted-down/hid the tag. 

On the project page, Cow would show up on the bottom of the list of tags "Cow 1" others can vote it down when they vote for things they agree with.  Once it's below -5, it's hidden. Or if the owner votes it down, it's hidden, or perhaps deleted.

The person that tagged it as cow, will have it in their bookmarks under "cow".  It will be easy to see a history of abusive tagging and for a mod to take action.

Last edited by JTxt (2011-01-19 17:38:35)

I think this is a great idea.
I'll report this so the Scratch Team sees it.

forme0 wrote:

I like the idea with the group things.

me too!