Add Up/Down Vote instead of Best Reply

best reply is overrated - some people want to be spoonfed.. there has been cases where I have told them what to do but havent hand held their hands and the best reply is given to someone else who posted after me with exact stuff but a bit more hand holded reply

Agreed, I do not do peoples work for them... unless they want to pay me... but I feel like being able to down vote would help to isolate the very poor responses I have been seeing lately. Responses that are not even closely related to the question posed. I am not going to throw out anything too specific because I do not want to call anybody out.

The only problem I see with down voting is that it provides a tool to cast negativity. The Laravel/Laracasts community has a reputation for being friendly and helpful, and I'd hate to see a mechanism put in place that could tarnish that (even if deserved, in some cases).

Instead, I'd rather see members be more inspired to "up vote" or "like" good responses, and have that drive the best reply. I think there would need to be some kind of incentive to encourage members to use it, though, as it's currently under used.

Another scenario I see commonly is that the OP doesn't really know what the best answer is, and ignorantly selects a not-so-best reply.

I agree it is a positive place. Myself personally have been pushed away from using it as much as of late, lets say the last 2-3 months because I am finding less and less value in the answers being provided.

Or, an answer is so poor, I am put off from the entire thread. There is no way good way to respond, you can not really call the person out, they just ignore it, or it causes drama... and I have no need for drama.

A down-vote provides a good method to allow a person to weed out poor responses, and up-vote provides the exact opposite.

Again, maybe I am wrong, and a large part of this request comes from personal opinion, so it is possible it is not the best course of action, but I feel like we need some way to flag these bad replies.

I agree that it could cause negativity, but at the same time I see it a useful tool like stated above to weed out some not so necessarily good answers. Other sites like stack overflow use up and downvotes and I don't see it brining a lot of negativity there.

Are there going to be people who abuse or always just downvote people? Sure, but you are always going to have those kinds of people, and you can't always protect people from getting their feelings hurt; this is the real world after all.

While on this topic of Best Replies...

I'd also like to see something like a monthly email that is delivered to any thread owners, with a summary of all threads that have not been closed; reminding/encouraging them to return to the thread and select a Best Reply. The email would only list threads that have at least 1 reply, and activity since the previous month. I would say that threads stay open more regularly than those that get closed - and I think that is just another case of the OP not realizing the feature exists.

But - if the Best Reply was driven by votes, this wouldn't matter anyway.

Just something to think about.

Maybe something like allowing the thread creator to pick the best reply (as now) but also a 'community best reply' award that was the most liked/favourited/upvoted one?

I also dislike the idea of downvoting as it often leads to 'in crowds' just downvoting people they don't like (see Reddit for instance).

There's also the issue of things that were 'best' when they were awarded now being out of date - I quite often see people replying to old threads saying they've tried some advice that was for Laravel 4.x or something and not understanding why they can't see the files mentioned. How you go about that without relying on people manually marking them is another matter though - some advice is (relatively) timeless - some goes out of date in a few weeks (javascript - I'm looking at you... ;-)

It's a hard problem to solve I think - look at Stackoverflow for instance - they've been pretty much dedicated to the issue for years and it's still full of out-dated 'best replies' that are wildly out of date or just wrong.

It is not about outdated best answers needing to be updated.

What this is about, is people that barely understand what they are doing, thinking they know the right way, spreading a plague of misinformation.

As has been stated, this community is rather well grounded, but I have noticed a very real issue, of those that actually understand the system, simply not providing feedback anymore. The rise of extremely poor answers has grown significantly over the last few months, calling them out on honestly dumb answers is highly frowned upon.

I get it, we live in a world where we need to treat everybody as if the world really cares about that them. We need to treat them like an employer would be okay with a dumb solution, and thats fine, I can let them find out the world is cold. But, without the ability signify bad solutions by the community, we are going to begin to improperly educate those that want to do things the right way.

@CMDOBUENO

What this is about, is people that barely understand what they are doing, thinking they know the right way, spreading a plague of misinformation.

I don't think I've ever heard the internet described so well ;-)

Yes, but that is the wild world of the internet... and most places have some form of control or notifications to let a person know that the info is probably bad, or should be used carefully.

Directly allowing us to up or down vote can solve this problem...

The user's level is not a good example, you can boost your level by watching videos, and asking questions... so... this is another great example of why we need down/up voting

The likes system can really provide the same feedback. If there is a selected answer that is wrong and someone else has a better answer and there were like 10 likes for it...it should tell you something. But most people don't really use the like system.

You also don't really need a downvote. Just an upvote would suffice and eliminate the negative connotation.

stackoverflow has the same concept - yet you dont see news of people going into psychiatric wards/counselling sessions because someone has downvoted their reply.

so i think if someone does something ie post irrelevant stuff down voting is a way to let others know that this reply isnt worth reading etc..

Down voting doesn't have to be a negative thing. If a reply doesn't really add value or isn't even relevant to the thread, it should be down voted. This would help prevent people from wasting their time reading irrelevant replies like @shez1983 mentioned.

Also, @cmdobueno brings up a good point that experience really not indicative of the user because it is so easily gained through just watching videos or even just marking videos at watched. I've seen people on the leader boards who literally have no best replies and their experience is made up purely from watching videos/asking questions.

Yes, I believe it's 1000 XP for a best reply, 100 XP for a watched video, 10 XP for a post. I think getting XP by manually marking a video as watched as a bug. The old forum (I'm pretty sure) didn't add XP for that (@jeffreyway can you confirm?). But yeah, XP really doesn't have much to do with knowledge. It just means you're active on the forum, over a period of time.

You could also set it up like HN where after a certain number of downvotes, the post disappears (or becomes hidden - you can still view it if you choose to but it's hidden by default)

I've seen people on the leader boards who literally have no best replies and their experience is made up purely from watching videos/asking questions.

Sure, and some haven't watched any videos, and ask a ton of basic questions over and over because they haven't lol.

I really think that would be a good idea @cronix hiding with enough downvotes. Now somebody just needs to convince the boss man.

Many answers were down voted in stackoverflow, even though they were quality of answers. Some are struggling to figure out why the answer was down voted by a guy who has a higher reputation.

@cronix I think it's 500xp for a best reply, not 1000 :)