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The question is answered, right answer was accepted
[Meta] For UA Devs: Can karma levels be changed?
This is a question for the UnityAnswers developers. If you're not a dev, please feel free to chime in with any suggestions and comments.
As you may be aware, @alucardj's post at http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/432710/meta-unity-answers-is-degrading-.html has generated a lot of discussion among the oldest and most active members of UA. Mixed in with a lot of really great but technically challenging ideas are some relatively simple suggestions.
Among them are two that I'd like to ask you about. They're the simplest suggestions, IMO - they just involve changing at what level of karma users gain certain privileges. Hopefully these would be minor changes technically (adjust a few values in a table), but they might just fix some major issues on UnityAnswers.
I'm hoping that you'll give your feedback on whether you'd consider implementing these changes, and if not, why not - both for myself, and for all the other long-time users that are very passionate about UA. We want to start a conversation with you, and we want to help in any way we can - most of all, we want to make UA the best site it can be.
Without further ado, the suggestions:
The first suggestion is to lower the karma requirement for converting between answers and comments ("convert answers to comments and vice versa").
New users constantly make mistakes, and posting a comment as an answer is one they love :). Currently it takes 10,000 karma to fix this - to change an answer to a comment and vice versa - the same as deleting a post. But converting answers/comments isn't lossy like deleting is - it can always be undone by anyone with enough karma, and all it does is reorder the flow a bit. Hopefully you'll agree that it requires less trust than 'Edit other people's posts', which takes only 2000 karma.
So I suggest making 'converting answers/comments' something you can do with 1000 or 2000 karma.
The second suggestion (and the one more important to the community, judging by the comments) has to do with the moderation queue.
While there are hundreds of users with over 1000 karma that can approve new questions in the queue, there are less than a dozen active users that have enough karma to reject questions in the queue. The result, not surprisingly, is that pretty much every question in the queue gets approved, regardless of quality - there simply aren't enough people to watch for and reject bad questions in the queue without resorting to 2+ hour shifts apiece every day. This then floods the site with lower-quality questions that reduce the usefulness of the site for everyone. If the minimum karma to reject questions was lowered, to 7000, 5000, or even lower, that would expand the pool of people that could reject questions and improve quality. People with 5000 karma can already edit and close questions, and I for one haven't seen much abuse of this power - surely they can be trusted with a little more responsibility?
These suggestions aren't going to solve all our problems, and there are certainly plenty of fantastic suggestions at http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/432710/meta-unity-answers-is-degrading-.html (pulling one at random, see @robertbu's suggestion that starts with "one way of addressing the moderator issue would be to add a new action for moderators below 10K called 'refer.'").
However, these two suggestions are relatively easy steps, (hopefully) not requiring any rewrite of the site, and it would mean a lot to users such as myself if you could implement them, or at least let us know what you think.
PLUS ONE $$anonymous$$ILLION on this post, you rock Julien
Graham, It appears that as of sometime today I can reject both questions and answers in the queue. Not sure what you changed, but it appears to have worked :)
That means that so far, we have successful testing for changing answers to a comment and rejecting q&a in the queue. The only other thing we talked about was lowering the karma requirement for converting a comment to an answer. If you lowered it to, say, 5000, I could convert your comment above, accept it, and close this question :)
Thanks for making the change for us. I think there are a number of folks who will really appreciate it.
A dozen - no twenty - times a day on the ad$$anonymous$$ page I do this:
"1 - I click 'reject', 2 - I click message, 3 - I type the form sentence 'Please post comments as Comments.' and then click send"
..........
If there was some way to add [a] new "InstaButtons" ...
So InstaButton would say "Reject this Answer and send form message about comments."
This modest change would reap massive rewards.
Literaly my fingers hurt from typing 'Please post comments as Comments.'
Does anyone know is there some way to get an insta-button ?
The roles, and how they get enabled by karma are, um, complicated and confusing. I've never really understood them in over two years. However, I have made the following changes:
The moderation queue can be seen by anyone with k>1000
Reject a question k>1000
Reject an answer k>1000
Convert answer to comment k>1000
Convert comment to answer k>10000
Let me know if those changes seem to work.
Graham, I was able to change your comment to an answer, and I just finished testing all the other changes (answer to comment, reject questions and answers in the queue.
As far as I can tell, everything is working, so I'm going to close this question. Thank you for your help! We'll have to keep an eye out in the co$$anonymous$$g months and see if this helps us clean up the flood of inappropriate q&a from naive users.
For those who are skipping the comment chain above, the final item here (comment to answer) is now 5000 karma, not 10,000.
Graham, FYI: the 'about' page still lists the old karma values.
hey Julien "I get stuff done" Lynge - you rock! :)
I have a warm feeling to wards Unity3D now regarding Responsiveness! :)
Listen guys I'll tell you then next "simplest possible" thing that would HUGELY speed stuff up.
A dozen times a day on the ad$$anonymous$$ page I do this:
"1 - I click 'reject', 2 - I click message, 3 - I type the form sentence 'Please post comments as Comments.' and then click send"
Secondly, some 20 times a day I do this,
"1 - I click 'reject', 2 - I click message, 3 - I type the form sentence 'Please search here on those search terms for many long answers on that topic..' and then click send"
**What I think....*
If there was some way to add two new "InstaButtons" ...
So InstaButton one would say "Reject this Answer and send form message about comments."
And InstaButton two would say "Reject this Answer and send form message about searching."
Again this is no huge structural change, just combining and simplifying a couple existing functions.
This modest change would reap massive rewards.
As of this morning, I don't seem to be able to reject questions in the queue any more, only answers.
Nothing has changed from my point of view. Does anyone else have this issue?
Users with certain karma can accept answers, but very few do, just like no-one upvotes their fellow members. Personally when I see an unaccepted answer over 3 months old, I accept it.
The list of karma values and the actions available are listed in the FAQs (it seems the FAQs has been updated to reflect changes in karma levels) : http://answers.unity3d.com/page/faq.html
