Who exactly votes?
Ok trivial question but I have wondered for years.... who votes for "best answers" to hotline questions? Is there any rhyme or reason to the voting or even when/if a question gets "voted" on? As far as I can tell it has nothing to do with people using the "I agree" button. Sometimes best answer designations seem to appear within hours of a question being asked. Sometimes the polls seem to close very early.
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It is a particular shame to see it in discussions about food safety here at Food52.
Good point about popularity votes on food safety questions.
Maybe the editors should put a disclaimer on the hotline, as some books on medical topics carry near the copyright page.
See examples here:
http://thedigitalhippies.com/digital/11-copy-and-paste-copyright-page-disclaimers/
There are no best answers with only two votes and no ties.
There is one thread right now in the right hand sidebar Popular Questions that has four answers with two votes apiece. That thread has no Best Answer. If someone else presses the "I Agree" button on one of those four replies with two votes, it will get the Best Answer title.
anyway, I agree that just hitting the "agree" button isn't an indicator of how good the answer is. I don't think the "best answer" changes to another choice, or at least it didn't in the past (?) but I may be wrong.
This is not true.
You can see the number of votes if you log out of Food52 and revisit the thread. If you are logged into Food52 and a forum reply has been voted as Best Answer, you can see the number of votes the "winning" answer scored, but not the tallies for any of the other answers.
Again, logging out will let you see all the tallies.
Only registered users can vote, but as mentioned before the vote from an experienced longtime community member who has contributed a lot does not get weighed any more than a post-and-run, one-shot wonder who signed up ten minutes ago to leave a drive-by question never to reply, thank or contribute anything back to the community.
The "Best Answer" designation is really a misnomer in 2017. It might have been more plausible five years ago. The way the Food52 community has evolved in the past couple of years, "Most Popular Reply" would be a more accurate designation today.
I'm not calling out Food52 because it has happened in many other places, but online community forum systems written five years ago often have not evolved to adjust to today's Internet usage habits.
Topics for the Food52 staff to consider but I would be surprised if they haven't already discussed this at some point in a recent staff meeting.
An answer that gets three votes gets labeled as Best Answer, but if another answer is overtakes that vote tally, the new favorite will gain the Best Answer label.
From my observations, the polls are never closed. You can vote on ancient answers in five-year old threads.
The forum system forbids one from voting on any answer twice, but it does not forbid you for clicking on the "I Agree" button for two or more answers in the same thread.
The "I Agree" button is basically a thumbs up.
There is apparently no editorial intervention and there is no weighing to the votes. A longtime community member's "I Agree" vote is worth the same as someone who signed up two minutes ago.
A number of weeks ago this was addressed on a another thread but I can't find it.
It's computer-generated. Has to do with how many times the question was viewed and how many 'I agree's' are logged which doesn't take many.
Caninechef's inquiry is about which answer is labeled as "Best Answer", a totally separate matter. Re-read her inquiry again.