Voting, Profiles & Hot content: Tools to help the Drupal community scale

Drupal is growing in complexity and growing simply in sheer numbers. We need more tools to help people manage the information overload and find the best voices in our community quickly. We should build dynamic tools to empower community members to join in and share their voices (if those voices are valuable) rather than walled gardens that keep people out. I believe voting, richer profiles, and the hot content are steps to help enable that vision. That said, the implementation has to match the community values. Below I've laid out the story of how some improvements to Groups.Drupal.org were made, provide data behind some of those improvements, and ask some questions so we can keep refining them.

At Drupalcon San Francisco there was a sprint for groups.drupal.org features where Josh Koenig and Brian Gilbert helped out add some new features. In particular we added voting on nodes & comments and we added a "hot" page which incorporates several elements to determine which content on the site is interesting in the last week.

I wanted to look back on the past year to think about these changes and whether or not they are an improvement.

Hot Content: G.d.o is a differentiated piece of $#!@$&

Randy Fay recently wrote about how Drupal.org doesn't differentiate in quality of content and he's absolutely right about a lot of the site. The only way to know what posts/comments are good is if you've been around enough to get a sense of people's reputation and maybe have a perspective on their content. For drupal.org, my colleague Lisa is working on a Content Strategy, which is what we ultimately need. I don't agree with all of Randy's ideas, but one of them I agree with is that we need better ways for the community to find the best content. Groups has that!

The hot content on groups.drupal.org helps feed people's desire for great content. According to Google Analytics this page is in the top thousand or so for most popular with a bounce rate of just 23% For comparison, Jobs is perpetually one of the top pages on the site and has solid value as a guide to content useful to visitors, it also has a comparatively low bounce rate of 29% which is a bit higher than the hot content. That makes the Hot page a pretty solid resource on the site for finding content, especially considering it's just a year old and has no primary navigation linking to it.

Voting on content & comments

Groups.drupal.org is using the Vote Up Down tool which has both up/down AND the ability to do just Up voting (my thanks to Marco Villegas for his help with the module). My feeling was that this tool would provide a simple way for folks to say "I agree" or "I disagree" without having to get into a long debate about exactly why. It helps bridge the gap for users who want to provide feedback to the conversation but don't want to fully invest in a comment, or don't want to create an e-mail notification for their action.

Below is a graph that shows a breakdown of the sum of votes on content (both nodes and comments):

This graph shows that of the 12,117 pieces of content that are rated, more than half of it ends up with a +1 total score (6,810 items). Almost 9,000 items end up with a positive score while about 2,400 items have a negative score (about 750 items had a net zero score).

Looking at individual voting habits, 7,400 people have placed a vote. Among those, there are 2,960 who placed a down vote and 5,630 who placed an up vote.

The sum of votes for individuals shows whether on whole they are more in agreement or disagreement: a person with 2 up votes and 1 down vote would have a sum of 1. The data shows that the sum is a negative number for about 1,800 people and a positive total for over 4,600 people. These two items show that most people use votes to be positive in whole even if they periodically have a down vote.

My hope was that voting would help reduce tension among groups on the site. In the time I've co-managed the site since Drupalcon Paris we have had 3 regional groups in particular that had a large number of disagreements that rose to the level where concerned group members needed to ask for outside help. Those disagreements led not only to me instituting this voting tool, but also to Moshe creating the Drupal Code of Conduct. Has voting or the DCOC helped those groups to interact more civilly? It's hard to say.

I personally find both up and down votes of other users to be valuable as I read a thread. It helps me get a sense of what other people on the site think.

What do you think? Is voting useful on g.d.o? Should we remove the option to downvote? Should we make it possible to see who did which votes?

Improved user profiles:

A few months ago my colleague Ben added some fields to user profiles. Now the site displays a mix of user entered data AND automatically generated information.

It's now possible to take a quick glance and see a user's level of interaction on the site from posting content, to voting, to events organized and groups organized.

Groups has long used avatars, a feature which is valuable to help reputation/recognition when scanning a page. Try looking at a forum post with a lot of comments on d.o and quickly identify comments by people you know. Now try it on g.d.o. See?

Voting and reputation are something that's particularly interesting to me since it relates to the session selection process in conference sites we build and the Certified to Rock system. I'll be writing more about voting on sessions as it relates to Drupalcon in the next few weeks.

What else can we do to improve the day to day interactions with these sites? How can we elevate the conversations?