On Polls and Voting...

[tamingmods.livejournal.com]

Ok...so I've felt this way for a long time. I kind of let it go as this was one of the main features of the comm, but seeing as now that we're having trouble keeping up with the polls (not to mention how time consuming they are to assemble) I wanted to do some research.

I've gone back and checked the last 10 weeks, and my feeling is that the polls don't do much.

Here are the numbers. For the dates listed, I logged the max number of votes that any single story got and here they are: 

24-Aug	2
31-Aug	2
7-Sep	2
14-Sep	1
22-Sep	2
28-Sep	2
6-Oct	2
13-Oct	2
21-Oct	3
26-Oct	3
2-Nov	1

Every week there are quite a few stories (sometimes more than half) that don't get votes at all.

Based upon that, I don't feel that the polls are being that useful to our authors. I think, if this is a feature the members would like to keep, we should probably redefine their purpose.

Are we trying to help authors improve?
Are they for identifying writers that don't meet the minimum threshold?
Something else?

As members what would you like to get out of the polls? And what would make you vote?


~tamingmods (calypso)

Comments

[talullahred.livejournal.com]

I was excited about the polls when I joined and in the first week I voted on everything I could read... then I saw they weren't much used and lost interest. Like others above, I think concrit is more informative than the poll and I would not be terribly sorry to see them go.

If there is the absolute need to keep some sort of peer reviewing, why not demand that each writer posting also has to comment on at least one story, on plot, grammar, etc? The downsides is that people hate being forced to review and that you gals would spend a lot of time tracking down who did and who didn't...