Clicking link acts as a vote.

[newbieone]

Hi all,

Had an idea, don't know if people would find this useful or not.

Wondered if it would be possible when a user clicks on a link to visit a site of interest for this in turn to act as a vote?

Usual voting would still be applicable as well, the reason I ask this is not everyone votes for a website, myself included (i used digg), even though it has been very useful to them.

This would help bump up the votes and popularity of the link.

Failing that a counter underneath of the vote button that shows how many 'visits' the site has had, just something to give people a reason to submit a url and end users visiting to see something that has an almost magpie effect 'ooo look that site has been viewed 688 times, it must be good' etc.

As most of the time people will only submit to sites using a voting system if there is something in it for them, I believe the above would give people a reason to submit.

Just an idea, feel free to delete as appropriate.

Cheers

Ben

[angolanmade]

I second that, a lot of social news sites gain a lot of traffic but with my experience getting people to vote on articles has been something that still needs tweaking and maybe this feature could be useful for a lot of start-up sites as well.

[Nick]

This gives us a second variation of the "silent voting" idea.

- JonH is suggesting (http://hotarucms.org/showthread.php?43-Silent-vote-plug-in-Submitted-content-rated-by-pageview-count) a vote for each view of the Post page.
- newbieone is suggesting (above) a vote for each click through to the source url.

This reminds me that we don't yet have an option for links on the List page to link to the Post page. Currently, all links go directly to the source unless you click the comments link which takes you to the Post page. That option is probably the first thing that should be done before making a silent voting plugin. Update: Done!

As for the plugins, I think JonH's idea would be easier to implement since you could just run a couple of SQL queries when loading the Post page. The second idea would probably need some kind of redirect - 1) clicking the link would trigger the same or similar AJAX that currently increases the vote count without needing to refresh the page. 2) It would then have to redirect to the source url after bumping up the vote count. This would mean there'd be no direct link to the source, neither DoFollow nor NoFollow. That *might* deter spammers to some degree.

An additional complication is the issue of who is voting. Currently, each vote is associated to a specific user in the database votes table. That reminds me of another feature we don't have yet - "Who Voted?". I assume both these plugin suggestions would work with anonymous users, too? In that case, I guess each vote could be assigned to an IP address.

Well, those are some of my thoughts on the issue.

[rushnp774]

I definitely like this idea, but with one potential tweak. What if clicks to the website were worth 1 vote (or maybe less), but actually clicking "vote" increased the vote count by 1-2 (or some other number). That could be good for a couple reasons:

1) Maybe after visiting the site, you realize you wouldn't have voted for it anyway because it was a crappy link or just wasn't stellar. I see no reason to give a (virtually) blind click the same vote value as an intentional "I like this link so I'm going to vote it up" action would.

2) It'd help the vote counts be more varied, which would in turn give the site's users a better picture of which links were indeed more popular at any given time.

I registered on the forums just to post this (I'll install Hotaru tomorrow), and will keep browsing and offering my opinions/suggestions too. Glad I found this CMS. It looks promising!

[nothingman]

stellar. I see no reason to give a (virtually) blind click the same vote value as an intentional "I like this link so I'm going to vote it up" action would.

The first thing that came to my mine when I read this. Agreed, we have an unvote option but keeping this as optional would be better - my 2 cents.

[newbieone]

Some interesting points raised here, a plugin to allow clicks on urls=votes in the first instance until your site has a decent user following may well be the way to go.

[angolanmade]

Anybody still considering this idea, personally this would be awesome for low to medium trafficked websites. What would be involved in getting something like this done?

[rushnp774]

I could probably tackle this sometime soon, and here's how I'd probably do it:

1) Add a new field to the _POSTS table for something like "Clickthrough Votes" or something like that.

2) Every time a story is clicked, the "Clickthrough Votes" field increases by .25 or something smaller than an actual vote. Anyone who has more experience with social bookmarking sites have any stats on the votes/story CTR ratio? That'd help me come up with a good value for the partial vote.

3) Change the vote display to add the "Vote" value plus "Clickthrough Votes", and display the result rounded down to the nearest integer.

There would probably have to be some other small tweaks to other plugins or parts of Hotaru, but it seems like a pretty easy thing to do overall. Having these separate fields like this would probably help ensure that the other parts of Hotaru that rely on the post votes value would still function properly, and still enable additional functionality of partial votes.

Any thoughts? Am I missing anything Nick?

[Nick]

The original request (below) is now an option in the Vote plugin, so I'm closing this thread as "Done".


Wondered if it would be possible when a user clicks on a link to visit a site of interest for this in turn to act as a vote?

Usual voting would still be applicable as well, the reason I ask this is not everyone votes for a website, myself included (i used digg), even though it has been very useful to them.

This would help bump up the votes and popularity of the link.