discord-csharp
Make campaign voting possible through reactions
As per the discord discussion, we could have a channel dedicated to in progress campaigns and have people react to confirm or deny, using the same functionality that is used to confirm a campaign currently.
Some things to discuss:
- Is the lack of comments an important factor here
- Do we want to enable campaign opposes, or should that require a comment, or if we do allow for reaction opposes should Modix then prompt for a comment.
- Do we want to have info stats in the embed so people can quickly reference how active a user is.
- Do we want to have the reaction count public or should modix remove them when a vote is issued.
- Is the lack of comments an important factor here
The lack of quantitative comments renders the functionality redundant.
- Do we want to enable campaign opposes, or should that require a comment, or if we do allow for reaction opposes should Modix then prompt for a comment.
Personally, if you're opposing a campaign, you have a reason to. I think it should require a comment. If you don't have a reason to vote either way, then you abstain.
- Do we want to have info stats in the embed so people can quickly reference how active a user is.
!info? Though it might be worth adding their activity in none-offtopic channels to this, and maybe we could agree a threshold thereafter.
- Do we want to have the reaction count public or should modix remove them when a vote is issued.
Modix posts the successful notice in a completely different channel, so this shouldnt be a problem. Voting should be kept private, we don't encourage finger pointing culture here.
Interested to hear how more Associates and Staff feel about this. I'm not opposed to it. If we did do it, it might be a good idea to have a flag to switch between commented campaigns and reaction campaigns (so we don't impact other people who host their own copies of MODiX).
- Is the lack of comments an important factor here
Unsure. My understanding (which could be wrong, since I wasn't around) is that before MODiX, promotions were done through strawpolls, so there's that precedent for promotions without comments.
Comments can sometimes give good context to others who don't hang out in certain channels that might be frequented by the nominee. On the other hand, we've had concerns about bandwagoning in the past. And for a lot of campaigns (especially to Regular), the comments end up just being variations on "looks good to me" or "not active enough, let's wait a bit longer".
If we stop enforcing comments, we might end up not missing them at all. I don't think they're critical to the promotions process, though, and it could be worth making the change and seeing how people feel after a few campaigns.
- Do we want to enable campaign opposes, or should that require a comment, or if we do allow for reaction opposes should Modix then prompt for a comment.
A half/half solution feels weird to me. If the reactions are limited to upvotes with downvotes requiring an extra step (e.g. going to the site), it'll likely just discourage people from downvoting entirely. Prompting for a comment in chat would remove the anonymity aspect, and trying to go through DMs doesn't really work out so great, since not everyone has their DMs open.
So my vote would be for reactions for Approve, Oppose, and maybe Cancel Vote. No comment prompts through Discord (though we can keep the commands), maybe still allow comments through the site (though it'd less likely that anyone will read them). Maybe Abstain if people really want, but without comments, it doesn't feel super useful.
- Do we want to have info stats in the embed so people can quickly reference how active a user is.
That could be nice. Some general participation stats and probably infraction counts, as those are generally the biggest !info factors when deciding how to vote. Sure, you can get the information with !info currently, but it's nice to have the info on hand and upfront when deciding how to vote without having to call an extra command.
- Do we want to have the reaction count public or should modix remove them when a vote is issued.
I'm thinking we'd probably want to keep things anonymous, so my vote goes toward automatically removing reactions whenever someone reacts, and displaying a running total in the embed.
So my vote would be for reactions for Approve, Oppose, and maybe Cancel Vote.
Whenever someone wants to oppose a campaign its often something they feel somewhat strongly about and are willing to put in the extra "effort" to explain why, having a prompt on the embed saying "please use the oppose command or the website to add extra context if you would like to oppose" could work". I don't see a need to explain why you approve someones promotion, its generally pretty obvious by the nomination reason.
its generally pretty obvious by the nomination reason
I'm not convinced that that's necessarily true. To me, simply being put up for promotion doesn't inherently demonstrate that the person has earned the promotion.
Maybe there's a distinction to be made between trivial/activity-based roles and nontrivial/merit-based roles.
- For activity-based roles, upvotes are generally the default "looks good to me" , while reasons for downvotes can be a little more diverse (e.g. not active enough, inconsistent activity, recent infractions).
- For merit-based roles, I feel like the onus should be on supporters to demonstrate that the nominee has earned the role (active, knowledgeable, helpful, consistent, makes contributions). Downvotes can also be fairly specific, but I also don't think it's unreasonable to downvote a campaign simply because the voter feels that the nominee hasn't quite met the mark yet. It doesn't have to be a strong feeling of opposition.
I'm not sure what the best solution is. If we force comments on downvotes, maybe it'll discourage people from downvoting because they don't want to go through the extra trouble, even when they feel that the nominee isn't right for the promotion. If we allow downvotes without comments, maybe it'll leave upvoters confused at why someone that they think is worthy is being downvoted (maybe unfairly, maybe no reason, maybe it's something they missed, maybe there's a misunderstanding).
Ultimately, it likely doesn't make a huge difference which direction we go. If we take one route and decide it's not working out, we can always tweak things. So I won't personally oppose either.
Also, this should be explicitly approved by admins, before moving forward, if not already. What occurs to me is that we historically haven't published campaign votes publicly, for fear of turning it into a popularity contest, or needlessly pissing people off. I don't know if that's still a thing, but having reactions attached would expose this information.
Having MODiX auto-remove the reactions would solve that, I suppose.
That was discussed in the discord previously. Modix will auto remove the reaction and log it, and possibly update the embed to reflect the vote but not the person. This approach actually makes it easier to anonymously vote, as now you don’t have to deal with the website.
To elaborate, when i have a semi functional version I’ll PR it on a branch for discussion. I fully expect this change to generate a fair amount of discussion if we decide to move forward with it.
what about just lowering minimum comment length from 3 to 0? (sometimes comment are helpful, sometimes not, so just make them optional)
that doesn't really solve the issue of campaigns being hidden and generally unknown when one is happening, which is the true goal of this issue. To expose them to everyone at a glance