Moodle community sites

To recollect for me giving usefuls in first posts.

Our quiz expert demontrating improvement on our moodle quiz plugins

Someone offering  a free book to the moodle community on how to use moodle

Someone showing a link of their well presented good looking moodle site, confirming against all competitors that moodle doesn't have to be ugly.

Any good tips are always appreciated by readers.

I always click useful if I think the post is useful. Hopefully users are not clicking useful simply due to agreeing with someones opinion for example. Useful means useful, that's it.

As Séverin and Nicolas have said, I'm having trouble imagining why you'd not count a post that's been marked "useful" if it happens to be the first post in the a thread.  I must be missing something.  It seems that pushes the forums more toward being strictly a question-and-answer support resource, rather than a discussion community.  You don't want to recognize people posting useful things like Moodle news, interesting new ways of doing things in Moodle, warnings about gotchas, etc?

john Simpson said this thread is a good example:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=278302

If set, he or she will find the answer post in their email.

> (...) the changes they made give you better results when you look at who ends up in the PHM group.

In understand this, but you can't justify an action just because it allows to hit the target. In french we would say: "la fin ne justifie pas les moyens".

Three changes have been made in this calculation:

• one should have posted something useful (instead of simply posting a "unuseful" one): this should effectively reduce the number of PHMs,
  
• the time frame for posting such a message has been extended to 6 months instead of 60 day, which would tend to increase the number of PHMs,
  
• the first posts aren't taken in account in the calculation. This one seems too me rather illogical.
  

What I'm asking is what is the result if you don't make the third one? And, why not amend the second one, e.g. instead of 6 months, extend the time frame for posting useful messages to 120 days (or any other duration) only?

Were these possibilities tested?

> However, it is not a matter of logic. ...

> the changes they made give you better results when you look at who ends up in the PHM group. Can't argue with that.

I understand what you're saying.  Just for fun, I'd like to try arguing with that:

class forum_post {
    function get_author_name() {
        return 'Ray Morris';
    }
    function get_author_country() {
        if(substr($this->get_author_name(), 1) == 'R') {
            return 'US';
        }
    }
}

I tested that with against an earlier post in this thread and it gives reasonably accurate results at the moment. That must be the right way to do it.  Can't argue with that. 

The functions above are silly examples, of course, but I think they illustrate a valid point. The scoring algorithm might work okay (or not), but the argument that it happens to give reasonable-looking results at the moment isn't al that persuasive, to me.

That's where i see things illogical/ironical : my post is not the first one (so votes are counted), it has several "useful" ranting, but these means more "+1, i agree with that"... so shoulnd't really be counted.

We can't coun't exactly which information IS really useful, but just try to estimate things, based on calculations and estimations...

Dogs are useful too.  They can retrieve the mail and papers in the morning...very useful.

Hi Helen,

Ok, i better understand then. When automated, it will save your time.

I'm patient, but just like to understand things

Thanks for the badge