Richmond Brainstorm

A few people have noted that the voting system on RichmondBrainstorm.com is a little mysterious, so I thought I'd try to break it down for you.

If you've used social bookmarking sites like Digg, then you'll be very familiar with how voting works on this site, because the software we're using was originally created to implement Digg-like sites.  But we've modified it and rearranged it some, so it's still worth getting into the details:

When a new idea is submitted to the site, it is immediately available for others to view and vote on in the "Recent Ideas" listing.  This insures that the new ideas are always exposed to folks visiting the site, never buried away and never to be found as popular ideas get all the attention.  However, new ideas will not be seen as "published" in the rest of the site just yet.

When someone votes an idea "up," the idea's total score goes up by 1 vote.  If someone votes an idea "down," the idea's total score goes down by 1 vote.  (Note that if you change your vote from up to down, you'll see a 2 point difference in that action, since you're not only taking away your +1, you're also subtracting another 1.)

Ideas that reach a certain positive threshold of votes are automatically "published."  This means that they are eligible to appear on the front page of the site, or in any of the category listings you can get to by clicking on the category name at right.   Published ideas appear with yellowish voting boxes next to them, while unpublished ideas have grayish voting boxes.

This mechanism allows users to decide when an idea is interesting and exciting enough to be highlighted on the rest of the site.  Of course, just because an idea doesn't get enough votes to be published, it doesn't mean it's not a good idea, it just means that not enough people on this website have held it up yet.  (As we're just starting out with a small base of initial users, this is especially important to note.)

So, perhaps the natural ideal lifecycle of an idea is that it is submitted to the site by a user, voted up by a number of users, seen more widely on the site, and then discussed and refined until someone is ready to go off and make it happen!

One last note about voting: in the theme of keeping it positive, we encourage you to lean toward voting ideas up or not voting at all.  If you're just kind of lukewarm about an idea or just aren't interested, that's not a reason to vote it down.  The down vote should be used in the rare cases where you think something is actually a bad idea and should be featured even less prominently on the site.  (We may also use down voting to handle issues like duplicate ideas, but we haven't worked that out fully yet.)

If you have suggestions for how we can make the voting sytem here work even better, just let us know.