[Not a bug] Marking your own post as solution increases solution counter.

[Levent]

Steps to reproduce/what were you doing before it happened?

Marking your post in your thread increases your own solution counter

 

What did you expect to happen?

It shouldnt increase the counter, this will be abused.

[Sauron]

I'm not sure why you'd abuse it... nor what the harm would be in that.

[Red :)]

Can confirm it works in Test Posts, too.

[Levent]

5 minutes ago, Sauron said:

I'm not sure why you'd abuse it... nor what the harm would be in that.

Same reason why people give unrelated answers in many threads. Internet points farming. Its not exactly a issue BUT if solution counter is not an important metric, it shouldnt be viewed with every post.

[BondiBlue]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

I'm not sure why you'd abuse it... nor what the harm would be in that.

Some people would see the solutions counter as an indication of a reputable member (which could definitely be the case), and now it's a value that is always visible. I could see it as something that someone might try to abuse if they want to seem more reputable than they are. Personally I don't know why it needs to show up under the username - it would have been fine to keep it just on a main profile page. But that's beside the point.

[XGoodGuyFitz]

1 minute ago, BondiBlue said:

Some people would see the solutions counter as an indication of a reputable member (which could definitely be the case), and now it's a value that is always visible. I could see it as something that someone might try to abuse if they want to seem more reputable than they are. Personally I don't know why it needs to show up under the username - it would have been fine to keep it just on a main profile page. But that's beside the point.

I am definitly not a reputable member then 

[Levent]

4 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

Some people would see the solutions counter as an indication of a reputable member (which could definitely be the case), and now it's a value that is always visible. I could see it as something that someone might try to abuse if they want to seem more reputable than they are. Personally I don't know why it needs to show up under the username - it would have been fine to keep it just on a main profile page. But that's beside the point.

I agree solution counter shouldnt be viewed on every post. Forum is going to turn XDA with people having "MARK MY POST AS SOLUTION IF I SOLVED" or "HIT THAT LIKE BUTTON IF I HELPED" if solution counter is as visible.

[GoodBytes]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

I'm not sure why you'd abuse it... nor what the harm would be in that.

Our forum will turn like Microsoft Answers forum.

 

User problem: Disc drive button doesn't work

 

Marked as solution: "Run SFC /scannow, then DISM /online, Run WSRest, and restart Windows update service. If doesn't work, post the BSOD mini dumb"

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, Levent said:

people having "MARK MY POST AS SOLUTION IF I SOLVED" or "HIT THAT LIKE BUTTON IF I HELPED" if solution counter is as visible.

To be fair, it would be nice if people marked their topics as answered sometimes rather than virtually never as it is right now

[Spotty]

I do agree that being able to mark your own posts as a solution does go against the spirit of the solutions count. Making changes to the forum to prohibit marking your own post as the solution counting towards the solution count is something that I think is worth looking in to.

 

For now, there are already rules in the Community Standards regarding post/reaction farming which this would fall under. I have added "Solution count farming" to that rule.

If someone is farming solutions in the manner you described it is something that should be pretty easy for the moderation team to identify, and something that we can reverse. The posts that have been marked as solutions are displayed when you click on the solution count or the "See answers" underneath the count on the profile so it should be transparent if people have abused it. Farming solution counts seems rather pointless to me and against the spirit of it, and I would expect that nobody in this community would do such a thing (especially since it would be obvious that they have farmed it), so I am optimistic that it won't be an issue.

[SansVarnic]

You had to report this.. I really wanted make myself the top Mod. 

 

/s

[Helpful Tech Witch]

7 hours ago, Spotty said:

I do agree that being able to mark your own posts as a solution does go against the spirit of the solutions count. Making changes to the forum to prohibit marking your own post as the solution counting towards the solution count is something that I think is worth looking in to.

 

I think @colonel_mortis has already looked into this, and found that its something known and intended in the forum software, and would require suprisingly high amounts of work for something so small

 

 

EDIT: found the post. Was close on what he said, but not quire right

 

[Spotty]

18 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

I think @colonel_mortis has already looked into this, and found that its something known and intended in the forum software, and would require suprisingly high amounts of work for something so small

That's not the same thing as what is being discussed here, however that has been fixed with this update. The original post can no longer be marked as the solution. 

[RockSolid1106]

I'm pretty worried that this also works in Test Posts.. Pretty sure this will be abused. Mods, will you be able to do anything about this?

[Skiiwee29]

1 minute ago, RockSolid1106 said:

I'm pretty worried that this also works in Test Posts.. Pretty sure this will be abused. Mods, will you be able to do anything about this?

It will be looked into. Thats all I can say for now. 

[AJJaxNet]

In theory, we should be able to lock an OP from using one of his own post as a solution somewhat easily, but I feel like there is legitimate reasons where a user might want to solve his own post.
 

32 minutes ago, RockSolid1106 said:

I'm pretty worried that this also works in Test Posts.. Pretty sure this will be abused. Mods, will you be able to do anything about this?

I've checked and there's no easy way to fix that, unfortunately. What we could do is have a fast archiving policy on that post so test threads just get automatically deleted after 7 days or something, which would remove the solution / post counts from the user stats.

[BondiBlue]

8 minutes ago, AJJaxNet said:

In theory, we should be able to lock an OP from using one of his own post as a solution somewhat easily, but I feel like there is legitimate reasons where a user might want to solve his own post.

I agree. For example: I marked my post as the solution here to indicate that I had updated the post with new information. I had basically rewritten the entire post since I had made it before the event took place. 

 

[Spotty]

1 hour ago, AJJaxNet said:

What we could do is have a fast archiving policy on that post so test threads just get automatically deleted after 7 days or something, which would remove the solution / post counts from the user stats.

Absolutely not. Posts should not be deleted, even from the test post section. There's also a lot of people who have posts in the test post section they've been working on for months writing very detailed guides, reviews, etc. Some people also use it to store information and references to refer back to.

 

Ideally it would be possible for the OP to mark their own post as the solution but it not +1 the solution counter. This might be something that requires IPS to implement if it's not already an option.

Another possible option is not count solutions in the test post section since that is likely going to be the place where people try to farm it due to the posts being private. However, forum moderators can see the test posts of all members so it should be extremely obvious if someone is creating a bunch of posts in the test post section to farm solutions, which is why I'm not too concerned about people farming in test posts.

 

Edit: I should also make it clear I do not expect people farming solutions to be an actual issue. When it was added people said the "Top Posters" shown in popular topics would cause people to spam replies to show up on the top posters list, but that has not happened. In the entire time I've been a mod on the forum (couple of years) I think I've only seen one instance of someone actually farming reputation by using alt accounts to like their own posts. I think it's natural to see stuff like this and think "Oh, people are just going to farm it to make their number bigger" but in practice it generally doesn't happen, at least not in this community. Once the novelty of it being a new feature wears off I'm sure most people won't pay much attention to it.

Edited November 6, 2021 by Spotty

[colonel_mortis]

7 hours ago, AJJaxNet said:

I've checked and there's no easy way to fix that, unfortunately. What we could do is have a fast archiving policy on that post so test threads just get automatically deleted after 7 days or something, which would remove the solution / post counts from the user stats.

Deleting posts doesn't actually remove from any of the metrics for some reason, so this won't work