I’d just like to mention that I also think this is a really important issue to address. The situation I’ve seen is when something has a pro of “project is available on github” when just about every other competing thing in that question is also available on github. But because someone only bothered to put it into one of them, that thing gets an unjustifiably inflated pro count. You might say that this is just a bad pro, and in this case I would agree with you. But I think that the issue is much broader than that. Some types of questions seem to have many pros/cons that apply across the board to every alternative. It seems like these things would be better handled by creating a matrix of “characteristics” upon which every alternative is graded.
Hi @mightybyte welcome to meta.
We have a potential solution for what you’re saying that I’d like to get your opinion on. “Available on Github” is a boolean/quantitative characteristic of a option and thus doesn’t make a great pro. Our solution for that type of information can be seen on a few test questions like this one:
(click compare all stats) http://www.slant.co/topics/366/~what-are-the-best-php-ides
So a potentially tidy solution would be to move all the pros/cons that aren’t subjective/qualitative to that matrix. There is however one catch. If there are say 6 options, and only 1 of them has github support, that’s a pretty important pro to some people and shouldn’t be buried in the matrix. The flipside is also true, if 5/6 have the support, the one that doesn’t should have a con pointing that out.
Ahh, your compare view is definitely along the lines of what I’m thinking of. I think it would be nice if you had a much more condensed view so that you could see more of them on one page at a time. Other than that, the challenge is to get rid of pros and cons that should actually be in the matrix.
Yeah we never actually got around to spending the time to design the compare view properly, just threw something out to test the concept.
Agreed. I’m trying to figure out a one-click flag that will do the job.
I was thinking of an idea in regards to UI and adding & modifying several areas, however just within this category alone (feature suggestions) my idea is common to other categories as well. In other words and I didn’t know where the best place to post my idea / question. So I figured to post it here due to the common, in a sense, for the name for this topic of discussion - gloabal posting it.
Anyway, having said that, in reply to the last post and other posts in here, how about having some sort of accordion style, wiki-ish (expandable & collapsable) UI in regards to all the questions raised in this discission. If needed for to clarify my idea, I can into more detail on this. Like I said, this has been an idea on my mind for a few days but it applies to various topics here so I didnh know jis to best place it and how to word it in the right way without creating any confusion.