Issue rating - formula?

Be aware that the more you upvote issues, the less your votes matter. The same is true of downvoting issues though upvoting and downvoting have independent impact. In other words, upvoting several issues doesn’t change the impact you have when you downvote issues and vice-versa.

I’d like to understand how that exactly works. What is the formula that calculates how much a vote matters?

It’s not really a formula so much the concept of influence. Here’s a simple example. Imagine there are 10 issues total in the system none of which have any upvotes or downvotes. You upvote just 1 of them. The one you upvoted has 100% of your votes (influence) while the other 9 have zero. Now you decide to upvote the other 9 as well. Your voting influence is now evenly spread across all 10 issues which, relative to each other, means that the influence is now the same as having upvoted none of them.

You still have influence relative to other issues you didn’t upvote or downvote of course but within the group of issues you voted upon, the more you vote the thinner your influence on those issues is spread.

Does a vote actually matter though? In your example of 10, if I pick 5, will that guarantee that they are addressed first (at least first after critical issues are addressed)? Historically this hasn’t been the case, is this changing? If not, voting is pointless if devs are still just picking what they fancy over votes.

When I finish a ticket and I’m about to pick the next one, I definitely sort them by Popularity. If there are Pro Plus issues, Beta Bugs or issues labeled with Priority, they will also grab my attention first, no matter if they’re “popular” or not.

But also, “If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority”.

Upvoting is important, but upvoting everything by default is not that helpful, IMHO.

5 Likes

Thanks for the explanation. Then, how does this add up over all members and all issues?
How can we see a global issue ranking top down list?

Search by Popularity:

Yep, thanks. Checked that and find a top-down list sorted by the number of upvotes. What I cannot see is how that concept of weighed upvotes impacts how this list is sorted. With no formula defined and implemented, the machine can’t do this.

All votes weigh the same, the metric is the number of votes. I can only assume (hope) that bugs carry more “weight” than feature requests in that they can be exclusively filtered because feature requests are a different beast and, can by their very nature, garner more votes than bugs which would put a direct comparison of bug votes and feature votes akin to a comparison of apples and oranges. E.g. while GPU accelerated graphics is popular on 18 votes, the dictionary constructor leaking memory with 8 votes is far more important but if someone were under the false impression that raw votes is the actual metric, they would be profoundly wrong.