Tag Voting

Have you ever looked at an activity and thought "this was a really good way to practice this grammar point"? Or maybe you thought the opposite and felt "this activity really doesn't have anything to do with past tense, even though it has that tag." Well, now you can vote on it!

When you go to an activity now, there should be a link under the tag list that says "Vote on tags." Click on that and it should change to a menu where you'll see each tag, along with a thumbs up or thumbs down. You don't have to vote on every tag, of course, but feel free to vote on whichever tags you like.

You'll also notice on every tag's page there's a new sorting criteria called "Most relevant." This will sort the tags so that the activities with the most thumbs up on that specific tag will come first. For example, the top Past Tense activity will be the one where the most people have clicked the thumbs up tag vote button on activities with the Past Tense tag. Or at least that's what it's eventually going to be - it's probably going to take a while before enough people have voted on enough tags to generate useful listings. My hope is to make the relevance score become the default sorting criteria when you look at a tag page, but we'll have to see how well the system works.

I built this system because one item of feedback that I've received somewhat often is that some activities have a few too many tags and show up in almost every tag search, even if it's not especially relevant to what the user is searching for. The activity's thumbs up score can be a general indicator of how many people like an activity, but this system, if it works according to plan, should help curate the site's data in a bit more finely-grained way.

The score calculation system might be a bit intensive for the database, so I'll have to keep an eye on it. Currently it re-calculates the scores in the middle of the night, so your votes won't have an immediate effect, but will help in the long term. Please let me know if you find any bugs or have any other ideas!