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Device Savers Voting Ring buries good answers

I noticed Device Savers Team habitually upvotes it's team members answers---most of which are good.

I only care about points and upvoting from the perspective that the best answer makes it to the top, when people still have the energy to read :)

I noticed today in Answers that Device Savers upvoted their own new answer (3) bringing it to the top of a question about iPhone 5s blue screen of death.

Their answer wasn't great. It is clear by now that BSOD in the 5s is going to be long screw damage or prox sensor or more. The answer they gave failed to mention long screw damage, and instead gave lame advice to alcohol the connectors.

This behavior is not cool, because now the actual best answer on that thread is eclipsed since it has only 2 votes.

should iFixit allow team members to vote for each orher's answers?

Thoughts?

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I agree, there's too much insular voting going on here. We'll do some analysis and may revoke some votes.

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Please see our response below. Thank you iFixIt Community for your concern.

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When we have people with under 1000 and a 306 (Emma & mayra) reputation score with the same amount of Nice Question Badges as Old Turkey, ie 2, somethings amiss. Kyle only has 7 of these badges and he's the #2 man on the list! The same goes for nice answer badges and Ace of Answers. These need to be, and have been earned in the past. I do have 17. That averages one every three months over the last 4 years that I've been doing this. Approximately 4000 hours spent researching, asking and answering questions.

Now, to paraphrase Pancho Barnes in "The Right Stuff", "we got your pud-knockers", who claimed them with 10 days on the site. Come on Man!

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You're right. We'll do something about it tomorrow.

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I'm making progress on this.

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John, To help you out try looking at some of the higher rated question respondents. What I have seen is that good answering is learned via practice and receiving constructive criticism from those that have been at it a while. Don't take offense if someone challenges your answer. Support it with reference links if you can. This helps give authority to your answer and shows that you took the time to research it rather than just giving an opinion off the top of your head. Your research skills will improve dramatically as will your diagnostic skill. Learn from the others on the site, there are some real pros here who dedicate hours a day helping others. Give good answers and let the community decide if they are worthy of up-votes. Negative votes are even better to learn from, they are rarely given, and most of us will tell you why. They can be deleted and a better answer given.

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Our Response:

Thank you for the welcome to this community. We value the iFixIt community tremendously and are extremely happy that some of our employees at Device Savers have chosen to be part of this growing community.

First, we want to thank you all for your criticism as it will help us grow as individuals and as a team.

Second, we want to offer up a bit of information: we definitely have a new team here on iFixIt.com; so the rules were never spelled out for us. Had we know there was so much red tape and jealousy we would threaded a little lighter. All of our employees answer these question/issue to the best of there ability and experience, doing this type of remote troubleshooting on their own time without any compensation because of their love of technology and helping others. We understand the heart of the issue, but still don't understand what you are implying as our team answers question accurate to our experience with that issue.

We apologize that the voting system has allowed our answers to creep beyond other ones that may be correct as well or even offer a better solution or more solutions—this is due to the fact that, as a team, if we agree with each other we will of course support their answer and if some of us don't we don't up vote it, as you should have noticed. We have well over the amount of team members that some of these answers have received on up votes. If we were concerned about the votes you would see 8+ an answer, this is not the case.

We have nothing to gain from these votes and do not care about such trivial things as internet karma or badges; we are here simply to provide the answers we feel to be correct to better serve the community as a whole. So chipping away at our reputation to satisfy the iFixIt Community does really effect us. However in this particular instance, we do not fully agree with any of you about the assumptions of our voting or answering process. No worries though, that doesn't discourage us. : )

We will make sure the team know how the iFixIt community feels about voting and make sure they do not up vote comments or statements in the future. However, considering that our question and responses are accurate towards the question asked, you should expect that members on our team will agree with each other an we should not be targeted for it.

Thank you comments and please feel free to contact us anytime with questions.

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Thanks for being candid, John. Apology accepted! We're excited to have you here. Keep posting great answers and the rest of us will keep voting them up!

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"We understand the heart of the issue, but still don't understand what you are implying as our team answers question accurate to our experience with that issue."

I'll be happy to clarify. I'm implying that forcing your employees to upvote each other's answers in order to improve your ranking on iFixit is completely inappropriate and against the spirit of this crowd-built resource.

There is no jealousy or "red tape" here. If you guys occasionally want to upvote each other's particularly useful answer, I don't have a problem with that. I'm glad that you have elected to knock off upvoting each other's answers systematically to the tune of 8 or 9 upvotes per day. This reeks of policy-based required upvoting, not spontaneous natural agreement with another's answer. I notice your employees don't upvote any of the other similar well-stated answers--just the Team's answers---which again points to an internal policy. I could be wrong, but.....nah---you guys had a policy to upvote, c'mon now.

If you have removed this internal policy--well done! Some of your employees have certainly added to the outstanding content in Answers and I've upvoted some of them a few times myself. Every group has growing pains. I hope you all continue to stick around.

Jessa

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jessabethany will be eternally grateful.