Open Dental Forum

I had 75 votes available to use in the feature request system since they were allotted to the spell check feature that had been completed and implemented. I decided to use those votes to vote on another feature request (Request 646 Bridge for NEA FastAttach). Before I voted, it had a Weight of 49.1 and was in 2nd position behind Feature Request 1365 (Insurance Payment by Electronic Deposit). I then added my 75 votes to Feature Request #646 (NEA) and the Weight dropped to 38.13 and the placement dropped from 2nd to 10th. That will teach me to vote for something for something in the Feature Request section -- same thing sort of happens to me when I vote for a particular political candidate -- but I digress --- just trying to figure out how I add 75 votes to a feature request and make it immediately drop from 2nd to 10th place.

Interesting... I've never looked at the algorithm for the feature requests before, I'm going to check it out and see if I can't explain why it reacted the way it did for you. My gut thinks it's something along the lines of a request that has 100 votes from 100 people bears more weight than a request with 100 votes from 1 person. However, adding 75 votes should never drop a score quite that significantly (in my opinion). I'll take a look and let you know what I find out. If possible, I'll add some more details to our web site to help other users better understand the nuts and bolts of requests.

From quickly looking at the algorithm I don't see how that is possible. So I decided to duplicated your scenario and this is what happened:
Req #646:

1. Votes - 490
   Critical - 1
   Money - $750
   Difficulty - 5
   Weight - 39.25

Adding 75 regular votes to that request (in the state mentioned above) resulted in a weight of 39.93

What happens is that the weight is based max values. For example, if the request with the most votes has 950 votes, then we start with that as the max. All the other weights are set as falling between 0 and 950. If the request with 950 votes has people add or remove their votes, then all the other weights are now slightly off because they used a different max. Haven't had time to tweak the algorithm, but we do have a recalc button that we built on our end that we run from time to time. It cleans everything up. Your artificially inflated weight wouldn't have lasted for long.

so in other words, 100 votes are not really 100 votes?