GrabCAD Community User Group

A system was implemented which was meant to place the answer(s) with the most upvotes at the top, while unliked, or downvoted answers fell lower.

It made sense to have the most agreed on answer at the top, right next to the question. but I have to admit I've rarely seen it work correctly.

Often the answers do form a back and forth discussion, so I agree they can get hard to follow.

Now that this Discussion section is active, it will be interesting to see if the Question section is kept. There is a lot of overlap between the two, but each also has unique properties.

But Jack's answer has an upvote, while the other (at the top) doesn't?

Yup. That was my point on rarely seeing it work.

I never really paid it much attention, and figured it was broken because I use Firefox. Jack does have a good point about it being hard to read with the answers being out of chronological order.

That said, I'm really not a fan of the ordering used in the Discussion area either. I'd rather see new content on page 1. Instead, new content shows up on the last page, which for some discussions can be several pages long.

Below is an example Question with a lot more answers. At first it seems like the upvote system is sort of working. They range from +32 down to 0. Then at the bottom a few more upvotes appear again.

Scrolling through the post dates shows an assortment of dates from 2012 - 2019 with no apparent ordering method.

https://grabcad.com/questions/which-is-the-best-free-software-for-generating-cnc-part-program

I think the idea of raising the best answer to the top, and pushing bad/mediocre answers down can be a good one, but I don't think it is working correctly.

another example of "hard to follow" is this Q&A from earlier today:

https://grabcad.com/questions/how-can-i-design-this-type-of-bottle-by-using-which-command-in-solidworks-i-have-attached-the-type-of-bottle

Thanks for the update Ahti. but....

IMHO: sorting by "best answer" is the root of the "hard-to-follow" problem. 

Sorting by "best answer" is only good when all the replies are answers. (especially if there are multiple answers, which is usually not the case)

My experience with GrabCAD questions is most replies are additional questions or dialogs, so having things in "chronological order" would not mix-up the sequence of the posts. 

maybe I misspoke in my last post, when I wrote: "especially if there are multiple answers, which is usually not the case"

I just did a little survey of recent Questions with 2 or more replies.  Of  the 12 Questions I looked at; 9 had multiple answers, while 3 were conversations.

This does not change my opinion that replies to Questions and Discussions should be in chronological order.

(of the questions with multiple answers, only 1 of the 9 truly had multiple solutions to benefit from being ranked best to worst)

Ahti....

Are you saying that posts will not be sorted out of order, unless the original poster chooses the "best answer" ?

I have no insight into how the "Best Answer" system will work on GrabCAD, but I've seen it on a few other sites, and it works well.

On the other sites, ALL answers remain in chronological order, and the "best" or "accepted" answer is duplicated, then placed directly below the question.

You can then quickly read the question, and get the best answer. But, the remaining answers/discussions remain in order below if further reading is desired.

Thanks Fred.  That makes sense.

I guess we'll have to wait and see what the GrabCAD team comes up with.

here's another question from today that is really hard to follow the dialog:

Diameter Dimension

@ahti.naruson-1  any progress on fixing this?