How the EP Promotion/Demotion Rating System Works

The Economic Populist has a content promotion and demotion system. Literally your vote can push an Instapopulist, or forum post to the front page or remove a blog post from the front page.

In other words, EP registered users control the content on the site, including the publication and placement of the content.

If enough people vote down a post, it will be unpublished, in other words, removed from the site.

When a post is unpublished, all comment trees attached to that post are also unpublished.

EPers please use the content system when you see an obvious spammer or someone posting a promotional item for another website, glorified advertising! These are hand spammers and they try to get free advertising as well as manipulate site rankings by spamming other sites with their advertisements. These posts are not real bloggers, so please treat them as such.

I need all registered users to be spam police and the content promotion/demotion management system gives you the power to remove these types of posts.

That little up and down arrow, on the bottom left of all posts is the content promotion/demotion system. Click up and the post if already on the front page, stays on the front page. Click down and enough people give a negative rating, the post is removed from the front page. If more EP registered users vote negative, the post is unpublished and removed from the site.

Comment Spam

You can also remove from visibility comment spam. These are advertisers who register on the site and post comments that are obviously advertisements or worse, linking to whatever item they are trying to promote. Simply troll rate those comments and they will disappear from the site for most users.

Do not abuse the system just because you might not like someone or their post. As long as a post is based in economic reality, not fiction and on topic, not formatted so poorly it's breaking the site, it's allowed.

Thanks - Your Friendly Neighborhood EP Admin

The original admin blog post on the content promotion and demotion system.

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Promoting an Instapopulist to the Front page

All, as you know the blogs are supposed to be for original writing, in depth, some "meat" to them and they start out published on the front page.

Users have to vote them off the front page.

But did you know you can promote an Instapopulist or forum post to the front page?

Yes you can!

While Instapopulists (forum posts) are for those short check this out with a quote posts, when you see something you think should get more attention or is more like a blog post, more in depth, good, shocking news, critical, just vote it up.

That little arrow box at the bottom left isn't a place holder, it's a promotion box and a demotion system and will literally move posts around the site, to the front page or all the way to not visible by anyone (a real troll post).

If the posts gets enough votes, it is moved to the front page for more visibility.

all EPer's read this - we had a spam attack

Hi all,

I just want you all to be aware, once again, if you see a spammer and that's anything, from a blog post to a comment, trying to post something not relevant to EP, such as promotion of a product or some scam, you have control to remove that post from this site.

If enough people vote down on a blog it will be removed and please use it. That's the content promotion/demotion system, but it can also be used for spammers.

We had a spammer get 30 minutes of airtime with a blog post because I was offline. Most are caught before they arrive but if one slips by, use those down arrows to get it off the site ASAP.

Spam, even hand done spam (which they have to do on EP, I catch all of the script kiddies), are like roaches...they are everywhere and if you see one, you have to kill it immediately.

spammers

Again, in case one gets through, all registered members, you have the ability to delete posts by down rating them.

Please do when you see a spammer get through.

Seebert saw it but nobody else hit the down rate button so they got free link time for a good hour.

They are like locusts.

if you are wondering where your comments went

let's say a particularly nasty piece of economic fiction was posted on EP. Then, let's say members of EP demoted that post to being off of the site, i.e. they censored it to oblivion.

What happens then is your comments attached to that post all go with it, they all get non-published.

So, if you're wondering what happened to your comments attached to a particularly funky blog post that EPers have deemed not worthy of being on the site and thus demoted it with the "down" arrow on the bottom left....

that's what happened.

So, a couple of things, when writing comments attached to a particularly funky post, don't spend a lot of time on them...

and if this is an issue for people, i.e. a bunch of your comments disappeared....let me know I might be able to work something out to reattached those comments to some other post...

say a "lost comments" open blog post or something.

Also, this is a reminder to be pretty damn prudent when using that down arrow.

It does literally unpublish and delete posts, which is a powerful control for keeping the content quality on EP high....

So don't use it just because you disagree with someone, as long as they wrote up something fairly well substantiated...

But do use it when you know something is just pure bunkola, conspiracy theory and so on....

No problem

Though I'll repost my one request here, since I've lost the link for the "site additions" request:
Voluntary, publicly readable field of study and degree attained fields attached to users in the database would go a long way towards judging dislike vs pure bunkola.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.

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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.

Registered users - friendly reminder

If you want to see an Instapopulist on the front page...or a blog post, don't forget to hit the "up arrow"...that moves posts to the front page.

To all of you anonymous lurkers, it takes 1 minute to create an account on EP and join in. (but read the FAQ in the about section first please!)

don't forget to use the promotion system!

Remember you must vote up (bottom right arrow) posts to put them on the front page.

And if you really don't like any of the posts, please write your own!

not to be a nag but....

please don't forget to use the promotion system to put stuff onto the front page. It is a "put the best stuff" as well as the most in depth stuff at the same time, we should be putting "some stuff" on the front page periodically...

else we have posts that are almost a week old and it looks like people are not writing and discussing.

Folks, don't forget to uprate in depth posts to the front page!

Folks, don't forget to rate up posts you would like on the front page.

For the site to work and the front page to showcase the best content, but change often, people have to uprate those posts.

Yes, posts get read in the queue because of the RSS feeds but people just showing up to the site, see the front page first.

Thanks for your participation!

Please uprate posts you want on the front page

People are forgetting to click on those arrows next to posts you want on the front page.

Authors, don't forget to uprate your own post if you want it front paged (that doesn't mean someone else will agree with you!)

On the weekly series posts, that's the FMN, SMC, Must reads, you really don't have to uprate those, they are series and have their own group of fans who know they will be there during certain times...

but when you see a really well done, well formatted, cited posts with lots of good information, please remember, to write these things is a lot of work and so one would think they should get a little front page time.

Being on the front page will expose the post to more people, plus it changes the site look, which is always a good thing.

Also, fortunately people use this sparingly, but in case something really horrific makes it on this site, the opposite is true on the arrows....enough down votes and a post is unpublished.

don't forget to uprate posts

People, don't forget to uprate posts you want to see on the front page.

on post promotion, comment ratings

You must be logged in to use the system. If you are not logged in the arrows will not appear.

I'm still working on the user rating/content system, mainly I want to take the best comments and highlight them elsewhere, which would be evaluated by ratings.

So, people, a. log in, b. start rating comments and promoting blog posts to the front page you deem worthy.

The weekly series of movies, comics as well as links don't really need to go to the front page, they now have their own separate page for people to easily scroll through all of the videos and comics.