Add ability to select monthly/quarterly faves

[Google Code Exporter]

We almost completely screwed up our vote this time because it was close to 
impossible to view faves for the saasta time window of our vote.

Proposed solution:

Add a feature to "View my Favorites" that allows users to select which Q 
and which Y to choose the fave posts from.  For example, I could do

---------------------------
( ) Q4/2007
( ) Q1/2008
(x) Q2/2008
---------------------------

and this would then show my Q2/2008 faved posts (my own).  Furthermore, we 
should make it possible to view all faved posts (not just my own) using the 
same mechanism.

TL also suggested that we should create an "archive view" for faves.  This 
would work the same way as monthly archives, just that the UI would view 
through faved posts only.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by [e-mail] on 20 Oct 2008 at 6:31

[Google Code Exporter]

Well, to completely eliminate human error, I'd just have a link akin to "list 
of votable posts". That link would be 
visible only when we say so, and we'd just configure start & end dates in WP. 
Having users select quarters seems 
just so .. engineerish :)

Hmm, that could also be combined with users favorites. In other words "list 
votable posts" = "your favorites" 
from a date range that we specify. Of course that'd work for our users only, 
but that would also promote and be 
a logical extension to the "add fave" functionality.

Original comment by [e-mail] on 21 Oct 2008 at 5:47

[Google Code Exporter]

Well, this was a recommendation from one of our users.

Anyway, couple of obvious improvements over the current situation:

Instead of showing *all* faved posts (as is done currently), group faved posts 
by 
quarter and show the latest 4 quarters.  Shouldn't be too hard to look through 
your 
own posts from this view.  The good thing about automatically showing latest 4 
quarters is that we don't need to do any further configuration.

We can improve this by having another view for users that would be restricted 
to only 
currently votable posts (as per your suggestion).  However, this view must be 
dynamically configurable via our saasta.fi plugin.  This way it's easy to set 
it up 
correctly before voting starts.  This wasn't done this time over because I 
didn't 
want to touch the SQL queries in our PHP code -- this must be easier so that 
organizing galas is low maintenance.

Original comment by [e-mail] on 21 Oct 2008 at 7:07

[Google Code Exporter]

Yeah I know who suggested it, and I also suggested that we'd configure the date 
range in WP (as in, the 
saasta.fi plugin, that wasn't too clear in my earlier comment).

I must say I dislike the "select quarters" idea. If the idea is to make voting 
easier, I'd start by giving a one click 
solution to get the list of eligible posts. Of course we promote posts that 
received the most views in the vote 
"invites", but that approach hasn't applied to homebrew, for example. 

Anyways, this is a tough cookie. Just an idea I didn't think through yet (2nd 
half of Juve-Real Madrid about to 
start :)), but all sorts of ideas I have always run into the problem of "how do 
the non-users vote then?".. what 
if we came up with two ways to vote - a really intuitive way for our users 
(vote buttons, vote shortlists...) and 
a less intuitive (take the current method, for example) for non-registered 
users. Guess my point here is to try 
to figure out if we could come up with a great way for only a certain user 
group without trying to please 
everyone.

But now it's footy time!

Original comment by [e-mail] on 21 Oct 2008 at 7:50

[Google Code Exporter]

Yeah, let's ditch the "select quarters" idea, that's not needed.  But last 4 
Q's 
would be interesting to see anyway, as it might be a convenient way to search 
for 
your own personal favorites (i.e., even without the intent to vote).

Original comment by [e-mail] on 21 Oct 2008 at 8:13

[Google Code Exporter]

Regarding comment 3 and hardness of voting.

Let it be said that I don't think voting is in any way bottlenecked by the 
technology 
we've set forth for this.  I think the fact that browsing through tens of posts 
takes 
quite a bit of time is the real problem why people are so reluctant to vote.  
In 
fact, I'd tend to think it can easily take more effort to choose your favorite 
Top 5 
saastas than to choose who you're gonna vote in the next presidential election. 
;)

I think we got pretty much zero non-user votes this time.  Don't remember if we 
got 
any in the past polls either.  It's interesting to see how we're going to 
encourage 
non-user voting behavior.

Original comment by [e-mail] on 21 Oct 2008 at 8:54

[Google Code Exporter]

First stab at this in r268.  This is more or less what our secret stats page 
does, 
just that it's now publicly available.  Will need to follow up this for user's 
own 
faves.

Original comment by [e-mail] on 26 Oct 2008 at 6:47

[Google Code Exporter]

Another stab in r271.  This implements quarter grouping for "my faves" list as 
well.

Original comment by [e-mail] on 26 Oct 2008 at 7:33