Numbers next to comments in Questions

what the he*& is up-voting ? and how does it decide what is helpful ?

A fuller answer... This is a system very familiar to software developers, especially those that use the "Stack Exchange" community-help sites. It is going to be meaningless to everyone else. It shows an unexpected lack of foresight on the part of HQ to use such a system without explaining it. It also explains the "Question" and "Answer" terminology.

The mechanism is intended to promote 'helpful' questions and answers to issues. If people find a question helpful (e.g they were about to ask the very same question) the etiquette is not to ask yours but to raise the 'score' on the existing question.

Similarly, for answers. If an answer solves your problem, or contributes towards a solution, then it should be 'up-voted'.

Contributions that are NOT helping things move forward should be 'down voted' AND a comment added to help the commenter understand how he/she could have been more helpful.

In this way, the useful questions and their answers float to the top of discussions, which should make finding the answer to your problem much quicker.

The comments are ordered by the 'score' - not, as you might expect, time & date.

Thank you Cheeseminer; I confess that I was a tad mystified! I'd still rather the comments were in order so that I could just read the latest ones, than have to a) plow through to find the newest or b) subscribe to receive email notification of new comments.

Thank you, Cheeseminer. I think you're absolutely right that many features appear to have been designed by people who assume that others occupy the same world as themselves. Rather akin to what would happen if medical people failed to translate and explain into layman's language for the benefit of their patients!!

Could I suggest that changes such as these should be 'proof-read'/'test-driven' by non-techy people - and glitches resolved! - before being launched?

It's not just a software development convention - it's quite common in online discussions in general e.g. on news/media sites. But yes, we all occupy different worlds. For example, I am blissfully ignorant of what might be "normal for facebook" :)

I can understand the urgency Blip may have had in terms of system performance, but Blip is its own little world - a genuine community - which appears to have been shoehorned into separate picture and discussion systems. They do not appear to be very integrated at the moment - I hope we will see more integration over the coming weeks.

A feature road map would also be useful. It would be nice to know what problems will be fixed, what features will be added, and what old features are gone forever...

I'd consider the terminology to be at fault here. We aren't talking about "Questions" and "Answers" at all — surely these are "comments". When I finally managed to actually see the up/down arrows (why such a faint grey against a white background?) my first thought was an Oh No one. This is so Farcebook it's scary, and very much a non-community concept. My distaste is amplified by the Official Answer. Bumping up-voted responses to the top of the list just adds confusion to the mix. The logical sorting paradigm should be either most-recent or oldest at the top.

Of course the other problem with this up/down lark is that the comments are no longer in order of submission so following the thread can be somewhat tricky!