Voting UI for showing like/dislike community comments side-by-side

Question

We want to add a comments/reviews feature to our website's plugin gallery, so users can vote up/down a particular plugin and leave an optional short comment about what they liked or didn't like about it.

I'm looking for inspiration, ideally a good implementation elsewhere on the web which isn't annoying to end users, isn't impossibly complex to develop, and which enables users to see both good and bad comments side-by-side, like this:

Like: 57 votes                           Dislike: 8 votes
---------------------------------        --------------------------------
"great plugin, saved me hours..."        "hard to install"

"works well on MacOS and Ubuntu"         "Broken on Windows Vista with 
                                             UAC enabled"
"integrates well with version 3.2"      
                                         More...
More...                               

Anyone know a site which does something like this particularly well? I don't need source code (since implementation will be simple), just looking for UI inspiration and best practices.

I'll accept the answer which refers me to the site which, in my biased opinion, is the best mix of usable (for end users reading comments) and addictive (for active users leaving comments).

Answer 1

Amazon does something similiar - when you list customer reviews, they list the most helpful positive and negative review at the top, before listing everything else. For example:

http://www.amazon.com/Glo-Bible-Digital-World-Immersion/product-reviews/0981990207/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_summary?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

To do this, though, the community needs the ability to flag a review as helpful or unhelpful, which might be more than you're looking to implement. I like your idea, though - rather than sorting through a large list of reviews, I like seeing a quick snapshot of what people liked or didn't like about something, even if one of those two opinions is relatively rare.

Answer 2

You might want to check out these book for algorithms:

• Algorithms of the Intelligent Web, Haralambos Marmanis, Manning 2009, ISBN 1933988665
• Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, Toby Segaran, O'Reilly Media 2007, ISBN 0596529325
• Collective Intelligence in Action, Satnam Alag, Manning, 2008, ISBN 1933988312