Best Buy makes its idea-gathering application engine free and open source. | Hacker News Reader

Best Buy makes its idea-gathering application engine free and open source.

bbyidx.com

34 pointsbenhedrington19 comments

It's a cool implementation, but I see one major flaw: unlike HN and other social news/submission sites, its popularity ranking doesn't seem to factor in when items were submitted.

Hence, if you take a look, the top three items there were submitted 3 months, 4 months, and one year ago, respectively. That might work for Best Buy's intentions, but generally that wouldn't make for a very sticky/relevant site. Would really like to see them incorporate date of submission into rankings.

Good idea, I'll let the team know that would widen the potential user base considerably. I think you are right for our needs recency is not as important as mass up votes.

There is a half-life decay algorithm built in, so ideas lose points over time if they are not voted for. We can always improve this, but it does look like the top ideas do indeed continually get votes.

Furthermore, once you've voted for an idea, you can't re-vote for it. You get one vote one time for one idea, and its value decays exponentially over time.

So to remain at the top, an idea has to keep getting new votes _from new users_.

The ideas at the top of the list have been there for a long time because they're good ideas, and they having staying power.

(Note that you can change the vote decay rate depending on whether your site is more interested in what's hot now, or what's popular over the long term.)

... Isn't this just a support ticket tracker?

I guess to some degree... we just thought if it was worth it for us to build vs. buy we'd share what we made with others choosing that road to get them started. Our site is here: http://bestbuyideax.com

Affero :/

As you might imagine we didn't have all the say on the license we chose... fell free to send over some educational links we can share so next time we pick something that would make :/ -> :)

Eh, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

I'm not. I have no use for this but I feel bad for the guys who coded it, having to release it under this. Its like killing it before it lives.

http://teddziuba.com/2010/01/i-love-the-gpl-except-when-it.h...

how do i download this?

http://bitbucket.org/garykoelling/bbyidx/overview

i caught that much. i'm just unfamiliar with "hg clone", i usually use "git clone" ... to google I go

The team was going to publish this on github as well but never got around to it, I'll see what I can do.

awesome, thanks

Install mercurial, run hg clone ...

From there on you only need to care about mercurial if you plan on committing stuff, etc.

The Best Buy IdeaX site was recently moved to Heroku, which is tightly integrated with Git. We will be moving the repo to github sometime soon to make life easier.

From the site:

"BBYIDX is a free and open source idea-gathering application written in Ruby and distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License. It's the basis of the Best Buy IdeaX website and was created by and supported by Best Buy Enterprise Services Inc and Bust Out Solutions, Inc. The standard release is known as BBYIDX and features the ability for users to simply post, tag, comment and vote on ideas. It also features the ability for administrators to moderate incoming ideas and comments as well as assign work-flow to certain ideas for further exploration. It also offers the ability to group ideas by "current" or category to create new "currents" which serve as problems or issues to be solved by comments and moderation. It also features read and write APIs that can be used to make access to an instance of BBYIDX via another website or mobile application."

Forgive me for asking, but what was the point of reposting the first paragraph of the page?

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