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

by benhedrington • 16 years ago

34 19 16 years ago

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."

spicyj• 16 years ago

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

DanBlake2• 16 years ago

Affero :/

benhedrington5• 16 years ago

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 :/ -> :)

naner• 16 years ago

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

DanBlake2• 16 years ago

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...

CoachRufus873• 16 years ago

how do i download this?

jamesbritt2• 16 years ago

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

CoachRufus873• 16 years ago

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

pringle• 16 years ago

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.

benhedrington5• 16 years ago

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.

jefflin2• 16 years ago

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.

pcantrell• 16 years ago

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.)

alex1990• 16 years ago

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

benhedrington5• 16 years ago

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

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

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