Re: [phpesp-dev] Rank problem when answer not required (revisited)

[James F. <jf...@uv...>]

Quoting Paul Borgermans <pbo...@sc...>:

> Dear developers,
> 
> Regarding the possible problems with ranking questions and where
> answers 
> are not required, I have a small suggestion.
> 
> To distinguish between unanswered questions and rank 1 answers which
> 
> both become 0 when stored in the database and corrupt the results, a
> 
> "magic" number could be set as the default value in the database (say
> 
> -99999).
> 
>   => The statistics scripts for previewing the result can easily take
> 
> this into account, as well as statistical packages. It is also
> backwards 
> compatible with respect to existing results.
> 
> Any comments?
> 
> Regards
> 
> Paul

Paul,

Are you certain that unanswered questions are not NULL?  It's been a
while since I looked at this, but I thought that's what was used for
unanswered questions.  If it is not the case, I believe it should be.  A
 NULL value makes more sense to me than a magic number.

-James