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How An Open Source Plugin Tamed a Chaotic Comments Section With A Simple Quiz (arstechnica.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the very-challenging-response-authentication dept.

Long-time Slashdot reader jebrick quotes an article from Ars Technica about how Norway's government-owned public broadcasting company "employs open source tactics to fight trolling": The five-person team behind a simple WordPress plugin, which took three hours to code, never expected to receive worldwide attention as a result. But NRKbeta, the tech-testing group at Norway's largest national media organization, tapped into a meaty vein with the unveiling of last February's Know2Comment, an open source plugin that can attach to any WordPress site's comment section. "It was a basic idea," NRKbeta developer Stale Grut told a South By Southwest crowd on Tuesday. "Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it"... He and fellow staffers spent three hours building the plugin, which Grut reminded the crowd is wholly open source... "[W]e realized not every article is in need of this. We are a tech site; we don't have a lot of controversy, so there's not a big need for it. We use it now on stories where we anticipate there'll be uninformed debate to add this speed bump."
What do you think? And would a quiz-for-commenting-privileges be a good addition to Slashdot?

4 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Russians by tomhath · · Score: 4, Funny

    I don't know what this article is about, but I'm sure the Russians are involved somehow.

  2. Re:Fair's Fair by DRJlaw · · Score: 5, Funny

    Will editor's have to demonstrate they've read the story as well? Little things like copy and pasted characters unsupported by the site suggest they hadn't.

    The irony is palpable.

  3. Re:Charge for Comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Thank you Soros, for taking the time for your well-thought-out and insightful post
    *pockets the roll of quarters

  4. Re:Fair's Fair by fibonacci8 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Will editor's have to demonstrate they've read the story as well? Little things like copy and pasted characters unsupported by the site suggest they hadn't.

    The irony is palpable.

    Irony would have been if I'd type editorâ(TM)s. (I didn't)
    Irony could also have been if I were an editor and made the mistake. (I'm not)
    Irony may be that I've demonstrated that having read the story doesn't improve the quality of responses. (It really doesn't, it just delays poor quality responses like these)
    However this was merely coincidence. This suggests to me that neither of us should be an editor.

    --
    Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.