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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?

7 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. My God by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it

    This would end Slashdot as we know it!!

    But in a good way.

    As an additional suggestion, people would only be able to post as AC if they got every question wrong... AKA "Hot Take" mode.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  2. Fair's Fair by fibonacci8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
  3. Worth a shot by Ami+Ganguli · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't know if it would work, but I would try it for random articles and see.

    In the good old days there were fewer trolls, and for a long time the moderation system worked well enough to keep them under control. This might be enough to thin the troll ranks, and tip the balance back towards informed discussion.

    --
    It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
    1. Re:Worth a shot by Anonymice · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I doubt the people who actually had something insightful & of actual value to add to the conversation would be much deterred by something quite so trivial.

      If you can't be arsed to answer a simple question about TFA, then you'd unlikely be arsed enough to contribute anything of any value.

    2. Re:Worth a shot by jenningsthecat · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ... I decline to participate at a site that wants to turn my browsing into the reading comprehension section of the SAT ...

      Browsing != commenting. And if you ARE going to comment, it would be good to know that you care enough about your own comments, the story you're commenting on, and the audience you're writing for, to answer a simple quiz. Frankly, if you don't care that much, then I'm probably even less interested in what you have to say than you yourself appear to be.

      --
      'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
  4. Good challenge for AI by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Pretty soon plugins will appear that will scan the article, answer the quiz and open the comments link for you convenience to troll.

    Hey, I have an idea. We should create a site trollcentral.com that will allow users to troll multiple comments pages at the same time. The site will provide a list of thousands of links from hundreds of websites, and your one troll comment will be simultaneously posted into all of them!

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  5. And reduce bots by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it

    This would end Slashdot as we know it!!

    But in a good way.

    As an additional suggestion, people would only be able to post as AC if they got every question wrong... AKA "Hot Take" mode.

    This would also get rid of a lot of automatic posts (bots), comment spam such as the "gay naggers" thing, and automatic gainsaying.

    It would also slow down the insulters and auto-dissers by making them take a few moments to read the story. As a bonus, those people would become more informed over time.

    I don't know if slashdot is interested in improving the site (whipslash has said that they maintain this site for other goals than popularity), and there may be other considerations such as "no money available", but it would sure make for a nice experiment.