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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?

3 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Charge for Comments by DalM · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The system I like the best (that I'm not sure I've ever seen actually deployed anywhere) is the concept of charging $0.25 per comment. If the trolls are the ones ruining the industry, let them subsidize it.

  2. Reading TFA? Just no. by rastos1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    These days the journalists do not fully research the topic. It's not what pays the bills and it's not their mission. At best, they just put together a few sentences and rush it to the front page. So I do not expect the article to be accurate and informative and I rather prefer to head directly to the comments section. People, who comment there, are quick to point out flaws in the article, add more accurate information, links, references and personal hands on experience. If the site, that you follow, does not have that kind of comments, it's not worth following.

  3. Could Work on Slashdot by mentil · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How about commenters that pass the quiz get an automatic +1 mod? That could work. Not positive it'd be a good idea, though.

    --
    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.