Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Moderation:Phase 1.1.1
- Moderators can't moderate their own comments.
- Simply creating an account does not make you a moderator.
- New moderators will be added and old moderators removed over time. I have ideas about this, but we'll work it out. This will eventually be automated, but right now I'm still resolving technical stuff. A lot of you have suggested great ideas (most of which Jeff and I have already discussed long ago) so just hang in there.
- The same moderator can't moderate the same comment twice in a row.
- I yanked about 15 moderators for abuses and violations.
- I rewrote parts of the Guidelines.
- I've been rewriting and cleaning up a lot of code. Lemme know if you see bugs. There will be bugs.
- I've decided on an absolute range from -1 to 5 for scores. I may change that later, but for now, that seems reasonable: It allows users to have an absolute minimum to browse at, It also will mean that abused comments can be promoted relatively easy.
- Moderation dropped over the week from 30% of comments back down to 10-20% as the bulk of moderators got over the initial excitement (presumably). This is much closer to where it should be.
- Moderators have been told to concentrate more on promoting good comments then demoting bad ones. I'll probably enforce that somehow someday.
- I'm working on better controls for customization of the comments on the fly. It might be a bit flakey, but give it a whirl.
- Remember that if you go to slashdot.org/index.shtml or index_F.shtml, your user preferences will not work. Start at slashdot.org and the system will detect if you are logged in and send you to the correct page.
Overall the feedback has been positive. Let me reiterate here that if you don't like the system, you can simply turn it off. 400 moderators is a lot, and we will have people abusing the trust that we have to place in them. If you don't want that risk, I don't blame you a bit. And if you see abuses, please let us know. We've revoked many people's access already, and we'll continue to do it.
The goal here is to allow enough filtering that the guy who wants to just read 10 good comments happy, but also allow the guy who wants to read a thousand flame infested offtopic comments while slugging out a good debate in the trenches to do just that. And hopefully everyone in between too. I think we're getting pretty damn close to making that possible.
Yes I thought about it and no I won't do it. I'd rather add useful features with my CPU cycles than gee whiz ones.
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
Pants are Optional
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
I like the various customizations that are appearing, but every once in a while I still wish for one particular feature with the thread flattening. Instead of the entire section of comments flattening, what about an option to flatten a particular thread within that group of comments? So if you see a comment with 15 replies and you want to read those replies all at once, click a flatten toggle within the header of that comment to see a flattened reply list consisting of only those comments and replies. Hope that makes sense, any comments??
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Ideas: You are probably already thinking about this, BUT
1) Anyone with a accumulated score over X should automatically become a moderator. Meta-moderators (the Slashdot Mammals) could mark certain users as being "in the penalty box" so they can't moderate no matter what. This has the advantage of cleaning up the comments (via moderation) but ALSO the advantage that we aren't being ruled from above (by either a dictator or a ruling class). I may have to change my name from "FascDot" to "DemoDot"...
2) The way to make moderators score more positives than negatives is to link the two mathematically. For instance, imagine each moderator has a "pool of points" for each story. Initially the pool is empty. If they moderate a story upwards, the pool gains points, when they moderate downwards, they lose points. Moderators with empty pools can't moderate (for a given story). If you make a minus more expensive (it costs 2 moderation pool points to lower a story by 1) you suddenly get twice as many plus mods as minus.
Hi,
/. resources.
1) It would be nice to be able to see our own posts no matter how high our threshhold value is set.
2) We may end up with a lot of people repeating each other since we can't see all of the posts. Not necesarily a bad thing but it would use
3) A "report moderator abuse" link off all pages would be a nice feature to have. (Very odd, but now that we're moderated it _feels_ strange to say that sort of thing and wonder if a moderator will bump my score as a result of commenting on moderation... [Read any Foucalt...?])
e.
I think anybody who actively seeks to be a moderator should be immediately and irrevocably disqualified.
Same goes for Presidential candidates, but that's off topic.
Just seems to me that seeking such a thing demonstrates a significant character flaw; the lust for power.
This is generally a bad idea.
Minimum value is bad because:
I would like a destinction between Flamebait and Offtopic versus "First", "Meept", and
"This message is intended to suck moderation points"
Maximum values are bad too:
There must be many levels of messages.
this will help the "10 best comments" on the HOF page.
Even the rating will lose, I'd like a better 5-pointer to go before the other 5-pointers.
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I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
If a poster wanted to make sure that her/his posts were visible to the majority of /.'ers, then it would be in their best interests to make the posts relevant and insightful, actually have content, even. I wonder if we're going to see the caliber of postings and posters increase. A sort of electronic evolution of sorts.
To that end, I think that it would be helpful if the score of an individual's posts would display on their user page. Just a short blurb in the already-displayed list of past messages. For those who wanted to work on see what other readers of /. thought of their posts (albeit the moderators only), that woudl help them see if their posts were highly thought of or not.
A possible benefit: a poster who might not feel that his/her posts had anything of value to the community (and there are several, I'm sure) might discover that they actually do have something relevant to say. It might encourage them to contribute more.
On the other hand, prolific posters who discovered that their comments' scores were consistently low might want to pursue an understanding of why. That could lead to improvement of their posts, to the betterment of the community. The fact that there are hundreds of moderators reduces the likelihood that a single poster will consistently be given false feedback.
This system might just produce better writers all 'round.
Believe nothing, not even if I say it, if it violates your sense of reason -- Buddha
All hail to king Taco!
:)
He has out done him self again!!
I have one Idea:
Someone mentioned a moderation of postings. good idea, but I have an expansion. As a reward for the moderators help why not create an area that the moderators can rate stories before they are sent to Rob? This would make sure that the post is on topic with the slashdot community, and at the same time, decrease Robs workload. Where is the reward? Moderators get first crack at the stories. They can hit the sites before the slashdot effect. There should be a time limit though as to how long a story can be left in the moderator "area". This way the rest of the slashdot community will still be able to see it. And possibly a place for rejected stories and reasons for rejections.
One other thing:
Why do moderators need a number? so you can complain? Not.
Later
ClarkBar
In the last few days, /. is starting to remind me of how it was a year ago. With articles sorted by score, I can actually pull out a few good responses from the hundreds of not so good ones.
A suggestion I have: put the score of the follow-ups next to their links in the threaded mode. That way it's easier to tell if there is a decent follow-up to an article.
The biggest problem I see right now is that sorting by score only sorts on the top article in a thread. There could be a +5 response to a 0 article, but I won't see it if my threshold is set to +1, and I view things threaded. Perhaps a 0 article with a +5 follow-up could be given a higher priority than a 0 article with no follow-ups? Maybe show all of the +5 articles first, then the ones with +5 follow-ups, then the +4 articles, etc?
Keep up the great work Rob!
What I would love to see is a way to 'filter out' the articles I have already read. Maybe each time I click on a link, a small update is added to my cookie, and the next time I connect to that article, all of the follow-ups I already clicked on dissapear.
Or a simpler system, where the last time I clicked on a link for any given article, the time is recorded, and the next time I visit that article, I can hit a button that will hide all of the replies older than the time that is recorded for me. Of course, with that method, articles that I haven't read, but are old, would get hidden as well.
That way I could read a few of the articles, go away, come back later and finish off the ones I haven't read yet.
Much like a USENET newsreader, there needs to be someway to tag the articles I have seen already as 'read', so I don't have to wade through them again.