Slashdot Mirror
On the Subject of Trolls
So it happened again recently. You guys who read a lot probably know where but this time it was much more hurtful then usual. So I've implemented 2 changes to help prevent this from happening again.
First I added an additional scoring penalty to posts. Originally the default range of comment posting was 0 for ACs, and 1 for Registered Users. In addition, a +1 or -1 could be Registered users based on their posting history (I'm gonna use the word "Karma" to describe the sum of all moderation activity done to a given user: thanks nate). If a user has karma of +20, they get a +1 bonus to their comments. If their karm is -10, they get a -1. I've added an additional rank of -20 which ads one more -1 to the post, which will make it possible for a comment to be posted at -1.
There are only 2 accounts out of the 80,000 that are this low.
Second is a bit trickier. The code now checks for "Trolls" as part of comment validation. Essentially, when a comment is posted, a troll factor is computed for your Account and your IP. This is the sum of all moderator activity done to your account in the last 24 hours or so. If your IP or your User Account has a -5 or worse total, your comment will not be posted.
Right now there are 5 accounts in the system that should show up as trolls. 3 of them are the 3 worst offenders from the story that caused me to have to write this code.
It was hard for me to do this. I'm feeling pretty wierd because this is the first time I've ever made it impossible for anyone to post. My guess is that in the end this won't help: There is no end to the number of IPs or User Accounts a determined troll can acquire to continue pestering people trying to have a real discussion. All I can say to those of you who are offended is to try to browse at Score:1 or Score:2 because the moderation system as a whole works quite well. And to those of you who are causing the problem (and I know who you are) please grow up.
Update: 09/05 01:51 by CT : A lot of good points are being made in the comments, but let me try to justify something: I'm not trying to cause censorship, I'm trying to prevent a denial of service attack. Under this system it will be quite possible for a troll to post 5-10 comments before the system rejects him. This isn't a censorship thing: He's been given plenty of opportunity to speak, he's just screwed up. He's not trying to communicate, he's trying to drown out other speakers. This is precisely the kind of thing that we need to resolve to allow a rational discussion to continue at the scale we're dealing with here. There are most certainly loopholes here, but no system can stop all abuses. This will just make it a little trickier.
Other Ideas:
- No Anonymous Posts. You all know how I feel about this one.
- Restrict the # of comments any single IP/Account is allowed to make in a single article. This gets problematic: anyone have a good idea on how to make this fair, that will scale from 1 comment to a thousand?
- Assorted restrictions on AC posting (Allow only 1 AC per registered post? Allow only registered users to post top level comments? No AC posts after 100 comments in a story? There are dozens of ideas, but I think they all are bad)
Oh, and if enough people bitch, I'll remove the extra '-1' from new posts. I'm not convinced that its a good idea, but it *did* serve to solve the current problem.
Interesting problems, thanks for the feedback (good and bad!) I'm glad that some folks are addressing the issues instead of just swearing and screaming at each other. I'm open to any suggestions, but anything angry will simply be ignored.
It might help, in addition to any other methods, to turn on an option in the user preferences to hide all AC posts, regardless of rating, or below a certain threshold (user-definable, of course). I personally find very little use for most AC posts, and most ACs for that matter, but I like to have the option of reading them anyway... but no reason someone else should be forced to spend their bandwidth downloading them.
/. currently lets us select the moderation level we wish to read. It would be great if we could also elect to ignore anonymous posts - like this one :-)
Moderation of itself seems to work -- fairly well, most of the time. Posts which are "good" get moderated up consistantly, posts which are "bad" get moderated down consistantly. Posts which are controversial, however, get bounced up and down, and the net score may not reflect the true measure of the post's significance.
I've suggested previously a couple of changes to the browsing interface:
I've often found my five moderating points are insufficient to the task. I also dislike the fact that I cannot both post and moderate, and am about this close to coming up with post-only and moderate-only IDs.
Other vague gripes -- it's not always clear what the moderation categories mean (is "funny" up or down), it might be better to simply have an up or down vote, plus optional description. The current options should have an indication of direction (+/- would do it). The categories seem incomplete.
Finally, there ought to be a feedback discussion for Slashdot where users can post their concerns and vote features up or down. Re-open the discussion on a regular basis (say every week or two) to flush out and start over, but keep the old feedbacks for historical perspective.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Better yet, allow us to decide which downmoderation category we want to be put in. When I post something offtopic, I want to set it to be Offtopic. When I post a 'First Post', I want to set it to be Redundant (or maybe Offtopic). When I troll, I want to be able to set it to Troll. And when I say that Windows sucks, I want to be able to set it to Flamebait.
Why not give the first x readers (maybe selected upperclassslashdotterswithagoodhistory, randomized by subnet? or something) an option to somehow moderate messages . Power to quick readers! yeah :)Just my 2e-2
nosig today
I am anti-cencorship, but I don't consider
moderation cencorship.
In the threads about Richard Stevens I stumbled upon this,
------snip-------
I am imploring the AC or AC's who insist on posting their drivel to this page to desist. One of Stevens' sons loves to read Slashdot and is
extremely distressed to see some of the posts that are being "written" here today. If you have a heart, just give it a rest.
----end snip-----
Now think about his son, and what he read, and
say that moderation couldn't have saved him some
pain.
thanks
-p.s. Slashdot isn't a government organization,
Rob built this from the ground up, if he doesn't
like the way somebody smells he should be able
to delete that persons post without people
complaining. If people don't like it, why don't
they make a slashdot themselves?, thats what the
internet is all about, if you don't like it, do it
better, just stop complaining.
Moderation should mostly focus on hitting posts which are scored too low, and somewhat on posts scored too high. It's easy to get the latter (thresh >= 3). It's really hard to skim the crud (thresh <= 1 or 0) for things which should move up. I'd like to see both min and max scores be configurable in the browsing interface. Randomizing post order doesn't really solve the problem -- in a sufficiently long forum, you'll hit moderator overload no matter what.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
What an interseting idea.
Answer a "skill-testing question" about the subject and you can moderate the discussion. The author of the story would come up with the question to go along with the story.
Glad someone remembers when Usenet was still pretty cool. Like many people here I'm sure, I remember a time when most people you met on the Net (Usenet, irc, gopher - WWW what's that?) were intelligent, friendly people that were almost always a pleasure to converse with. Why do things always have to seek out the lowest common denominator.. sigh. Good luck Rob.
[We don't come from a planet. We come from a grid sector.]
>>
Everyone is a generalization. I have never been "hurt" by comments I have read on Slashdot. I have had some flame replies to my posts in the past. What do I do? I have a phrase for this: acknowledge and move on.
Consider the fact that the same people that abuse this forum will be pleased when you impliment this new type of moderation. Since it spoils the very nature of this great site.
Maybe more moderators is the solution?
$.02
Later.
pronoblem
Then you should have to be averaging a 3 to get a default score of 2...
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
When a moderator knows his points are going to keel over and croak in seventy-two hours, he'll be more likely to use them on stories that are around now - maybe stories that don't interest him that much.
The short TTL ensures that moderation still occurs on slow news days. Without it, the only articles that got moderated would be the really popular pieces.
How could Zero have been his default at the time? This new rule hadn't been implemented then, and he isn't an AC. His comments should've started at One just like everyone elses. Those comments were actually moderated *down*. Seems like a waste of points to me - his comments aren't that bad.
Introduction -
Did anyone even consider if this is a technical problem or a social problem?
The natural conclusion is given (it's a social one).
Past AOL - USENET issues has proven this.
Can you straighten social problems out solely using technology?
To some degree yes but you will never get to the root of the problem.
Thesis -
My thesis is that you have to decide if you want an open forum or a closed forum.
Explanation -
Open forums render spam and all sorts of shit in masses and there's nothing no one
is gonna be able to do about it (it's like freedom of speach, even nazi opinions can be expressed).
Though the as they are open they are in a way the nicest ones.
Closed forums means you have to be a member to express your opinion and the nice thing is you can keep
track of the users and see what they do and controll them if they missbehave. Though it is a closed
forum meaning it's not likely to gain any wider acceptance among the broad public.
The current form of semi-open forum with means of sensorship (moderators) is obviously not working.
The spam gets thruu.
The moderators are flooded.
The maintainers of the forum is being adressed and complained at.
Theory -
Adding extremely complex security like systems will in the end probably mean the forum becomes less userfriendly.
This could create a situation where only those who either has a whole lot of time to waste or those who are
really smart will catch up on how the forum actually works in depth.
Giving this it's likely the forum will decrease in popularity among serious users and history has told us that
the more complex the security systems gets the more intense gets the destroying efforts.
To assume the forum could drop a whole bunch of people/users here, however passively, is not unthinkable.
The effect of such an event may not show in the site maintainers user logfiles since most of these users are likely
to silently leave, without actually removing their accounts why the actual result would show in less serious
debating and fewer real discussion as a whole.
thats ok but what happens if the person has opinions about an issue hat other ppl disagree with ? the moderators can easily kick him off. e.g. the anti-GPL crowd. i may not agree with their opinions but just because i have moderation points does that mean i moderate em down ? i *dont* like this idea of tracking moderation histories and stopping people from posting based on ip addresses..it raises a whole lot of other issues. IMHO, increase the number of moderation points and let the system take care of itself. make the range from -1 to -5 and let ppl filter as they see fit. i read at -1 anyway...i dont mind reading at -5.
So if I have a Karma rating of 2, an AC of -1, and a blessed +2 broadsword, why can't I just kill the Trolls myself?
I believe that in order to save these comment boards , and to the right to anonimity, from disaster, that only registered users should have the option to post anonymously. This would add another hurdle to so called 'impulse posting' that seems to perpetuate itself on some threads here. This solution would preserve the right to post on topics you don't want to be associated with, but would prevent the assholes from ruining the intellegence of this place.
First off, :-) ;) there are something like 80k people reading slashdot daily? Or registered? I'm not sure this is a significant portion of the population. It will not cause the kind of disruption in OTHERS lives that will get the offender punished, because it won't hurt many people on a daily basis, not to mention that a half way competent troll will simply spoof his IP and look like he's on another subnet to get back in... Who does this solution harm the most?
Let me say that, as a former OS/2 user HOBBES KICKED SERIOUS ASS! Thank you for everything that was there. I still have some of the CD's and miss OS/2 much. Linux is cool too though. I'm getting used to it now.
Let's talk about your post however. I see a few problems. I don't think they are unsolvable, just problems.
The ban the whole subnet is a really good idea, but I find it hard to bereave that this will affect too many people! It may well stop the troll's temporarily, but how likely is it that someone else at the same ISP will be a slashdot junkie like the rest of us? If memory serves ( and it usually doesn't
Then there is the limit on karma thing. If someone's karma is between 1 and 9, I don't think they should be punished. 0's should come in with a value of 0, and below that I think the block, if it were implemented would be a good idea.
Pvt. Pyle ended up cracking in the end. How effective was the training method used? It did NOT have the desired effect on Pvt Pyle. Instead, it inflamed him to kill his DI and then himself. Do you want to motivate AC's and Troll's the same way? It's a good analogy however. I was a Hospital Corpsman in the United States Navy, who served with the US Marines, and we are taught the lesson of Pvt Pyle in Field Medical Service School for a reason - We need to spot them before they erupt! That was an accurate part of the movie.
"I have no respect for a man who can only spell a word one way." - Mark Twain
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
Call me silly, but I'd like to see (at least for a short while) some system that gives registered users a single moderation point for each AC post. That way, we could quickly bury trolls and the like. Perhaps this would work well in combination with Rob's "Karma" system and the randomization of top-level posts.
Of course, it's not a perfect solution, but I see it as one step above eliminating AC posts completely.
Just my US$0.02...
Delmoi writes: > This wouldn?t help much for AC?s, so I propose getting rid of them > entirely. If someone waned to post something anonymously, they still > could. You could also have ?soft? anonymity, and ?hard? anonymity. I'm certainly all for killfiles. I want one that killfiles idiots who keep posting using MS-HTML. Look at those question marks! Why does /. let illegal postings through like that?
Rob's plan may not be perfect, but its approaching an ideal. Give someone a second chance (and a third and a fourth and a fifth), then revoke their rights for abusing a privilege. The mechanism might need some work, but the idea is good. I think it's about three chances too many though.... Censorship isn't based on content, it's based on abuse, it's short term and it's quick. Fits the crime, IMO.
The payoff of a troll is the rise it generates. No troll = no rise. Much the same way that some one of the most effective anti-graffiti measures is to simply cover the stuff up as soon as it appears. No art, no impact. Takes away the satisfaction of doing it.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
so do the posters who post behind firewalls and proxy servers. tying ppl to ip addresses with a *history* is *bad*
I have got to agree, the more moderators you have, the less likely these posts are to slip through the cracks. It's is a known that 5 people (15 moderation points among them? I have yet to be a moderator, so i don't know exactly how it goes) cannot mark down all the bad posts, but 4 or five times that number would have a much better hand at it. I'm also very curious as to how one becomes a moderator, I come to the site 6 or 7 times a day, and have never been a moderator.
/., but i must say that this is the best way I have seen, for dealing with the trolls....
It is entirely too bad that this has come to
I agree, moderation needs to be changed. One idea that poped into my mind after reading yours (though I like your idea of moderators being named) is giving moderators two classes of points. One class to up articles and one class to down articles. I don't know how many moderators there are at any one time on average, but 5 points/class should be enough to bump up the good and down the bad.
/. As an adult, I want the option to get pissed off at stupid trolls if I'm in that mood.
My only concern is that someone else is telling me what I can and can't read on
The Turing story also had some pretty offensive posts.
First: I refuse to believe that problems cannot be solved with technology, as you claim, adturner.
You just saw the spamming-punk-kid problem fixed, not by the community, but by Malda wielding some nasty kung-fu. That's technology.
Second: This isn't censorship. This is a private forum; Andover.net owns it. They can do whatever they want with our posts, except change our words without saying so. And it's the group of individuals that compose Slashdot's "community" that does most of the moderation; Rob's system is a very liberal live-and-let-live-or-die one that lets us make our own decisions.
As an aside, I would like to see moderator points given out more often. I see a lot of gems that end up as ones, or zeroes if an Anonymous Coward posted 'em.
But... Let's compare slashdot's posting forums to a "letters to the editor" section of a newspaper. What would you think about having a "x/5" scoring put on every one of the letters to the editor before being published in the paper. And, to top it off, putting the "less than 0/5" posts in 4 pt. type on page 79?
Remember, newspapers are private entities. They can do what they like. But the people will rebel if things tighten up too much. Witness why an overbearing police presence at a crowd of people is (often) followed by a riot... People don't like to be told what to do and say. The more the iron grip tightens, the more idiots will be "squeezed" from the lemon. Once out, they'll make a stink (just like what happened on the slashdot article about creative labs new PC). So, go ahead, make this a private group. Buuuuuut, some idiot will find an exploit. And will abuse it.
BTW: I was here before slashdot had accounts, when you had to type in your user name and email, and when BoredAtWork posted all the time (and because of his quick posting, causing the first post deal!). Things were never so bad then. (In a really lame way, this proves my second paragraph... I'm sure most of you could do better.).
Have a good day... And make it a 5/5 day...
I agree with you - it is Rob's site, and he can do with it whatever he wants.
/. community, say 'censorship here is OK' we might as well be saying 'censorship is OK anywhere.' Such ideals as freedom of speech should be, for those who believe in it, global to all parts of society, all walks of life, and all things where information may be seen.
However, idealism goes a long way. I once frequented a web board which censored posts constantly. It ended up becoming so bad that if a DISCUSSION started about anything 'possibly offensive' like religion, or violence, etc. the entire discussion would be removed. After I stopped visiting the site went down permanently within a couple of months.
It's different on slashdot, I know. We don't want to have to see flamebait, and trolls, and advertisements all over the place.
But freedom of speech has much greater implications than some people seem to realize. This is especially so in the information age. Censorship goes against the principles of the internet itself. A medium to supply information. Who gets to choose which information we get to see?
The non-censorship of slashdot is not a government thing, it's an idealist thing. If we, the
To an idealist, the only person who should be allowed to censor what you say is yourself.
Moderation is different, but is from a certain perspective a form of censorship. I'm not condemning it - it's a 'necessary evil' like the only choice people like me had when voting in the poll for ACs. But moderation so far has worked (ok, there is some moderator bias, but c'est la vie). Moderation of posts does not have as much of the so-called 'chilling effect' as would the rating system proposed for the entertainment industries, but it does have one - especially with the 'moderator bias' many people have noted going on here. People with positive views on, say, windows NT may be discouraged from posting because a bias moderator might moderate it down and call it 'flamebait.' I personally believe this is a form of censorship (in the same way that government agencies with an agenda could go after certain movies with this rating system for propeganda purposes).
Anyways, like I said, I agree Rob can do whatever he wants with this site. It is his, but I submit that his strong belief in free speech should apply to all parts of his life, and all his creations - if not for our sake, then for hypocrisy's.
-reptilian
72656B636148206C72655020726568746F6E41207473754A
Sometimes I think that Perens has a starting level of 5. And I just don't understand that. Maybe the moderators worship him unduly.
I really object to my article being called borderline flamebait.
yep. but dont forget that /. has grown in popularity and features on various mags since then. its also got more AOL kiddies coming in and has a direct link from linux.com...cant really go back.
Problem is that this introduces a registration process for ACs. Part of AC is a CYA for Rob: he doesn't know who you are and he can't find out who you are. He can't spill you to the Feds, InterPol, the Black Helicoptors....
An alternative option might be for all AC posts to have to be filtered by a moderator prior to showing up in the general discussion. Only moderators would see unmoderated AC posts. Multiple moderators would be able to vote an AC post in or out, so the system wouldn't be overly susceptible to moderator abuse. The tragedy of the Stevens article would likely have been avoided.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
...slashdot accounts. That's a good idea [not] (and will be what will happen when no A/C's are allowed.... There'll be accounts labelled AC#000001, AC#000002, etc...). Hotmail will bloom with the increase in pointless mail addresses.
This in just certainly NOT the way to go... Don't give MS anymore support... It just doesn't need it!
5 exclamation marks are a sure sign of someone who wears their underpants on their heard, aren't they?
:)
Good one CmdrTaco, keep folks like this above anoymous coward w**ker out!
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
...if the 'Troll' attribute isn't revealed to the moderator, how would they know which posts get tripled and which don't?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Don't real users have real addresses, that is, static ones?
I received my second batch of moderator points today - I noticed it while reading the article regarding trolls and karma points.
;o)
Reading down further and re-reading the moderator guidelines I set my viewing level to -1 and was quite surprised by some of the messages - hardly constructive criticism.
I guess this just goes to show that the karma points and decent moderators are definately needed.
Anyway - I'm going to pop off and read through as much as possible to see if there are any decent comments that I can rate higher.
Take care and post me some decent comments to moderate guys
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
I also get an automatic 2, even though about half of my comments are off-the-cuff comments that really should be 1.
:-)
Here's one solution: give us a choice! The posting form could have a box that gives us the option of posting at 0, 1 (if registered), 2 (if karmic), or 3 (if a demigod; we might as well give Bruce Perens this status!). That way we can knock down casual comments to 1, and responses to assholes all the way down to 0.
As for "demigod", that could be someone with a substantial history of posting well-received material. Demigods should be much easier to identify if users with karma have the ability to self-moderate.
Finally, I don't buy the DoS argument with trolls. Let them post, but give them an exponentially lower default moderation code. E.g., the current trolls would be -2, if they still cause problems they're dropped again -4, and so forth. Or maybe not; some people might find pleasure in seeing how low they can go.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
We've seen, and some have been victim of, certain moderators who take up a campaign against a certain individual. Even interesting, informative, and insightful posts instead receive moderation energy pushing them down to the ranks of the trollers, denying their insight to other readers. I think there is a simple solution to that strain of badness: limit the number of times a single moderator may moderate one other individual down. For example, you may have one person moderated down only once in a certain time period by the same moderator: one moderator cannot carry on a campaign to devaluate one account. In my opinion, this represents an easy way to seal one little crack in the Slashdot foundation.
Anybody else have ideas+/opinions?
Those who keep responding to trolls' postings do as much harm as the trolls themselves.
Uhh.... Now what exaclty are you trying to express... you seem to be confused and have two or three contradictory opinions.
Are you by any change practicing "Doublethink"?
"Freedom is Slavery"
"Two Plus Two is Five"
Everyone should always be able to express their opinion, or *legit opinions* will be able to be labeled as "Trolls", and banned from the system.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Perhaps he make a totally assinine suggestion.
also, this new system could be quite bad for users of the same system, not allowing them to post.
maybe the "troll" status should be computed only if peopl ehave their posts moderated down because of flaimbait, or trolls, not such things as redundant, which would not make a troll. any comments?
-DAVEO
I surf with my threshhold at -1, but with the sort set to "highest scores first", so I see the most moderated posts first, and can be sure to read them, and I can go on and read the lower posts if I want to. So, while I want to see everything, the moderation is still useful to me.
---
END OF LINE
If ya ask me, all user account trolls should have email made public, and the login account disabled. You have just grounds for doing it; anyone willing to make such stupid comments should be held accountable for them.
As for anonymous trolls, just ban more than 1 post every X minutes from every IP. Trolls don't have 20 minutes to post 5 comments... they'll post once, get denied once, and go away. Real comments (at least the useful ones) take more than X minutes to type out, so no problem there. And if a dialup user is assigned an ex-troll's IP, he can wait X minutes for it to clear again.
Just 2 cents from a longtime reader who's getting tired of watching idiots ruin a good thing for everyone...
--
--
Just lurking, thanks!
On a theoretical level I agree with you that trolls should be ignored.
:) )
....
On a more practical level you have to think of a more complicated process of "screening" or "filtering" them.
In the days when human communities we're smaller the power of ostracism was strong enough to deter anti social behaviour (though it also had the distastfull by-product of nomalising behaviour -and this still is more or less still commonplace today).
In today's gobal networked community these community based regulations are a lot less functional expecially on the net we're anonymity is more or less generalized (for good or for bad).
Most of the time I keep a high threshold when I reach comments, but in doing so I also realise that I'm missing out on some good comments, of couse I'm troll and idiot free, but such is life that some times I have a different opinion on what should go up and go down in the ratings dept. and so when I have some time spare I read comments on a low threshold, that is how I read this post.
And so even if I ignore all the posts that I don't want to read I welcome any possibilitly of filtering and more finely screening them, of course if I had a control over the process it would be even better but not have all that much time to do so I'm not complaining (too much
Glad you put a good quote on anarchism in, I restrained earier from doing so not wanting to fill the system with them
I used to have a sig but I left it on a bus
Ok, maybe random ordering would help a bit simply to get stuff moderated. But it doesn't address the psychological impact of seeing hundreds of posts on one topic.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I'd also like this. I've twice had moderation points time out because I didn't see five posts that really screamed out 'moderate me up.' Since I generally only check Slashdot once a day, it's easy to lose nearly half the time before even seeing I'm a moderator.
If entries are sorted by score instead of post time, you'd kill 2 (actually 7) birds with one stone!
1) There'd be no more "First Post" or "Last Post"
2) with high-scorers up top, we won't need to scroll for the really useful or infomative posts
3) the new ordering would make people want to reply to current comments instead of making so many new redundant posts (which would get a low score anyhow)
4) there'd be fewer irrevelant, biased, or offtopic posts b/c their comments would be on the bottom of the page where it is barely noticed.
5) people want others to read their 2 cents. So, if its a really good 0.02, more people will see it cause it is at the top of the list. If not, no one will see it. Thus, people will start putting more thought into their posts.
6) keep ACs. They start with a score of 0 anyhow. If they want to be noticed, they'll have to register
7) to prevent corrupt moderators, make scoring like a ladder system. Allow registered readers to increase the score of their favorite post by 1 point. So, if 10 people really like a post and vote for it, it'll have a total score of 10 (oh yeah, increase scores up to 30 or so)
I swear, this is the ultimate solution. it solves everything!
That's truly an excellent idea. I'm not sure how the categories work right now (is one moderation enough to classify something as funny or insightful or a troll? It probably shouldn't be...) but if two moderators mark something as a troll it should be considered such. -1, -5, -20, whatever. It's a troll. In my user preferences I could mark such checkboxes as 'never show trolls' or 'always show funny'. Perhaps I could also choose to automatically give a boost to insightful or informative articles, while funny ones got demoted, for my personal perusal. My gut tells me that the best solution probably lies in giving each user more control over their own experience.
That said, I should clarify that I do feel that slashdot has the right to take steps to try to keep these forums useful.. in fact, I think they have a responsibility to do so. Bravo CmdrTaco et al, for making some hard decisions.
-- Adam
If censorship is a concern, this allows a way around it. As any poster will take at least a couple of minutes to create an interesting post, this shouldn't be much of a limit to interesting posters. On the other hand, posters interested simply in spamming will end up quite frustrated, because they either have to wait the full 10 min before posting again (making true flood posting take well over an hour), or obtain a new IP address; either way, it's a major inconvienience.
If you penalise trolls, please automatically inflict the penalty on all replies to trolls
This is it. This is what it really is about. Freedom is not just about speech. It's also about having the ability to react, think and interact without restriction, but being responsible for your actions. I you have an opinion on some subject and you aggressively attack someone else about it, then you are the one who did that and the consequences that stem from that are yours not the other person for having a different opinion.
So on with the show. And don't forget the tomatoes.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
just split it up. slashdot is big enough now to be split up in two sites. just randomly put topics on one or the other. one.slashdot.org two.slashdot.org. This solution is scalable to higher numbers and probably may work great, especially when the userbase is compatible with all sites.
I think that is a great idea. But what if you are away from your personal machine and don't remember your password? True anonymous posting should always be available. But I really would like ability to "cloak" my posting. This would also help the people who post with and automatic karma of 2 or higher. By cloaking their identity each post would be set to 1 for comments that were felt to be slightly off-topic.
"I have a cunning plan..."
And what about firewalls? The company I work for has about 20000 people all using the same external IP address.
I think the current moderation system should be reviewed. I would implement it in a completely different fashion.
..) message, you also have to post it early after the news appears and most moderators have not read it.
Instead of giving moderation points to some persons at some times, I think everyone with user accounts should be allowed to moderate all posts. All posts would have a list with 5 possible scores and anyone can select any and submit their vote. Whenever someone does, the comments for the post get sorted again (or you could store the submited information in some temporal files and re-sort the posts every x minutes). The sorting algorithm counts the mean scores of posts with more than x votes.
One of the problems I see with the current moderation system is that posts only get sorted after most people have read them. Another problem is that a message posted at the beginning of a discussion (first posts) get moderated up or down much more than messages posted afterwards. So in order to have your message receive a high score you don't have to write a really good (informative, insightful,
Alejo.
Your observation in the last paragraph is
certainly correct; I used to have a karma
level which put my posts at 2 automaticly,
and so they stopped getting moderated up.
After all, where else (and if you do know please tell), can you see posts threatening grevious bodily harm and strange sexual practices because a recently deceased technical writer apparently did not like a particular OS or scripting language.
/. for serious info is obviously new to the content anyway. I come for the freak show and well worth the computer time it is.
/. /., a little local colour in the community.
It's just FANTASTIC. Talk about lacking a sense of perspective.
I mean, come on, OS's are important up to a point, but death threats?
Having said that, anybody coming to
Can I suggest allowing people to see only posts that have been moderated down below a certain level that way I can ignore all the serious stuff and concentrate on the amusing psycopaths for my thesis.
The psycopaths are all part of what make
But the intelligent threads aren't direct followups to trolls. The first poster gets penalized (maybe the penalty only applies if the post itself is a counter-troll), the rest of the thread is not a direct response to the troll, they are responding to (presumably) slightly more informed discussion. No penalty. Incentive: don't feed trolls, if you must, provide an informed response.
Yes, I've seen a number of trolls generate interesting discussions, but it's usually at a very high S/N cost. See for instance Lewis A. Mettler on open source and security, at Infoworld Electric.
Yes, it ended up producing some intelligent comment, but only at the cost of much, much noise (hundreds of direct posts and thousands of followups). Note Mettler's own followups to my summary and Bob Brewer's (tseliot, mentioned near the top of the link provided). Talk about a one-tune whistle!
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Maybe if you spoke Engish instead of jackass your score wouldn't start at -1.
I do have a couple of criticisms. Actually, the first is not a criticism as such, but a question: Is there a way one can determine one's Karma? It would be nice if you would put that in the personal Slashbox.
The next issue is whether this elaborate scheme is really necessary, or whether you could just weed out denial-of-service posts by hand. I see an opportunity for unpopular opinions (e.g. pro-Windows ones) to get shot down by overzealous moderators, even if they are expressed in a civilized way. I tend to trust your judgment more than the collective judgment of everyone with moderator priveleges, especially since all those people could unite in a mass attack against minority opinions. Maybe we should create a "denial of service" moderation category and count only points in that category against someone's ability to post. I think this would help moderators be more conscientious, and also filter out honest instances of moderators downgrading a post because it is poorly written or thought-out.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
If there were no moderation Slashdot would descend to the singal-to-noise ratio of the more popular parts of Usenet - in other words, just a smidgin above totally unusable. So I strongly approve the proposed changes. I like the idea of Karma; indeed, if I could extend it, I would like readers to be able to assign individual Karma values (so that if I, for example, found adturner's contributions particularly useful I could tweak his karma up and then I would tend to see his contributions more frequently). If this worked then perhaps a person's default karma would be the mean of all that persons individual karma values - in other words, the community would assign karma.
Of course, this would carry with it the risk of people with excessive amounts of non-life setting up large numbers of accounts in order to boost the karma rating of an individual, and also, of course, it's a lot of data to track (but that's what databases are for).
Worth a thought?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
i dont agree. i usually start reading the last posts (oldest) first since theyre more informative. randomizing would screw up the more informative posts and id have to read everything which is almost impossible sometimes.
Decent idea. I can certaintly see where users
would definately think a little more before they
insult and possibly hurt others online. Of course,
this would almost certaintly require the removal
of anonymous posting-either that, or start ac's
with a much lower initial pointcount.
(email at: moeller at dophnic dot myip dot org)
That way, AC trolling will have to be moved to valid accounts, which can then have their karma lowered.
. when in danger or in doubt, run in circles scream and shout --Robert Heinlein
Would it be interesting to do the "collaborative" filtering thing? Those people which have real handles can mark the articles/other handles they like & dislike, then you can do an "Alexis" kind of thing to classify articles are more likely to interest you based on what other people with handles who liked or disliked similar sets of messages (did that make any sense?) This would probably encourage the use of handles, although maybe the processing & keeping track of the data matrix between all the users might be a little more than is practical for the Slashdot equipment.
As others have mentioned, there are times when the ability to post anonymously is necessary (at least for the poster). And creating bogus accounts to do so is a waste of resources.
i disagree. i didn't read the trolls on stephen's obit, and i'm not about to lower my threshold to do so. i've attempted to always use my moderation points to moderate *up*, not down.
stephen's taught a lot of people. he wrote books that were technical and yet you could sense a person on the other side of the pen. i've had the pleasure of reading others like that, but for unix development he was the sole provider of such work. he leaves behind many wonderful and caring people - family, friends, and readers.
we are a community, and we just lost a member. all communities will occasionally have people enter them that don't belong, that won't (for whatever reason) conform to the rules of that society. those people should leave, or be forced to leave. the american indians for example would have been well served by such reasoning.
rob's changes affect five people at most. five people who intended and did inflict a lot of real pain on people. yes people need thick skin online - they also need to attempt to conduct themselves in a decent and respectful way. as one of seven's readers i would hope that no matter what was said about him i'd have a thick enough skin to ignore it. but for his friends and family they'd need armor plating, something that no one online should be required to lug around.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
I fondly recall those days (not all *that* long ago) when Slashdot (almost) resembled 80's Usenet. Clued-in folks knowlegeably discussing the stuff they're interested in.
I would note, however, that many who are here now would see threads like the one you pointed us to as representative of a banal Linux admiration society. Perhaps. But it was a lot more fun then than it is now. I'm still here, so it's still fun, interesting, valuable, etc. It's just that it used to be moreso.
There wasn't much bickering in those days; I think that's what I miss most. But there was still lots of valuable content.
I realize that banning ACs wouldn't make things back the way they were. I don't know that there is an answer. Once something has become as popular as Slashdot is, I'm afraid there's no hope in preserving/restoring its contributors' high quality.
I still wonder if separating comments by user agent and/or OS might not keep some of the sniping down. But, then you'd miss out on good comments by people who are on different platforms than yourself. Maybe if only comments of 2 or better broke the "platform barrier?" Hmmm...
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
This would allow people a choice of setting thier threshold, OR, ignore "Anonymous Coward" or any users that happen to be rubbing them the wrong way.
I agree. Once you start to selectively delete a particular type of comment, you could face situations where:
- you may be pressured to delete other kinds of comments which you may not want to (through threats of whatever nature). ie: you've deleted such-and-such, why not this here?
- You may also find yourself accountable for comments getting through which you said you'd remove.
- you may find yourself in the nasty situation where you are accused of selectively deleting stuff for your own purposes (even if you haven't - just try to prove it).
"Those who don't believe in magic will never find it." - Roald Dahl
- Identity restrains otherwise anonymous posters from posting abusive or pejorative posts because their identity provides them with a reputation that will stay with them for quite a while.
- If a given person is behaving against the standards of the Slashdot community, the problem can be confronted more easily by dealing with the person directly, and not trying to confront a group of faceless ACs.
Tact, Restraint, and Respect are three principles that will need to be considered when posting, else the entire process is unproductive.-------------------------------------------------
I've been reading here for a little bit, courtesy of two former co-workers of mine at Diginexus who introduced me to this.
What I've noticed is that a lot of the posts here are not really news. I have a few of my favorite posters who I look for when reading articles, but I'm seeing a lot of people who apparently have piped the output from their lower intestines to their brains, and then tee'd it to their keyboards.
I can't even read half of the articles here anymore. Between the "linux advocates" who rabidly try to rip apart anything not Linux, even BSD or BeOS, the script kiddies, and the "Let's make a beowulf cluster out of xxx type of hardware", this place is turning into quite a swamp where I have to wade through to find a good post from people I know or like because they are actually intelligent.
What I like to read are discussions about the various issues in technology today. I don't like seeing people get ripped apart because they admit working with microsoft or their products. However, I also cannot stand the rabid "advocacy" from both the pro and anti MS people. Remember how that arrogance and "advocacy" ruined OS/2? People, we're here to use technology to make the world a better place, not for KDE Vs. GNOME wars.
This is a community that is undergoing intense scrutiny. I am seeing slashdot mentioned on CNN, Wired, Microsoft-sponsored publications, Ziff-Davis publications, and by people I meet in the general public. This is ESPECIALLY after the Red Hat IPO.
You know what? People are watching the Linux and techie communities a lot more now. It just so happens a lot of us post to here. And we're looking like a bunch of idiots. Especially to the Microsoft people that read Slashdot who are looking for material to attack Linux with.
Worst off, we're turning off a lot of people that want to explore looking at Linux, BSD, BeOS, or UNIX in general. These people are getting a very negative impression about us because certain people don't discuss like humans. These people are coming away with negative impressions of technology in general, not just *ux or BeOS or MacOS.
I'm sick and tired of reading stories from posters here about Slashdot readers who read stories and react negatively. People read those emails you send cursing them out about using anything Microsoft. And since when did anyone who uses NT or any MS deserve to get ripped apart and cursed at?
Mindcraft had the right idea to post some of those mails on their web site. People here might have not liked it, but it showed us exactly who was doing the posting and what was being posted. And they did the right thing by showing those of us who choose not to curse out people because of their thoughts what the others do. This was something we all needed to see so it could be stopped or slowed down significantly.
The story about what happened to the secretary at Unisys really did make me upset. She did not make that decision, and you people (and you know who you are) really hurt a woman's feelings. How would you feel if that was your mother, sister, girlfriend, friend, or wife? That woman went home very upset. No amount of apologies from Robin Miller could have made up for how she feels. And it made us look like idiots.
The reason why I came here to post was on the recommendations of several very intelligent and nice people I met through real life (Carter Page, Matt Knecht, the guys at Datarealm, among others). I've since long wished that more people were like them on here.
I just can't help but notice how this place is giving an overall negative impression of the Linux community especially, and the tech community in general. Now I'd like to opine on what I think should be done.
Rob, I wish you had more restrictive rules for AC's. They seem to be causing the most issues. I also wish you could block IP's of those really nasty trolls. I'm already filtering words from a large amount of posts because I don't have the time to read the "advocates" who are just looking to abuse others for not thinking like them.
People, we're supposed to use these brains to think, not to discriminate against others just because they use a different OS, windowing system, or processor. You're not helping, you're hurting. And you're spreading your influence far and beyond Slashdot out into the world.
The "Slashdot Effect" means a lot more to me nowadays than thousands of people loading a web site and intelligently discussing it and the merits of the product or people behind it. It means that the people reading the sites, or the posts here, are going to get a torrent of nasty e-mails ripping them apart, attempts to crack their site, insults against their relatives, or general idiocy and ignorance relating to their product, no matter what it is.
I applaud Rob, Hemos, and the rest of the people who put this really cool site together. However, attitudes in general need to change here. This is rapidly turning into a "news for jerks" site.
MBP
Diginexus
Why not give anybody with an account the ability to mark troll/spam. You then set your troll-o-meter to the minimum number of people who have to label a comment as troll before it dissapears for you.
Would work for me.
As much as I dislike the idea it appears the only way to solve this is to disable all anon/no account posting. If still want anon posting then accomplish it much like old (defunct) anon posting service. You post as anon, if anon is abusive and just a troll, yank the account, nuke the messages and go on with your life. Yeah it can be censorship. I tend to think its more like being responsible for what you say. Rob will probably not like this but as he appears to be bound and determined that anyone can post anything and not be held accountable. Which is fine, its his site.
You must not be reading every article closely then... I've noticed that the "linux r00ls" posts almost always get moderated down, while posts that defend Microsoft (for instance) get moderated up - IF they are not flamebait, but are actually saying something.
:)
Thank You Rob! You are doing a great job. I know you can't please all the people all the time, but you sure try hard
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
Moderation points should propogate to the replies
I disagree. As one famous Supreme Court ruling said, the best antidote to bad speech is good speech, not no speech, and sometimes a bad original post prompts an excellent response that teaches the rest of us something valuable. (If nothing else, how to respond to messages like the first!)
If you propogate moderation, many of us would miss the excellent responses. Worse in some ways, it would encourage people to start new threads instead of responding to existing ones lest their comments get lost in a downward moderation.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I'd like very much to see this. Moderating is a power and a privilege, it should come with an accompanying responsibility.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I think it's a bad idea to impose any penalty, even a tiny, purely socal penalty, for referring to yourself in the third person. I saw a flame war almost destroy another, unrelated list over this issue. The "repeat offenders" were people who were required by their beliefs always to refer to themselves in the third person. I don't claim the right to determine someone else's "true self" or "religion," I don't see why a discussion space for (mostly) technology-related issues needs to enforce a position on the appropriateness of third-person speech. If there is a good reason, then (genuine question, no sarcasm intended) what is it?
It blows me away that there are still people who think it is censorship to tell someone else to shut up when they are being offensive or disruptive.
In a forum like Slashdot this is not considered censorship, it is editorial license. Censorship involves prior restraint, keeping someone from saying something in the first place. As has been pointed out, these editorial measures would kick in only after an individual has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be a true troll.
And whats all this about freedom of speech and the First Amendment? It is my understanding that since only the US government is explicitly covered by the First Amendment (and other branches of governement by subsequent interpretation) this isn't really a First Amendment issue. The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech. Unless there has been a special election that I don't know about, Mr. Malda, et al. are not representatives of the government.
This is more along the lines of a living room. The Slashdot guys are nice enough to erect this little electronic living room here and allow us all in to discuss topics of the day. If someone that I'd invited into my house began to foam at the mouth, shout profanities and verbally abuse others, I'd feel no compunction at ejecting them from my house.
I think the Slashdot guys do a tremendous job of keeping this place going and trying to keep the discussion moving forward. I don't think that demanding civility of others and trying to enforce it is too much to ask. As they say about TV, if you don't like what is on, change the channel or turn it off. There is a big web out there. If you really can't abide by some reasonable limits, go build your own Slashdot wanna-be.
If someone's post drops off the end of the karma
scale, perhaps the moderation points that were
spent on suppessing him up to that point could
be returned to their owners.
Alex.
One aspect of the freedom of speech that I think escapes some people is that no one owes anybody else a soapbox. Rob (and to some extent Andover) does not owe the lamers, flamers, and trolls a forum in which they can spew their poison without limit. That they have SOME liberty to do before the system locks them out means that Rob is doing the best that he can to foster quality discussions without shutting them up. If he was an oppressive moderator the trolls would have little or no opportunity at all. Slashdot may be a publically available forum but it is NOT a public forum. Those who run Slashdot have every right to make rules about how it may be used. Trolls can always spout off in unmoderated USENET groups if they don't like it here. They can even buy their own bandwidth and run a website themselves. I'm not sure that preventing postings is the Right Thing To Do but that's up to the Slashdot webmasters.
I'm not confused, but it's just a subject upon which, IMHO, it is *difficult* to define *which* kind of freedom one wants, or what's one definition of freedom. After all, I was giving *my* opinion...
/. and the Net in general to express ourselves freely. But, as Rob expressed it, it's hard to maintain a discussion when a bunch of hyperactive morons keep shouting around you. See what I mean?
/. proves once again, unfortunately, that self-organisation and cooperation ("anarchy") does not work. Blame the human nature? I don't know...
:)
As for the term "anarchy", I was referring to it in the context of the discussion, with the meaning of "my freedom starts where yours stops" (and vice-versa). It is so true here on the Net, where a small number of morons can simply block thousands of people from accessing information and writing their own part of it. If you think flooding a discussion forum is part of your conception of freedom...try IRC.
About what I wrote, and your answers, I was referring to this particular situation (slashdot karma feature, etc.), not to political systems. I don't have the vanity (yet) to pretend knowing *the* ideal form of government (or lack of).
I appreciate (and I hope we all do) the opportunity given to us on
"Everyone should always be able to express their opinion, or *legit opinions* will be able to be labeled as "Trolls", and banned from the system."
Sincerely, I don't think Rob was referring to opinions in general, but to a small bunch of troublemakers. I encourage the posting of opinions (hey, that's what we're here for, personally or technically, huh?), but not what was mentioned in Rob's explanation ("kill Bill Gates" and such).
This sole example of a censorship form here on
I just hope half the world's anarchist-wanabee's won't start spamming me now
max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
This one about Richard Stevens dying
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Answer: NO.
IIRC, many dial-up accounts have dynamic IP allocation. That would just be unfair.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Let me preface this by saying that I am well aware that there has been a fair amount of debate about banning ACs. I am also aware that I haven't paid much attention to this debate, and now I am pretty uninformed as to what the opinions are that are already out there (If someone could point me to a good thread on the topic, that would be cool). With that in mind, here's my thoughts on the AC problem.
As several people have pointed out, there are some problems with the current system. Granted, it does a pretty good job of dealing with trolls who have accounts. However, as several people have pointed out, most of the worst offenders are anonymous, in which case we have to resort to IP-based regulation. This, as several people have pointed out, has its own problems relating to dynamic IPs and so fourth.
Thus, the solution of permitting only people with accounts to post presents itself again. I think this is a very good idea. Here's why:
Studies have shown many times that anonymity has a way of reducing inhibitions. People do things behind a mask that they would never consider doing in broad daylight. Thus, many of the trolls that have been driving everyone so nuts lately probably wouldn't seem that unpleasant if you met them in person. Society imposes many restrictions on behavior which largely hinge on the fact that actions have consequences. If one of these trolls behaved like a troll in the real world, you would quickly find that you have no friends, no life, and your mom has cut off your allowance. Being socially stigmatized is an unbearably unpleasant experience. This can be bad when the stigma is unjustified, as so many of us nerds can attest, but it does impose a certain basic civility on society.
Anonymity short-circuits this whole system. When you're anonymous, you can do whatever you like, and there are no consequences (believe me, getting your messages flamed and moderated down is a bonus, not a consequence). This applies equally well to bathroom walls, prank phone calls, and Slashdot posts. The problem with the internet is that it makes it very easy to be anonymous and loud at the same time, and so the system of civility breaks on a larger scale than ever before.
If you had to have an account on Slashdot to post, this problem would go away fast, whether there were enforcement systems or not. The simple fact of having their masks ripped off would stop 75% of the trolls before they start. Unfortunately, the account still provides a certain degree of anonymity, and so we have enforcement systems to deal with the remaining 25%. Once we have accounts, enforcement by a variety of methods would be easy.
My favorite solution is the digital analog of people ignoring real-world trolls. There ought to be an option whereby I could have all posts from a specific account removed from my comment display, much like I can currently not see postings from Jon Katz if I so desire. Thus, if I get fed up with a particular troll, I can get him out of my face in a completely harmless way. Of course, some people will use this to ignore other people who have legitimate opinions that differ from their own. So what? If people want to be close-minded, let them. The nice thing is that it uses the absence of anonymity the way it's supposed to be used: to allow us to make our own personal choices about who we listen to. This approach hinges on the removal of AC posts.
There are, of course, a few valid reasons for anonymous postings. These constitute 1% (if that) of the anonymous postings on Slashdot right now. However, there are ways of implementing anonymity within the system, so that a person with an account can can make a posting that nobody but the system recognizes as hers. It still counts towards her Karma, and it's still subject to whatever enforcement systems exist (except perhaps the auto-ignore described above), but it permits her to be anonymous as far has her readers are concerned. My own thought is that perhaps one could buy an anonymous posting with some of your Karma (say, 2-3 points), thus ensuring that people only used anonymity when it was genuinely important. In other words, anonymity becomes something that you earn through good citizenship (and I think Karma is a pretty sensible measure of citizenship). In this context, anonymity could become a way to break through the auto-ignore and be heard by the people ignoring you- but it would only be worth using if you really had something worth saying.
Anyway, that's my $2E-2. Comments and criticisms are welcome, flames will be taken to heart and left to fester in what's left of my self-esteem.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" -Salvor Hardin
First of all, limiting things by IP is not always the best solution. I would hazard a guess to say that 80%+ of all /. readers use dynamic IPs. Not to mention the significant portion of folks who access the site from behind a firewall. With dynamic IPs, its possible for someone to get screwed just because they are on the same ISP as a troll, for instance.
/. staff), would know who posted.
Secondly, I personally do not like the idea of AC posts in the first place. I understand the ideas behind it, but I grew up around FidoNet, which in its heyday frowned on that sort of thing. OTOH, AC posts can be as much of a benefit as a detriment...I understand that.
So I would recommend putting together a system that limits the number of AC posts either by some sort of quota system or (and I contradict myself here) by limiting AC posts to one per IP, per discussion. Period.
Yet another idea would be to make ACs register, but opt to make their posts show up as ACs. This would force ACs to register, thus reducing the amount of abuse. This system worked well in the BBS days, IMHO. You could have anonymous posts, but only the sysop (in this case the
Just my $0.02.
My journal has hot
Might also pay to make habitual troll-respondants subject to the same penalties as trolls themselves -- negative kharma.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I realize that censorship is a bad word for many people. However, there are bounds of human decency that one should not cross. Not all stories are created equal. Those dealing with people are prone to greater abuse and hurtfulness, and therefore need to be dealt with accordingly.
Ironically, I'm watching a PBS show featuring a round-table discussion about the Internet while I writing this (pre-emptive multitasking).
BTW, banning AC's may not have completely solved last night's problem. The idiots would just keep creating new login accounts.
It's been possible to start at 0 after posting a lot of bad comments for a while. The new rule makes it so that you can start at -1 after posting even more bad comments. Honestly, anyone who posts that many bad comments deserves it.
Upsilon
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
I think an easy solution, would to put a SIZE limit on your post, sure some ligit posters would be cut off, but think about it in general, get to the point and thats it, AND give moderators more moderation points. If anything, add a size limit regardless of other tactics you use.
Along the lines of teaching people not to respond to trolls: How about a "The Slashdot community discourages replying to Troll's (as anything you say only encourages them). Are you sure you want to post this reply?" message that pops up when someone clicks on the "Reply to this" on an article that has been marked "Troll". This might give many people pause and stop much wasted discussion and thought for trolls, but it would also allow those people who thought they _really_ needed to respond to the troll to do so, thereby not limiting free speech.
This is for thoes of you that have karma:
:)
What about adding an option to the posting page in which if a users has karma, they can elect to post at a +2 or at a +1. I know that some users just want to blurt some things out sometimes, when other times they have a detailed message that is worth their karma. Obviously this would not go the other way for negative karma users.
Posibly thoes coments that are without karma could not be counted towards future karma(i.e. posting a joke at 1 that gets demoted to 0 would not hurt the user with karma but demoted to -1 would) Or make the karma a pool of allocateable +1's that can be added to that particular users comments as they choose.
Your thoughts please.
ClarkBar
Just because someone has a lack of proper grammer/spelling abilities doesnt make them a troll. Maybe there should be a 'Spelling/Punctuation/Grammer' score to go with the moderation score. Anyone who manages to get themselves down to -1 should be sent a friendly email with some URL's where they can improve thier english =).
Nick
Nick
I must have that the last three BSD related discussions were a noble exception and not as bad as usual. But I doubt that slashdot can keep this level.
And: No, I don't want to troll you.
I'm just dissapointed to see the same FUD from some linux advocates or BSD-haters in every BSD related discussion over and over again.
And please don't look only at the few 3-5 score postings, look at what does and what does not get moderated down.
I'm not sure what you are getting at here...If you don't want to see all the trolls, then surf at threshhold 1, if you _do_ want to see everything...well then you all this moderation stuff is useless for you....
:) and then give them >>unlimited moderator points
>>I also think one of the best things that we >>could do would be to remove the 'automatic' >>moderators.Instead, moderators should be hand >>picked based on there posts by Commander Taco, >>or Hemos or someone. Or me
...that prolly wouldn't work so well....that would mean that there are _a lot_ less moderators, and they would have to do a whole lot of work...right now, with so many moderators it works out so each person doesn't have to do too much.
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
perhaps we could be allowed to lower our karama too, so that if someone has a really high karama of like 3 they could lower it down to 1 so that their comments would blend in with everyone elses. I mean just because you posted good comments before and this time you post a "me too" comment doesn't mean you should get a 3 rating automatically. Of coarse your karma would automatically go down, you wouldn't be able to control that, but at least you could keep it from getting too high.
char *stupidsig = "this is my dumb sig";
Under the 1st amendment, one is free to say anything one wants. That doesn't mean I have to listen to you.
I generally browse Slashdot at +2, with highly-moderated posts sorted at the top. I find that when I bother to look below +2, I find much less worth reading. Sure, there's the occasional overlooked post that really should be moderated up, but generally, especially with a day-old discussion, the good stuff has been noticed.
One of the wonderful things about /. is that the "censorship" really tends to be more on style than on opinions. I see plenty of posts which express alternate opinions than the "community norm" moderated up -- but those posts tend to be well-written and polite. The post to which I am replying ("Another nail in the coffin of free speech") is a perfect example of this.
/.
If you want to be listened to, then express your opinions politely and with respect for your opponents as well as for your friends. If you want to be an asshole, don't expect to be listened to. This goes for all of life, not just
Adam
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
I agree with you, and enjoy even much the good conversation.
:)
As for the filtering, I keep a low threshold *but* I'm a fast reader *and* nobody *forces* me to read everything... That's freedom! And also self-censorship... but our brains do it all the time to prevent overheating, huh?
Glad I didn't get flamed...
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
The only problem with this is that is assumes the vast majority of people are sapient.
Most people won't understand the message, and it will just hack off ISPs.
Besides, most trolls are AC's, and therefor you can only filter them via IP, which is bad, because most AC's are on dynamic IP of some sort, and therefor you could hurt somebody else.
I think that Rob is choosing the best of a bad set of paths. The only real solution is to crank up your comment level to 1 or more, and let the trolls yell into a barrel until they lose their voices. The same solution as on UselessNet.
Don't answer these sub-sapients. Ignore them, and get on with life. Don't waste your points on moderating them down, just leave them at 0 where they belong, and don't read 0 level posts.
www.eFax.com are spammers
(flame retardant on)
There is no such thing as complete "freedom of speech". Something is going to always offend someone or another. That's the flaw in the system. That's why things considered "obscene" are illegal in the US. But trolls are definitely obscene.
I say go with full moderation. Read it and delete it if it's inappropriate. I think the moderators are smart enough (I hope) to distinguish between logical, thought out posts, and trolls. Well, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't consider it censorship. I consider it filtration to give us the good stuff while letting the bad stuff sink.
All good message boards I've been to are moderated in this manner. They are all read before it's posted. It's a little slower but the board has a tendency to be more intelligent and clean compared to the non-moderated boards. (In fact I avoid unmoderated boards like a plague) CmdrTaco, if you're reading this, understand that this is YOUR board, and I don't believe anyone should have the right to DOS it to ruin it for you and the other people who come here to input/gain informations and insights.
My 0.02.
"Eat it Zok, Eat it!"
Perhaps one's karma should be based on the points accumulated after the initial level. That way a +2 person only gets karma points for +3 above.
Elsewhere there has been comments about daveo. I too support the effort to get daveo back to the +1 level. Then again, I am also a person who really misses MEEPT.
Off-topic: I'm also watching TV right now. I just saw a Miller-Lite commercial with Norm McDonald (sp?) and Marc Anderssen (sp?). Lot's of bad dot.com puns.
First, I would hate to see the AC posts disappear. In some threads, Anonymous Coward is the most informed poster. Not often, but not that rare.
Second, there needs to be some way to nullify the obscene drivel of the AC posting and reposting and reposting to W. Richard Stevens Passes On. -1 is good for flame wars and off-topic stuff. That drivel (all from the same AC, seems like) needs a lower level, something like -5.
From the standpoint of the reader or lurker, a default level of 0 seems appropriate.
1. Level -5 for rude, profane, obnoxious posts.
2. Level -1 for First Post, Meept, Flame-Bait, Off-topic, Flame-wars, etc.
3. Level 0 Unmoderated AC posts.
4. Level 1 Unmoderated non-AC posts without karma.
5. Level 2 Unmoderated non-AC posts with good karma or posts that have been moderated up to 2+.
6. Level 3 Unmoderated non-AC posts with great karma or posts that have been moderated up to 3+.
Options posting.
If good karma, option to post it at 2, 1, 0, -1.
Possibly option to demote both self and the post you are answering.
If standard karma, option to post at 1, 0, -1.
If AC, option to post at 0, -1
This way, if you just cannot let the flamebait stand answered, you can keep the subthread below the level of readers who do not wish to see such.
Moderators:
1. Ability to -5 posts that are offensive, without losing moderator points. Abuse of this privilidge should mean permanent loss of moderator status.
2. Possibly keep separate counts of plus and minus moderator points.
Personally, I think "funny" should definitely count to positive karma. Quite often, especially in the terser and deeper discussions, someone is needed to prick other people's bubbles, or to otherwise alleviate the tension.
/. an interesting place to be. Or don't you agree that being funny is important? :)
If someone's just being cruel, or taking cheap shots, then maybe they shouldn't be given a higher rating. Or maybe they should -- isn't that why we have moderators?
Being funny has its place, along with being informative, or being insightful, in making
If, say, tree different moderators decide to moderate a post down, they get back the moderation point they used.
:-) so they would stand out for other moderators. Once a post has been bombed by 3 or 5 (or whatever) moderators it goes away... Bombing a post wouldn't cost points, but it wouldn't affect the score either. That way, anything less than a quorum of moderators won't be able to eliminate posts indiscriminantly.
This is almost exactly like an idea I had. I would propose that moderators have a checkbox next to every post to bomb it. Posts which have been marked 'bomb' would have a distinguishing icon (like a mushroom cloud
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
From his posting history it looks to me as if his posts are usually ether pointless or helpful, not flames.
Sure he talks in third person but many people talk a heck of a lot worse then that and they don't get scored down.
Talking different doesn't make you a troll. Calling somebody a jackass does.
My sympathies, Bob. It's clear you've put a lot of thought into this, and a lot of angst. It's really too bad, but kind of unavoidable if slashdot is to remain a useful forum. Most of us have seen the sad state of Usenet newsgroups these days.
I'm curious -- what was that recent troll? Obviously, I missed it. I'm not asking for full details, but just a sense of what happened, whether it was something libelous, a glut of off-topic comments, or what.
If it's still around perhaps someone can point me to it.
Agreed. First posters should be slaughtered on sight. Or at least a moderator should be able to assign such a poster a -1 karma point for the next two weeks. And if it's an AC who does a First Post, it should automatically go -1 just for that. Of course ... then you couldn't read this, cause I'm on vacation (just back from New Orleans, cherie, and at mon frere's in Santa Barbara) and I FORGOT MY PASSWORD! Will in Seattle (ok, well, I live there ...)
I asked Daveo about his grammar errors, and he had a pretty good explanation for it. Basically, when he was being raised, his mom had this annoying habit of referring to everyone (herself and him) in the third person, and this kinda mucked up his grammar (though I somehow don't think that's the whole story). In any case, apparently he's seeing a speech therapist about it these days, and I've noticed a marked improvement in his grammar as of late. Hopefully this trend will continue. Daveo appears to be, if nothing else, a good person, who just appears to be an idiot due to unfortunate circumstances.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Rob, how about blocking ACs and new-account postings by thread? So that normally ACs can post, but certain threads are protected.
This takes into account the fact that there's a huge difference between the annoying ('MS/Linux/Apple sux/rools' posts) and the utterly vile (saying someone deserved to die in a memorial thread that their children are reading.)
So that blocked ACs just didn't create new accounts, you'd want to block new accounts as well, perhaps ones 24 hours and less old. This isn't a completely great solution, as there were some excellent AC posts in the Stevens thread along with those two horrible trolls, but the idea that Stevens' son might have come across some of that stuff just by innocently reading at 0... shudder.
Well maybe two. Have the Karma bit be a funtion of how long someone has been a reader of /. . Most of us who have been on public forums for awhile know of the "anonymous rush" where people get all goofy and maniac because they are able to project their thoughts electronically. The agedness factor could be determined by the originating date of the IP/ID. It's definitly a complex problem. The bad stuff the other day was most likely the product of a few. I imagine it will pass as people relearn Netiquet and some of our younger /. readers mature a bit. I think it will pass. Kind of like the cocky l33t folks mellow out after awhile on IRC. If it doesn't pass..I'll blame it on TV and the ad execs who are hell-bent to warp kids into becoming good little consumeroids(which has become a science BTW). People can be complex and illogical beasts. I'm glad I'm an alien and don't have to worry about these things. I still have to chuckle about how CNN *still* quotes AC's as if they still think it's *one* person! LOL.
But squirrels are unreliable, and can't cross the street to save their lives (heh). What /. really needs is a gigantic Perl brain that understands the spirit of the site and pre-moderates the most obvious offensive flamebait trolling crap that bubbles across the wire. It could read every comment and filter out maybe 75% of the worst ugly trash, and leave the rest to the moderators.
C'mon Rob, IRC is full of bot-brains that do this sort of thing (albeit on a much smaller scale), and we all know that Perl is well suited to the task. Think about it, it could run on it's own dedicated machine, have a cool name, and develop its own personality over the years. It's a great project and would be fun to do, and everybody who is qualified would lend a hand, I'm sure.
Start Today!
--
And yes it is censorship. Censorship by definition is not limited to the government- any organization or individual can censor others if they have the power to stop their speech. The second "feature" that Rob has coded is definately censorship as it allows moderators to deny any account or IP the ability to post.
Now, we can argue if the troller has the right to post or is it just a privalege that Rob/Andover grants people. If /. wishes to make posting a privalage rather than a right that is their right, but everyone needs to be aware that this is censorship.
What about making ACs log in as AC and accept a session cookie to post? Valid expired AC session cookies could re-enable later AC access with a cookie exchange, you'd still have anonymous posting, but you'd also have a mechanism that would link multiple posts to a single AC in most instances. Anyone who was moderated down into slashdork status could be redirected to a "behave yourself" page if they still presented the same cookie. Multiple logins from the same IP as an AC within a timeframe could be slowed down like password timeouts to catch scripters - threshold settable per IP even.
http://www.pauldrobertson.com
why not allow only a certian number of anonymous posts for a given period of time? or perhaps only one anon post from a given ip for a given amount of time. i'm thinking of like 8-12 minutes here, long enough for someone to read what others have written and write a response, but enough of a delay for some angry little kid to cool down and vent his anger on a sibling or something (jake@underworld.net, no /. account right now)
I know im being a bitch now but the actual quote was
"Opinions are like assholes, everyone's got em but nobody gives a fuck about anyone else's"
Like alot of the people who feel so strongly about this subject, I've been visiting /. for a long time. I've seen the quality of posts deteriorate and I totally approve of the moderation system. The only thing I have a problem with is the fact that moderators can't post and moderate in the same thread. I think this is kind of self-defeating to /. because it prevents the very people who should be posting in a thread from posting. If I have to make a choice between moderating down a childish, derogatory, flamebait post and posting a comment of my own, I'll choose moderation every time. Why? Because there ARE alot of good posts on /. but I feel that the bad posts are more detrimental to 'the cause' than the good posts are helping us. This is supposed to be a forum for technical, reasonable and informed discussion. /. was never intended to be a voice for every bitch and whine that each individual has. I believe in Free Speech but just as Americans don't have the right to threaten the President's life or slander someone and cause them damage, I feel that Slashdotters don't have the right to intentionally damage the credibility of Slashdot and public forums in general.
I really hope that this situation resolves itself, but it didn't for Mac wierdos and it didn't for crazy Amiga fanatics. I just hope we don't start alientating and 'turning off' the very people we are trying to bring 'into the fold'.
These holy wars ("holy wares" - Freudian typo?) have been around as long as, ooh, as long as the jargon dictionary can remember. It's unlikely that /. will ever be immune, in the same way that IRC/bulletin boards/USENET/any given mailing list/a meeting of bofhs will never be truly immune.
Oh, by the way: use emacs. Or joe if you have to.
Maybe this has been discussed and discarded, but is it possible to replace the Anonymous Coward with an account that has a unique name but no other identifying information? Set it up so that you could trace the history of posts by a particular person, or tell whether two posts were by the same person, but not tell who that person was? I would think this would make it easier to track the trolls and score down their posts without interfering with people who legitimately need anonymity.
Possible precautions:
"Until we as a society learn that we don't really want the government/media to protect us from ourselves, we're doomed as a nation to greater losses of freedoms. By /. advocating censorship, that's just one more nail in the freedom coffin."
Censorship in and of itself is not a bad thing. We all do it. How many of us use an answering machine to filter out the calls we don't want, or immediately trash any junk and mass-market snail mail? We all filter information. Even the most open-minded of the media do it, otherwise our morning papers would be three feet thick!
Censorship by a government is a bad thing. These are people who can't even run their own lives but try to run ours, and with our tax money to boot. It's an instance of our "rulers" determining what we see.
However, if slashdot deletes posts, that is a completely different thing. Slashdot is not the government. Unlike a government, when it deletes a post it is not eliminated from all other internet and real world outlets.
I don't own slashdot. You don't own slashdot. Only slashdot has any rights whatsoever in determining what gets posted and what doesn't. This affects nobody's freedoms. You have no rights to slashdot, just as nobody but you have rights to your website.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to speak. Freedom of the press includes the freedom not to publish.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
[Submit] on this one pushed at 2:33.
Umm...how is that constructive, or for that matter, productive? Just seems like a way of scareing (sp?) off those who don't follow the party line. /. has jumped off the deep end into the USENET pool, but attacking ISPs is not going to win people over. Plus, if these attacks are traced back to /. in some way, then it's Rob and Andover that are going to pay, which only screws /. over even more.
That's why my threshold is usually=-1.
I whish it would be the default for an AC like me...
Three Ideas:
1. Weight different comments differently. IE. a relevent = +2 while a troll = -2.
2. Only use positive scoring with ID's; Your initial comment ranking is a result of the ranking of your previous comment rankings. Moderators would be responsible for browsing at the lowest levels to see if there are any decent AC posts for good posts from new users.
3. A more stable group of moderators could be used. Assign longer moderator terms to those who demostrate good judgement when moderating.
Just a couple of ideas...
J:)
Oh well, no point in steering now.
I think that most spammers have enough sense not to mess with Slashdotters. If we all simply went to their website (/. effect), they'd be toast. Imagine if 5% of us those that read their post decided to ping flood 'em?
Well, that can be said of any "fringe" group. People with "damaged psyches" tend to feel more outside of the mainstream. However, because of our strong social need for groups and networks of social support, these people tend to be attracted to groups which are, themselves, outside the mainstream. You know, I'm a rebel, just like all the others? Of course, we tend to feel that once we're in the group that we're okay, we don't need help, we're not psychos: how could we be part of a group like this and be psycho? Groups are comforting and powerfully healing as well as potentially powerfully misleading. Case in point: witness the attraction of cults.
And I'm sure some of the people out here who need mental help are getting it (I know I am). But that's not my point. My point is, just because some people could use some mental help, should their opinions be disregarded or deemed trash? I would say, rather, that the pseudo-trollers (those who post flamebait not to watch the fireworks but because of conviction) need not mental help, but rather the space to grow up. During that time, I'm not saying they should be coddled, as that will not encourage aforementioned growing up. I'd just as soon ignore the psuedo-trollers as the trollers. In the latter case to deprive them of their vaunted power of creating havoc, and in the former case because when children seek attention, they don't differentiate between 'good' attention or 'bad' attention, and so only learn to change their behaviour through the (to the child's mindframe) horrifying response of no attention. Yes, it's slightly harsh, but it's a lot better, also for the child to learn it on their own by figuring out that everyone's ignoring them when they say inappropriate things than by being put down all the time for them and thus feeling defensive and justified.
But please, don't assume that they need mental help or that, even worse, those who need mental help are incapable of contributing intelligently to these forums. To do so is to fall into the stereotypes Western society has set up in recent times. I find that people with "damaged psyches" tend to have a better insight into how the world works, as they've more empathy.
getting off the soapbox... :)
Droit devant soi on ne peut pas aller bien loin...
Droit devant soi on ne peut pas aller bien loin...
Straight ahead of him, nobody can go very far... -- Le P
I don't quite think it should be and. I think that if they are posting as a non AC the account should be banned and if they are posting as an AC the IP should be banned only for AC's.
There seems to be people of all mental tints commenting on this thread: people who want serious info, people who want to laugh at funny posts, and people who want to laugh at trolls (amongst others, but these were the ones that caught my attention). I propose that each user be allowed to choose for himself what a positive trait is, and what a negative trait is.
In the User Preferences, have a list of every moderation point (Insightful, Informative, Funny, Flamebait, Troll, etc). Next to each one, let the user pick whether the moderation point should be worth -1, 0, or 1 points to the moderation total.
This way, people who only want "intelligent" posts can mark Funny, Troll, etc as -1, and have Insightful/Informative and friends marked as 1. People who only want to read the rantings of the broken people can do the opposite, if they wish.
Well, that's just my 3CA3D70A.
-Joe
I think that it is important to be able to post as an anonymous coward. People shouldn't have to reveal part of their identity to make a comment. Even if it is only their nick name.
By allowing AC's to post comments, it frees up the person to post thoughts on a discussion without first worrying "what if someone I know reads this", and then "what will they do to me.?"...
I don't know if this is paranoid, but it is important to me at least to have the AC posting ability...
All the other posts regarding moderating anonymous cowards such as myself down are well thought out with one little problem. I have an account, but the cookie never worked right, so I mostly just anonymous coward stuff. I therefore read as anonymous coward, with the default AC filter. Seems to me that filter will need some kind of "don't show the trolls to prevent AOL 'ME TOO!' syndrome" code in it. What does that do to your ideas? All it takes is one schmuck with an account to tag any really interesting AC posts as trolls and I can't see 'em! Mija Cat
The subject of Trollers on Slashdot is a different story, however. This is not a country, it's a web site / community, whatever. No one has a "right" to post to Slashdot, but since it's a "community" that is in theory being developed here, everyone should have input as to how they would like /. to be. Here's mine:
I think the current solution to the Troll problem goes a bit too far. I think the ideal solution would have the following properties:
1. Allow anyone to post (yes, even Trolls)
2. Allow the anyone to choose not to see the Trolls.
I went back and looked at the posts that probably started this whole thing. The Trollers were not interested in Linux, Pearl, or whatever else: they wanted to inflame. Some people get off on that. But I think it would be best for everyone if Trollers (and the people who find it necessary to respond to them) have their space. People not interested in those games, do not have to be involved. More moderation options would take care of that. Trollers at other times may post interesting material. So preventing them from posting seems bad, other than in exceptional circumstances (such as overloading the server. The same goes for AC posts (Plenty of people have spoken more eloquently than I could about why anonymous access is valueable and why posts should not be deleted outright).
Thus, in the end, I would recommend that Slashdot admins allow Trollers to have their space, and everyone else their space, and let's make it easy for people to separate the TrollSpace from DiscussionSpace. Let's be an inclusive community, rather than exlusive one, even to people who annoy us.
And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another -Hesse
But that leads back to only account holders can post, in which case I couldn't piss in your corn flakes or pat you on the back quite as easily. Mija Cat
<RANT>
What I do not agree with, is what is moderated. Too often I see technical posts moderated down, and jokes moderated up. This is not "Slashdot: Comedy for Nerds." This is "Slashdot: News for Nerds." I want to learn, so I want to read posts from professional tech people. If I want to laugh, I'll listen to a professional comedian.
</RANT
An automated signal-to-noise ratio should take care of meaningless posts.
We need more moderator points all right. For example, I normally read at threshold 2, otherwise I'd never be able to get through all the articles I'm interested in in a reasonable time, and when I moderate I typically read an entire article in flat mode with threshold of 0 or 1, looking for articles to promote (and occasionally demoting a troll). Even for a single article this takes a significant amount of time, and I *never* seem to have quite enough points to do the job, which for me, mainly consists of moderating up enough articles so that people like me can read the way I do. I'd say a doubling would do the trick, and leave a few points over for troll-hunting. I really don't care how *often* the points show up as long as it's not so often that moderating time starts getting taken out of reading and contributing time.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
For moderating, how about:
Even on the Internet, freedom of speech doesn't include the right to spraypaint on public buildings, even if it's valid political speech. Slashdot abusers are vandals IMAO.
I'm surprised that you call it a knee-jerk reaction. It seems to me that Mr. Malda has agaonized over this decision, and probably continues to agonize over it.
/. with these changes. And I would caution others not to rush to judgment on this one. Only that would be a knee-jerk reaction.
The "open forum" philosophy has not been damaged at
MY OPINION SECTION CmdrTaco, I recognize that this was hard. I recognize that this was a problem. However, wouldn't it have been sufficient just to add the nifty karma feature, extend the negatives, and leave people to adjust their thresholds? That is, after all, why the thresholds exist. Completely censoring people is, frankly, antithetical to the spirit of /., as I see it. MY RAVING SECTION People! Please read the story and, before you post, think if it might apply to you. The second comment was bona fide trollish behavior. I'm sure that there is a help group out there for the irony impaired.
Restrict the # of comments any single IP/Account is allowed to make in a single article. This gets problematic: anyone have a good idea on how to make this fair, that will scale from 1 comment to a thousand?
The fairest way I can imagine would be first, to resist anyone with a low alignment -1 to maby only a handful of first level comments. Also replies within a thread should be limited only by who its in reply too. For instance you should only make maby 3 or 4 direct comments within an individual tree branch. No that doesn't make sense either, basically you should be able to indefinatly continue a thread, for instance if someone replies to something I should be able to reply to that then reply to my replies to reply to other peoples replies. But one should be limited on how many comments he/she can make 1 step down from a specific comment. Give them 3 or 4 mainly in case they forgot a point they where trying to make or correcting typos exedera, but if someone makes a comment on thier comment they automaticaly would want to be able to comment on that. I know I didn't make myself very clear, but its harder to explain, than it would be to program.
I would like to suggest a simpler system. Review past modarators actions and pick those who have the best record, Mostly postive, No signs of bias, etc. Offer these people a chance to become permanant modarators, With only negative points. They wouldn't lose thier chance to become regular modarators also. Give them unlimited negative points and let them kill the trolls. Any signs of bias or misuse would result in loss of modarator status. Then the regular modarators could do thier job without wasting points on idiots.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
That idea sucks. I browse at -1 because I want to decide for myself what to read. I'm fine with moderation as long as I'm not forced to accept the moderation but deleting posts is really bad.
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
Since nearly all of the comments here are by ACs I'm guessing Rob is right. This won't help in the long run. In a way, it is a compliment. It shows how popular Shashdot is. You must be doing something right if all these people want to waste hours waiting for things like first post.
Why can't slashdot readers moderate themselves? Put a rating system in for each message and allow the readers to rate the messages if they cared to. Also, a reader's own rating(based on the ratings of his or her previous posts) could determine how much weight his or her rating carried.
Foogle> This new rule hadn't been implemented then
You've misidentified the new rule. For several months, the rule was that a poster with karma of -10 or below is given a default score of zero. The new rule (which leaves the old rule intact) is that a poster with karma of -20 or below is given a default posting score of -1.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Actually, if you look at his User Info, you will see that he starts off with a 2, like all other "good karma" posters.
There may a certain amount of moderator worship for him, but I did see one of his posts moderated down once (and left that way) to a 1, as "flamebait."
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Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
I have to say this is a good idea, but does this apply to 'accounts' only, or does this system include ACs (based on IP)? Most of the "trolls" I've seen are ACs, and if they have dynamic IPs, this won't do any good.
A few ideas...
Personal settings re other people's posts. Perhaps John Katz bugs me, then I could give his posts a -1 on top of any other points he may get, or if I really liked his usual posts, I could give them a +1 or +2 so that they'd float to the top. This would be sort of like
(On a practical note, few users would use this, and only vs a few other users, so it's not a matter of storing 80k x 80k of settings.)
Instead of having 'Funny +1', perhaps we could seperate the descriptors and the points. Some funny posts are inapproptiately funny and some point out a good point with humor, so for funny to always be a +1 isn't always right. Also, if keywords were seperate it'd be easier to display a list of all the keywords for a message (funny, insightful, etc) which would aid in a filter for inc/excluding posts by keyword.
Also, don't think that the whole point of this moderation is to censor people whose opinions are unpopular. It's also to chop down the number of messages that we have to read. Preferably by selecting those messages which are 'best' by our and community standards.
We also need a way for messages to influence threads they're in. If someone posts a message and then the reply to it is +5, then the original post is probably relevant. This would work better by moderating parent posts up, but not down. (Don't hide a parent because the reply is -1, but do show a 0 post if it generated high scoring replies.)
Brilliant. Scare off all dissenters with threats of violence against their systems. Of course, considering the number of death threats that result from /. discussions, this fits in perfectly with the mindset of many /.'ers. And would likely end up getting /. labelled as a cyberterrorist hang-out if people did start attacking ISPs of posters they disagree with.
Well, please don't troll, "first post" or flamebait at all.
Maybe we need a few more moderation points. Slashdot is growing and growing, and I don't think the number of eligible moderators is keeping up.
;)
I'd say "Let us keep our moderation points for longer than 3 days", since I often see nothing worth moderating during the 3 days I have my points, and end up either not using them, or wasting them on moderating down some childish post. I know that this will cause abuse, but I'll waste a paragraph on the idea anyway.
Maybe we could be issued a few more points, or be allowed to keep them for a few more days...
Yes, there should be a core group of moderators whose specific task is to demote trolls, with an unlimited budget for demotion. These people should be trusted and permanent, have lots of free time, and, importantly, should have the same limited budget for promotion as any other moderator. These people would be our firemen - they're there for the specific purpose of putting out fiers.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I work for a company that does NAT for all the private IPs with a unique internet IP. So if people there messes with slashdot I'd get a "-n" in my posts? Is this fair?
Part of what makes Slashdot Slashdot is that it's a community. Once you have Andover (no matter how cool or smart they are) behaving as full time moderators, you've taken the power from the community and placed it outside of our hands.
Though I sometimes don't agree with what moderators do to posts, I usually feel comfortable enough to browse at 0... the -1's usually trully are flame bait and such... I find it amusing when I post something, put clearly in the subject field that "This is Flamebait", ramble about something stupid, and then see the comment moderated up and spawning a whole new discussion thread!
My two cents are that:
1 - Moderators should get more points - I often don't moderate comments down because I feel my points would be better served highlighting the more insiteful comments than by filtering out people... With more points, I would feel more tempted to help point out the trolls.
2 - Posters of comments should be allowed (at least registered ones) to moderate themselves (just so you can see what they're thinking - I could moderate myself as offtopic, just so people would know that's what they're getting into). Don't have that posters moderation change the point total, just use it for a "mood"
3 - we need more categories for moderation
4 - allow more people to moderate at a time... Again, I tend to hold onto my points for a couple of days, hoping an interesting article gets posted, rather than getting drawn into an Apple vs Linux, or Redhat vs. Debian, or everyone vs. microsoft discussion. Having more active moderators with more points would definitely weed out the trolls and polish the gems.
5 - People who are consistently moderated down probably should start at 0... Don't make them go any lower than that, but rather send an automatic email to their account as a warning, and then discontinue their account... They can then sign up again with the same login, just make it a tad bit more difficult for people who abuse the system.
What?
it appears that daveo is 1 of only the 2 accounts which is moderated down to -1 by default. this is certainly not fair. why cant people look at the posting history? there has never been a single flame or troll from daveo. look at the posts in the history. all are somewhat insightful (if not gramatically correct, true apologies for this), real opinions, and at the very least not intended to bother any one, but to add to the conversation. can this system work? we must see, but if someone who has no bad intentions is one of two -1 accounts, it is not starting off well at all.
-DAVEO
> posts at an automatic 2, I certainly have to
> agree. There are many times when I've posted
> something off-the-cuff that I've wished I
> could specify that it should be with a score of 1.
As another "+2 karma" poster, let me just say "me too", for precisely the same reasons.
More specifically, I propose that - at the time of posting - the poster of an article ought to have:
(a) his or her karma score displayed on the "post comment" form
(b) a pull-down option to select whether the post should be posted with a score of -1, 0, 1, or 2.
As for the issue of whether or not ACs should be allowed to post, IMHO they should. While there are many trolls and abuses of this privilege, there are also benefits. I find myself reading crypto/NSA/spooky posts and science posts at level 0, largely because in the case of the former, people with clue may also have a reason to want to post anonymously, and in the case of the latter, those with clue may not post frequently enough to Slashdot to justify the trouble of registering with the site. When it comes to astronomy, I'd much rather read the AC post at 0 from the Ph.D. in Astrophysics debunking the 5-10 registered posters at +1 who have no idea what they're talking about.
> SUCK IT!!!!!!!
Well done - you just justified Rob's decision entirely.
There is also the oppsitie extreme also, what about modem users who usually receive a new IP address every time they logon? Someone can set up more /. accounts and just access through a modem. I think the IP banning should be removed, I think it will probably just hurt people like haggar and will do little to stop ACs.
Anonymous Treke
I don't know what I'm doing either.
Since I've often heard phrases such as "when I get my moderator points again", there are obviously people who routinely get moderator status. I've been reading Slashdot once a day for about 4 months, posting about 10 comments in a week, but never had moderator points. Now I'm not complaining about that - it's just that it seems that the points are usually given out to a subset of slashdot readers even more specific than the criteria listed on the page about moderation.
Of course, the most likely reason is that 4 months isn't long enough to be considered a regular Slashdot reader. I'm fine with that. Unlike the whiners who set their threshold low and then announce that they're leaving because of the low comment quality, I plan on staying here. But if that is the case, zyklone should think about how many posts there are in 4 months. There's a HECK of a lot. Long enough to see "countless posts" about anything.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
It's not just the blatant trolls that get under your skin. What's troubling (and disheartening for people concerned with the current state of humanity) is the huge number of attitudes expressed at Slashdot with attitudes like:
Keep in mind that here I'm not talking about people who are just saying that to get everyone riled up (i.e., "real trolls"), but people who say it with true spite for other people behind it.
I honestly do believe that there's a relatively high number of people here that have damaged psyches and could use some mental help. Stuff like this makes me think of Jon Katz's Hellmouth series and wonder if these people suffered abuse when they were younger which turned them into such despicable human beings. No matter how much it might seem like a short-term fix, cutting down other people instead of improving yourself will never give you the peace that you seek.
This site can be an entertaining read, but when you look at the big picture, it can be one of the most depressing sites on the web.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
P.S. Sorry if you've read some of this before, but I thought that this was a more appropriate thread for it.
Moderators are not always right, how do you save a good post back if it's deleted? Evenmore, a script kiddie will quickly write a perl script that load the slashdot pages 10 godzillian times every day with different names, and have moderator access everyday. All he has to do is feed the script "flesh" usernames every 3 days. And delete Bruce Paren and Shoeboy's posts left and right. Now what do you do.
IMHO the only way to make the up coming auto "-1" policy is change from 5 negative scroe and out to 3 strikes and out. Let them losers log on and log off his ISP like a monkey.
CY
In the usual BSD/Linux flamewars for example, idiots of both sides usually average out and some of them are even funny.
But there are occasions when rudeness and tastelessness are totally inappropriate. The Stevens debate was one of them. Here I wished (I don't know if it was done) that the worst offenders simply were removed.
That has nothing to do with censorship, I doubt there is any culture were hools of that sort would have been tolerated.
I really doubt all lame posts are done by kids. There are plenty of adults who lack maturity and plenty of kids, like myself, who can refrain from posting garbage.
First, I have to thank Malda for going through all the work of implementing a reasonably sane moderation system for the comments. Second, I'd like to point out that even though user comments comprise a substantial portion of the site, they're still a very small part of the "Slashdot Experience". Just remember to stay on target with the news and features (and of course the radio show :) and things will be good.
First, CmdrTaco, this needed to be done. I think the flood of homophobic flames that followed a recent article shows that very clearly.
Why not post peoples' IP addresses next to their comments? In general, folks tend to behave a lot better when people know who they are. And since a lot of the trolls probably come from the same person, it would take away their ability to pretend to be more people. (If that makes any sense whatsoever.)
Another thing I'd like to throw out there -- perhaps extremely short posts should be moderated down? Most of the one- and two-line posts aren't really worth reading. Or maybe # of lines could be displayed alongside posts in the index.
"Don't touch the bunny!"
As far as the 'slashdot junkie' problem, that's exactly why I proposed that. If someone gets their /24 block banned from posting and there's a lot of other people on that /24 block, there'll be MAJOR hell to pay for the person getting them banned, and quite a few people will be quickly sending angry comments to their ISP, thereby removing the troll permanently, or at least until they get another ISP.
As far as spoofing, the IP address which is banned won't have been something that would have been validly routed at the time. If the ISP knows what they're doing, they'll realize that someone was spoofing. Unfortunately, most ISPs don't know what they're doing. :/ I don't see TCP/IP spoofing as being a major source of these problems, though. Most of the ACs in question are just (well, seem to be) stupid kids who know nothing but try to shout everything. Most notably being that one (I hope) particular AC in the Rich Stevens article who was spamming the discussion thread with porn sites under the guise of on-topic conversation and is likely the same one who kept on talking about "spraying his petrified face with scalding-hot jizz" or whatever. He made me nauseous with rage, in any case.
Maybe just punishing ACs on the same subnet, then, yeah... or maybe every day posting a list of the banned IP addresses and who caused the ban, if applicable.
And yeah, I know what Pvt Pyle did in that movie. :) But Pyle can't go and blow away Rob (well, actually, Rob's home address *is* easy to find...) and Pyle had other problems to begin with (not that the bad ACs here don't seem to to begin with). But as you said, it was an analogy. Just an analogy. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
I'm not quite getting your idea, what would be the purpose of giving someone a +1 score for completely removing record of who posted. Isn't this basically the current Anonymous Coward? Come to think of it why do why need two Anonymous settings?
First of all I'd like to say I haven't noticed much a problem with trolls...but then again I only read the comments on maybe 5-10% of the articles that get posted on /. I have, however, seen moderator abuse (i.e. people moderating comments down because they disagree, rather than based on content), and that REALLY annoys me, because it's a failure of the system, not a failure of the masses.
Secondly I don't really like the idea of karma working in an upwards manner. Sometimes I post comments which try to be insightful, other times I post comments which aren't are just blah, whatever, which don't especially deserve a rating > 1. This could result in a LOT of wasted points spent downgrading or "overrated"-ing comments which are high merely due to karma. Maybe the system would be okay if people got positive karma to +1 only if their average post was >= +2.
I had this idea... What if people are limited to 3 comments per article per thread-hierarchy? How many times does a person need to respond to an article, if they're genuinely responding and not spamming/trolling? Maybe be should be allowed to delete/append to their previous comments in such instances. This allows further and infinite discussion by an individual so long as they respond to a different comment beyond 3 comments in the same place. This also makes it significantly more difficult to spam. [Perhaps people shouldn't be allowed to respond to their own comments, or only once.] Obviously this idea does not help anonymous trolls, but it's an idea.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
This would be fine for the people with static ips, but I would guess that a majority of posters are modem users with dynamically assigned ips.
(Made an oops on the last one..)
As I was going to say, instead of refusing posts that fall below a certain threshold, why not add something to user(s) prefs that would allow them to ignore any comments that fall below a certain score? That way, no one is "censored" per se, and anyone who has a negative karma can perhaps reverse it if they so desire.
Just an idea.
The idea is to give moderators more ability to solve the problem, not restrict their power. If a moderator wishes to conserve their points for positive posts, then so be it.
It seems to me that the number of points a moderator gets should be directly proportional to some indicator of how busy slashdot is, perhaps the total number of new posts in the last three days. Then if someone posts 100,000 flood posts, the moderators would have the points to bump them down.
Anyone else have any ideas on how we can make the point system more flexible?
I've seen too many online communities suffer and wither from the irresponsible behavior of a very small minority of posters.
I couldn't agree with you more. I publish a web zine, and I made the mistake of calling the message board Vent! I was also foolish enough to leave it unmoderated. What this means is that vent has become something of a waste of time to read. If you don't believe me, check it out.
I would have no issue with creating a -2 level, for particularly offensive or otherwise "bad" posts, but there is no reason that Joe Slashdot User shouldn't be able to read through all the flood posts, etc.
If you're worried about disk space (which I very much doubt), then you could compress all -2 posts. My guess is that a flood would compress very well!
The current /. moderation system works pretty well, and there are a lot of great new ideas on this post. However, I'd like to see us become a little more systematic on this issue.
/. server load, disk space, etc.--unless you count the amount the rest of us are forced to waste debating the issue. Trolls seek our interest, and hog it to exclude cooperators. Cooperators seek our attention too, and to the extent that they add to the discussion, they create more interest. So it's definitely not a zero-sum game.
/. readers with game theory experience could help CmdrTaco by examining a myriad of possible payoff tables without forcing the rest of us to suffer through them :) It's often true that modeling doesn't help much with real world problems, but the environment embodied by the /. moderation system is synthetic and has few variables. So it should be possible to model it effectively.
/. equivalent of "Robert's Rules of Order," and would be a significant contribution to the community at large, not just /.
This issue is a classic game theory setup, with defectors (trolls and occasional abusive moderators) and cooperators (everyone else).
The resource we're all concerned with is interest, attention, or mindshare, or whathaveyou. It's not bandwith,
Tinkering with the moderation system should be approached by representing its current set of points, etc as a payoff table. The effect of varying payoffs is easily modeled, so enterprising
I imagine that the current moderation system is not far from optimal. There are problems, but I'm not aware of any synthetic environment composed entirely of cooperators that is immune from invasion by defectors--except a practically useless environment. However, it is possible to maximize the population of cooperators. The successful result would be the
One modification that should be made immediately is to moderate all responses to trolls to -1. Trolls seek our attention, and even the most careful, rational, reasoned rebuttal is a reward to them.
I love the smell of chemicals in the laboratory. It smells like... discovery.
Heh.
I think it should also be mentioned that not all AC posts are useless or bad. I would have to say that about half of the AC posts are of about the same quality as posts made by logged in users. Let's face it: there is probably a very good reason for ACs here on Slashdot, it is probably so that 1)people without a login (or too lazy to login) can still participate in discussions, and 2)some of us may want to say something that could could be detrimental to ourselves, possibly even costing jobs or worse.
I am not saying something shouldn't be done about ACs, as the other half of their posts tend to be plain B.S., like this "First Post" business. It's stuff like that that gives ACs a bad name. I think if somebody wants to make a really bad post and they can't put their name on it, it ought to be deleted and never be allowed to appear on Slashdot in the first place. If somebody wants to login and make a bad post, at least that person can be reprimanded as appropriate. Basically, Slashdot should have the capability to moderate AC posts that are clearly out of bounds to nonexistent.
Heh. So I suppose you're going to find this reply stupid and/or insipid. You'll probably be right.
I find your attitude arrogant and eliteist. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
What I mean is, I don't read much more of Slashdot than the articles and their links, I only dig into the comments (and post comments) when a story interests me and I have too much free time on my hands. Tonight, for example...
Further, in some of the technical stories, the Anonymous posts are sometimes better than the user posts. Not always, but it does happen. Mija Cat
You setup a forum that accepts anonymous posts, you have to expect to get anonymous barbarians posting. If this comes as a surprise to you, well, you're young, aren't you? I've seen this happen in all sorts of public and semi-public forums based on all manner of telecom technologies over tha last two decades. Age doesn't give you much, but if you've kept your eyes open at least you can accumulate a little experience.
Ouch! A learning experience for Rob!
Anyway, if slashdot had less tolerance of anonymous yammerheads I might find it more worthwhile to read - as it is, it's rare for me to click on anything but the links to the stories that sound interesting - and if I did, then it would probably be worth the trouble to login. Yeah, I have a login, but why should I bother with it when I only drop in to check the headlines? Heck, these days I most often find the rare item here that's worth reading by way of a link from one of the more useful news sites.
Besides, slash has way too many time-wasting graphics and ads these days. I see I need to update the blocklist again...
I believe the concept of reputation (or karma) is good. However, I'd add some factor for the number of replies a post generates. Only posts with >0 score would count. You'd then have two variables affecting a given post's score and the reputation/karma of the person who posted it. The first part is the traditional moderator adjusting the score of a post. That, obviously, affects the post and, via karma, affects the poster. The second factor is the discussion generated by the post. At some threshold of replies (whose score is >0), the original post's score is increased. This would also be reflected in the poster's reputation/karma.
I think it would also be interesting to allow poster's reputation/karma to be affected by the other users (no ACs, though). This could be done through the reply to a post with a numerical indication (0 to 5) of what the person replying to the post thought about the original post. This could ease the burden on moderators and serve as a check (e.g. if the community thoughta post was excellent while a moderator left it at 1). Unfortunately, I'm not sure how honestly this type of feedback would be used.
I think it is very important that you allow anonymous postings. For write or wrong, out of hatred of fear of reprisal (or a flame war), people will want to have their say without it being traced back to them.
......).
I do not see any advantage in not making people accountable for their postings. Give registered used the option of posing anonymously, but the anonymous postings should count towards their karma.
Perhaps people should be able to chose how much an authors karma affects the score of a posting? People who don't care about reputations should ignore it, but other people might only want to hear from the big names, and not care about how that article has been moderated. Most likely some combination of the two.
One other thing. I don't thing that a person's karma should count towards their chance of moderating. It would be possible for a community of moderators (eg. us linux users) to moderate down another community, (ie. NT or BSD or BeOS or Mac or
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.
Ok, here's my suggestion.
:-/
Set your threshold to 1. And use hard thresholds, since this will hide all responders to the Troll also.
Rob, I think that you should use these settings for new accounts, since most people doesn't bother to change these.
I have also removed Display Scores, since I prefer to decide which postings I like. Banning the worst abusers seems to be good solution also. I also remove postings less than 15 characters to remove 'First Post' and other uninteresting stuff.
Unfortunately, I have spent almost all my moderator points on Trolls instead of promoting interesting postings.
I like this idea. And it could be done both ways: an exclude filter and an include filter.
--
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
When going through message boards, the signal to noise ratio can be so low that a tea stained, crumpet ridden idiot could post something relevent(appologies to Spike Milligan).
./ message boards like I have dropped usenet.
./ experience suck:
I would hate to think I would drop
So to those who want to my
YOU ARE ALL $@#($*# [MSTroll screen active]
NOOO YOU CAN NOT DO THI [MSTroll reprograming started]
Must stop the paiiiiii [MSTroll reprogaming completed. Have a nice MSDay].
I must go and buy NT4 and install all service packs..........
>>>>>
1. Set the default for anyone not logged in to browse at 0 on comments instead of -1
2. Only allow 1 post per minute from an IP. This would slow spam to an incredible halt and anyone that just happened to be posting a lot of comments wouldn't have to wait that long (normally a message takes a few minutes to type anyway)
3. Pretend your the US Government and pass a law that allows you access to the offenders computers and provides you with the a backdoor to their encrypted files.
4. Heres a nice controversial one: Allow moderators with karma of 2 to delete AC posts.
5. Moderators with karma of 2 can -1 an AC post without losing any points.
6. Heres one to make those crazy censorship people go crazy: Auto-delete a post if it contains too much vulgarity. Better yet, if a post has a ton of horrible words in it, send them back to their comment with a nice little message about "Stop with the fucking profanity" and allow them to remove any choice words and hit post again.
Sorry if half of these were already mentioned...of course, we could just forget about all this and form a lynch mob and track down anyone that posts offensive comments and beat them with a sack of doorknobs...
---------------------------
"I'm not gonna say anything inspirational, I'm just gonna fucking swear a lot"
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It's apparently the "hip" thing to bash on Linux and Linux users now...
Bashing on linux is hip because it's useful. In fact, the criticisms of Linux here are a whole lot more useful than the praises, since they help get important issues addressed. On the other hand, preaching to the choir accomplishes very little of value.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
While most /.ers hate censorship, I think it's a necessary part of everyday life.
So if i were in your shoes, this is what i would do: (please excuse any old/already implemented ideas)
Use the "karma" idea and apply that to calculate how many moderator points the user recieves.
Implement a posting quota (10 per main thread is reasonable for the average user) and make it grow exponentially with better karma.
The worst users and the AC's should get a minimum of one post/thread.
Make "Sort highest scores" the default way to view comments. This will keep most people from seeing the bad posts.
I think the ideas you laid out are very good Rob... certainly would help.
However, why only give benefits to people who post tons of good comments and penalties to those who have already posted tons of band ones. Wouldn't it make more sense to be some sort of ratio system?
If somebody makes 5 posts and all of them get moderated up by an average of 3 points give them the benefit. I know that I don't post very often at all but when I do I try to make them intelligent and to the point...
Also, conversely, when somebody only has posted a couple times but the posts are -2 on average nail them right away. Don't let them cheat the system at all for their personal pleasure...
But anyway you do it, I think it is a good idea for making the community more comfortable for all!
I considered stopping to read the comments posted, because of the immaturity of many posters, but many of the comments are Insightful, and I enjoy reading, and contributing to them. Plus, the open forum idea adds to the overall quality of Slashdot. The A/C's detract from that quality, and piss a lot of people off. (Not only that, but as I pointed out to Rob, they're using up system resources with their bullshit too.)
This is a big Thank You to the management staff of this site. While I agree, it won't solve the problem of immaturity among posters, but it will curb it quite well.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
These comments are almost immediately nailed as 'offtopic' or 'flamebait' by the moderators, but at the expense of many points that could have been better used promoting good comments.
This is because you give me X options to moderate up or down. Give me the opportunity to hand out up to X positive and X negative comments. The "offtopic"s won't prevent me from moderating others up then. And if there are no bad posts? Then I waste my negative points.
My suggestion is to require registration of a hidden account to let people post as Anonymous Cowards. The name that goes on the post is AC, but the scoring on the post is linked to their hidden account.
Therefore people who wish to post as AC and have a valid reason for concealing their identity may do so. It discourages casual posters and those who don't want to (or have moral objections to) register from posting, but in the long run I think it will improve things.
>And yes it is censorship. Censorship by definition is not limited to the government-any organization or individual can censor others if they have the power to stop their speech. The second "feature" that Rob has coded is definately censorship as it allows moderators to deny any account or IP the ability to post.
/.'s main page for at least a day. You will be read. You are not forbidden from having your material read, only when it can be read. It probably won't help the troll situation, but it is not censorship.
It is not censorship, no matter who you limit it to. The posting restriction is temporary. If, after several obvious trolls, you are forbidden from posting that day, you can post again 24 hours later. Most of the posts stay on
And no, there is no "right" to post to Slashdot. This is a privately owned web forum.
How about one IP address can only post two replies as Anonymous on any given article?
Seriously, is deleting comments that are over the line such a bad idea? Why should moderators waste their points knocking down some troll who posted some vulgarity that has nothing to do with the topic? Such comments are just a waste of disk space and bandwdith so delete them on site. Anyone else agree with me?
Hasta, -Malachi-
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
How about opening up all AC posts to all registered users without restriction?
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Ignore us?
Easier said than done!
(grin) Mija Cat
What if, like most other message boards, you made people have a log in to post a comment or message?
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
I have been giving this problum lots of thaught and I think that I have a solution.
In addition to the main coment page we have two others, AC and troll-trash. When someone posts an AC, the post automaticly goes to the AC list, one seprate from the main comment page. The AC list is just a holding place for comments. Moderators can then send the AC posts to one of two places. If the post is good, it goes onto the main comment page, and is treated like any other comment. If it's a troll it gets sent to the troll-trash list. Keep in mind that moderators do not lose points then moving AC posts in the AC list. When the post is put on the main comment page, then it can be moved up or down with the normal point system. Once in the trash, it can still be moved to the main comment page if another moderator sees fit. This is a check and balence of there powers. The AC and Troll-trash lists are publicly viewable, but seperatly from the main comment section. One exception to the rule is an AC post that is longer then a few lines, and the charters are differant. (Real words) Then it would go directly to the main comment page.
This may seem more confusing then it is. The idea is simple. Everyone can post, and everyone has the oppertunity to view messages that would be trash. They just don't come up with the comment page like normal. This should make both the trolls and the good posters happy people.
Just my idea. Please think it over.
I know you've been considering the AC issue for quite some time now, but this strikes me as a bit of a knee-jerk reaction. And it really isn't a solution. If I were branded with a default -1, I would simply change nicks or go AC (or change IPs) and keep on trolling. As you pointed out, this really isn't going to stop anybody who really wants to troll, and that's what we're up against on the (unreferenced) message chain.
I do like the idea of karma on moderation (especially positive karma). But it isn't going to stop the hell-bent or the insane. It is a good gesture, but why throw in a solution that you know isn't going to do the job?
Respectfully, ADC.
Isn't the new slashdot how TV works now? Instead of just telling people "If you don't like it, turn it off", they dumb down and water down their shows to such a point, I hope to God that there isn't any other intelligent life out there. If they saw our TV broadcasts, they'd blast us to hell before the cancer spread further...
I've seen countless psots that have nothing more than the theme: "NT sux, linux r00ls" moderated up as "funny" or even "informative" while well thought-out, mature posts about a shortcoming of Linux, or even (my god!) something positive about MS or NT labeled as "flamebait".
The moderators do not follow their own rules.
If you want slashdot to be a forum of linux zealots to pat eachother on the back and blast anything that is not pro-linux, then leave it the way it is, but don't lie to us by claiming the moderation system is fair, Rob.
For those of us that want to see all intelligent posts, we are forced to put our threshhold at -1 because of the immature, biassed moderation. You suggestion of setting the threshold of +1 or +2 is only acceptable for those who want to see only pro-linux posts.
How about opening up moderating of all AC posts to all registered users without restriction?
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
With all respect, perhaps you might like to really think about what you are saying before you post. it is very easy to post total rubbish, I know I've done it myself all over the place. But you should avoid this if you want to make your feelings known. :-) Trolls might live under bridges, but pedants hide behind bushes ready to pounce at any time. ;-)
It's not a question of censoring yourself, merely putting the way you feel in a manner that is understandable.
Then more people will take in what you've said, your post is more effective, and you've done something positive. It's worth an extra 30 secs of thining time, or a couple of reviews of what you're saying.
Putting yourself badly makes people ignore you/mark you down and no-one listens to you in the end, which is not right, as you say.
Oh, and always check your facts.
These Karma points should be per user, at least for people getting rated up. If someone I think someone always makes a good post, I should be able to rate them up myself. This way, if I don't believe in this "karma", I don't have to deal with it.
I remember looking through some threads the last few days, and wondering why this guys dummas posts were all at 2. Guess ths karma stuff explains it.
Also, this can be a way that all of my posts are rated up, say, to 5. It would really make me feel alot better about my writing. Seriously, I have never been rated up, but why do I have to know that? (Also, by "me" I mean any "user")
I know I will be moderated down for this, but . . . Vincent
Same for me. The company I work for has a bit more than 100,000 employees whose requests are distributed over a few proxies (2 in Europe, 1 in the US, 1 in Australia, and maybe one or two other proxies that I do not know).
It would be easy for anyone to abuse Slashdot and immediately prevent all others who have to go through the same proxy to post on the same day. Using the IP address for identifying the bad guys is not a good idea when some people have to share a proxy.
But on the other hand, it looks like the IP address is the only reliable way to stop the current abuses. Although it would be possible to be fair to the proxy users by checking the HTTP headers and looking for Via fields or modifications of the User-Agent field, these could unfortunately be faked by some script kiddies.
Maybe it would be possible to find a compromise: if some IP addresses are known to be used by many people using separate accounts (or Anonymous Cowards), then after a few weeks these IP addresses could be put on a special "proxy list". The threshold for banning posts from these proxies would be higher than the threshold used for single-user addreses. Or for these addresses, the rule would be different: it would prevent posting from ACs and any account that has a "bad karma" but not from the other accounts. So the registered users who contribute regularly to Slashdot would not be banned because of the wrongdoings of someone who happens to share the same proxy.
-Raphaël
This system is IMHO overkill, considering the incident that triggered it (3 spam accounts).
/.-trolls department??
It may also be in part unjust and harmful to the quality.
The Karma system is a cool idea, but it is too general at the moment. It will create 'hero worshipping' in that frequent posters and known Linux personalities will immediately have a high score, even if they just wanted to make a light-hearted remark or are not so qualified at the particular topic. This could take the spontaneousness away.
My Suggestions:
A logged-in user should *never* start lower than an AC
If s/he slips below 0, a mail should be sent to him explaining his behaviour. With 3-5 rogue accounts, it shouldn't be difficult to sort them out manually, and spammers like 'i hate stevens' won't bother to justify themselves.
Karma should be constantly updated: as others suggested, based on a time span (last 2 months) and/or number of posts
Karma should be restricted to topic. This would be tough to implement, but would reflect that the respective poster is qualified at a cetain (range of) topic(s).
The main problem are IMHO not the registered users, but systematic abuse of AC. I really enjoy AC opinions sometimes, but recently it seems they have been abused to stir up a lot of trouble.
Maybe MS anti-Linux Division,
What do you think of this ? :
:-)
If a comment has a negative score it fell into the "unwanted area" where posts can't be replied but can be viewed. It's easy to implement (hum seems to easy, i must be wrong
What do you think of that ? :
:-)
If a comment has a negative score it fell into the "unwanted area" where posts can't be replied but can be viewed. It's easy to implement (hum seems to easy, i must be wrong
When you're a guest at someone's house, I'm sure you treat the place with respect, since it's not yours. Would you go to Rob M.'s house and start scribbling on the walls with Magic Marker, or rummaging through the bathroom medicine cabinet?
If someone tried that in my house, I'd kick them out PDQ.
It's time to get rid of the AC's. If people don't follow house rules, it's time to kick them out.
I've been an avide /. visitor for over a year and I've never felt like posting. But your gripe changes it. Since you haven't noticed it, the cute slogan for the site is "News for Nerd. Stuff that matters", not just "News for nerds.". This site was created by Rob and his (along with his friends) personalities are all over it. They intentionally let "comedy" crawl all over the site. I have a feeling that this is to lighten up the world a bit...we all know that most news sucks (how many shootings do we have to see in detail to know there are a lot of crazies out there). The wonderful part of this site is that your comments get posted too. I've spent 15 years working in the media and most orgs never post negative comments about themselves. I ask you to understand that this site is about life. Loosen up a little and enjoy the site. If you want only to learn, go buy an O'Reilly book (oops, they have humor too). Just know that the /. guys like to have fun and this site has never been advertised as "news only". They are doing their best. If you don't like it, create your own site and see how hard it is to always be fair. As a last thought, please don't . That accomplishes nothing in life. Do something constructive with that energy like write a USB driver for Linux.
A freak and lovin' it!
1) So say someone on my ISP posts a bunch of trolls and logs off, and that when I come home from work and go online, I get assigned that IP. Will I be blocked from posting? (Rob's essay said that if your account *or* IP had a sufficently bad record, you'd be blocked. Why isn't that an "and"?)
2) I've marvelled that there's no ad-spam on slashdot. Do you guys have a team of grunts that deletes those, or do the folks who flood USENET with "Pamela suck off Tommy Lee" posts just not peruse slashdot? If there is a troupe of squirells to delete ads, maybe they can be used to delete the really bad trolls.
3) What were the offending posts that inspired this?
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
I read (and post to) /. from two net connections. One is at work and the other is at home (via adsl). Both of these connections have transparent HTTP proxying, that I cannot bypass. It is the addresses of these proxys and not my own IP addresses that the moderation system will see. Therefore, if a troll uses my ISP (or works at the same company as me), I would lose my ability to post to slashdot.
Something similar to this has already happened when the Internet Movie Database blocked my ISP's proxy IP address, due to the action of one person.
Since there is not a one-to-one mapping between IP addresses and users, and many hundreds of people can share one IP address, this kind of moderation is extremely stupid.
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
It'd be nice to just "taint" the responses to trolls and be able to avoid those posts as well.
Get off my lawn.
Folks, there is such a thing as a valid comment that completely pisses you off. Thats called "freedom of speech".
Registered accounts begin life with a Reputation of 1 (AC posts start at 0). Furthermore, Reputation is carried over from week to week.
Now, let's say that Karma is the sum of all moderation activity a person has had done on them for the past two or three weeks. Furthermore, the Karma is calculated the first time the person posts on a given day. How the person's Reputation is altered would be determined something like this:
If a person is already at -1 Reputation and gets docked due to negative Karma again, they're downgraded to Troll status (and are notified by e-mail of this fact). Troll status would probably be best implemented by a simple flag in the userdata. All of their posts start at -1, regardless of Reputation. The Troll status is lifted when the person's Reputation reaches 1 again (in other words, over a period of time they have to accumulate enough Karma to get two +1 bonuses to Reputation).
The idea of this is to add two advantages to the current systems: 1) People with a high Reputation have to maintain it in order to keep it, and 2) Consistent trolls have their accounts severely punished, but can still work their way back up (though not without really posting some good stuff).
The normal method of dealing with this type of luser in a USENET enviroment is to have a "meaningful disscusion" with the ISP of the aforementioned troll.
A slashdot style "meaningful disscusion" would prolly be very effective.
We are talking 2 or 3 out of tens of thousands here, perhaps go read the obituary from yesterday :(.
CC
"Pray arm me further by your reply" Winston Churchill
and similar catagories can be added
and we can have an option to ignore these and flamebait, troll ect.
Just another perl hacker in Bangkok
While deleting bad posts seems to be a good idea, it really is a bad road to go down. Didn't Prodigy have this issues a few years ago? Once they started moderating posts, they became liable for anything that fell through the cracks.
There's also the question of where to draw the line. It is a tough one, and over time it is easy to become a little less stringent.
I've implemented an extensive hockey pool website. To make the site more attractive to specific team owners, I use a two phase logon system.
Phase 1 is stashing the userid in a cookie. When a user connects to the site, I check for the cookie and if its there then I accept their identity claim.
Phase 2 kicks in when the user actually tries to do something that might alter the state of the account (e.g. enter a trade, vote on an vote topic, post a message, etc). This stage requires the user to re-enter his/her password before proceeding.
Slashdot could easily implement something similar. You can't post unless you at least phase 1 clearance (if you are smart about generating the userid cookie then it can become nearly impossible to generate them randomly). After they've logged on once, it never inconveniences the user again unless they change browsers, etc. You can even add a checkbox that the user can select to make the post anonymous.
If the user tries to change their ssetup in any way, they need to re-enter their password.
Just a thought.
Up to a point though.
I've also been on the receiving end of being marked as a troll, when I felt I was making a valid point (posting uptime for my 8 NT WWW servers, when people were saying NT needed booting once a day).
And what happened when I complained? That got marked as a troll *too*
Personally, after this, I'd like to see some method of seeing who moderated a post, and as what. It may cut down the abuse temptation to moderate things you don't agree with if people can see what you've done.
I'm glad you're programming it in, Rob. Even though I'm looking at things at level 1, I still see some improvement.
How about this: Allow a -2 and a -3. A -2 means that it's recorded, but only shown to moderators and Slashdot editors. If it gets moderated down to a -3, it's given 2 hours to live before it's nuked from the servers and the modpoints returned. The user or IP will only have a -1 attached. That way, it'll take three moderators to nuke a post, and all three take the blame, but we won't have any sideeffects.
---
Spammed? Click here for free slack on how to fight it!
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
You're not the only one who feels this way. But I guess that the bottom line is that the members of /. are, in the main, Linux people. Thus, if moderators are effectively drawn by lot, you're going to end up with a lot of pro-Linux moderators.
(This, fwiw, is probably why we have politicians instead of people drawn by lot in the same way as jury service to run our countries. We'd have GTW in three weeks otherwise, I expect.)
Those few of us who are in the "other" camps (be you a BSD, Apple, Be, Microsoft or other advocate) and find ourselves with some moderator points, probably find ourselves torn between wanting to moderate up the pro-BSD (etc. as above) posts to redress the balance and wanting to post.
On the anonymous posts issue - would it not be possible to insist that users have accounts, but allow them to _post_ anonymously? [Apologies if this view has already been aired elsewhere, there are just _too_ many comments here!]
--
This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along.
--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
To be honest, moderators tend to knock useless stuff like this down enough, IMO.
Perhaps a Hall of Shame for the egregious trolls and abusers would be a good thing to have.
It sucks when moderator points are wasted on someone posting 300+ lines of repetitive crap...
List accounts where applicable, IP addresses for AC's?
--
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
You could institute some sort of system where a password was mailed after a certain amount of time (say, 1 hour), so that impulse posting with new login accounts would not be near as feasible.
Why not just post anonymous people's IP, so they will either register or fear the threat of being harassed by people?
This is a good idea, as it leaves people accountable for their actions and takes away a bit of the sense of anonymity. This would definitely work well for anyone who has a static IP address (some people on cable modems, and a few others).
But herein lies the problem, as has been said by others: What about dynamic IP addresses? Sometimes IP addresses are switched around (which I think most dial-in users have whenever they dial in, they get a new IP address). So all they really have to do is disconnect from their ISP, then reconnect with a new IP address and continue their reign of terror on
The idea of posting IP addresses is a good one, but there are, as I've said, ways to circumvent it.
---- Joseph Bowden
ICQ: 13709677
Want to contact me via e-mail?
www.tealeaves.org "All you need is love." -
Does anyone know what particular comments CmdrTaco was referring to?
I use a proxy server which is used by hundreds of different people every day. They all look like coming from the same IP adress.
Too bad we can't cross-post, though the other story is about movies and stuff.
/. but by the people. This means that sometimes it will break (people being somewhat imperfect). Its better than doing nothing, though.
I think that the moderation is crucial. First, its not done by some sort of "advisory board" or by the owners of
The trolls will never go away. There are people who are small-minded and shallow and will post inane, stupid or worthless comments strictly to see people fight or to try to cause "chaos". These are the same people who put a bunch of fighting-fish into a tank just to watch them kill each other. "kaos rulz" and all that crap.
I say, give the worst offender a chance to write in an email where her or she tries to justify their position on trolling. Then let *that* get moderated. If it turns out that they have some deep, complex social reason for all this, well, hey. Let 'em back in. The other result - the community giving them the collective finger - is to lose posting priviledges forever. Maybe its just a random thought - but its certainly not intended as a troll.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I'm strongly in favor of anonymous posting, and browse at -1 typically, though recent events are causing me to rethink that.
Yet, I am really happy to see CmdrTaco trying to do something, even if it proves futile. I've seen too many online communities suffer and wither from the irresponsible behavior of a very small minority of posters. I beg those leaving to consider that they are only giving the assholes exactly what they want, and worsening the problem by reducing the number of worthwhile posts.
I have to believe that if there is a technological solution that sufficient quality minds exist at slashdot to find it. CmdrTaco has made a good start.
The major problem I see is that its too easy to start a new account with a clean record. Could the number of new accounts created from a single IP be time limited - say no more than one per week?
I am not sure how dynamic IPs (for the majority of us on dialups) work into this scheme. Could someone explain?
So if someone speaks or acts funny, then you are a troll?!? That would mean that many of my best friends would be trolls even before they have even opened their mouths, and even more when they do. Your remark is (in my eyes) very fascistic and I wouldn't be the least surprised if I found you with a white hood on your head ("they look funny, they talk funny - they must be trolls. Let's drive them away!").
If you want "freedom of speech," you are free to speak as much as you want on your own web site. When you are on someone else's site you have to obey their rules. That's just how it is. Freedom of speech applies to public forums, not private web pages. The internet is your stage, use it! just don't complain about someone else's section that isn't speaking your views.
No Karma until the account is 7/14/30 days old. That way trolls cant just create new accounts and play with them. Sure they can wait 30 dyas, but really, the people your concerned about won't bother just to gum up the works. That would place the burden on them. Or you can scrap the karma thing and just force them to be AC until 7/14/30 days pass. Etc. Didja ever notice how many wise sayings are attributed to "Anonymous"? What a guy!
I like the idea of Karma, but I would like to see another method used as well. I would like to be able to add certain registered users to a personal upfile. This would give posters I recognize as being insightful/funnny/informative, on a regular basis a +1 for me and me alone. I'm not a coder so I'm not sure how many cycles this would add to the server on each page request, so I'm not even sure if this is feasible.
One reason I like this, is that it makes it easier for me to browse at +2 if I know that I'm more likely to see posts that add to my slashdot experience.
The other reason I like this is that it would be relatively easy to implement a system of sharing personal plus files. This would cushion people who get moderated down because of personal problems with individual moderators; person I like moderated down due to personal problem, then auto +1 by my plus file = not net gain or loss. It also gives an added incentive to write good posts. If more people browse higher, we're less likely to respond to trolls without thinking.
In over ten years of lurking and joining communities like this I have noticed that the people who post well once usually do so often. Those who are just being destructive, eventually grow up, or fade away. moderating up, instead of down focusses(sp? (yeah I could cut and paste and use a spellchecker, but I'm lazy)) our energy on behaviours we want.
There are a lot of intelligent people here whose opinions I enjoy reading. Some of them I agree with, and some I don't. Both teach me something and make me think. Both are valuable.
While reading the comments that started this thread, I felt very saddened. Here were many people giving a tribute to someone who enriched a lot of lives, and some people couldn't be mature enough to just shut their mouths. I was reading at +1 so I didn't see the truly awful ones, but I did see some responses (including quoted bits), and I was just saddened. Good Luck to the Slashdot crew at figuring out some method of resolving this one.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
My biggest fear is that if it is known who is and is not a moderator, people will start "sucking up" to the moderators in an attempt to get higher scores on their post.
I'm not sure that this is such a concern. Sure, they can suck up to them, for as long as their 5 points last. There would be no way to tell who was a moderator, until they started moderating. What are the chances of sucking up quickly enough to get their approval before they run out of points? :-)
dylan_-
--
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
OK, this is just my opinion:
Some user names, for whatever reason, stick in my mind; I somehow notice some personalities more than others. To be honest, I've seen your posts moderated down a few times, and I can't remember ever having thought it was undeserved.
Having said that, nothing you've ever said convinces me that your posts should automatically be scored -1. As noted in another thread, Daveo seems to have been similarly maligned.
This latest disgusting abuse looks like it was the act of one childish AC. (I'd like to point out that most ACs seem to post sensibly, and I don't want to see any bans on anonymous posting.) So I can't understand why a couple of registered users have been punished.
In summary: if these are the only people who default to -1, it shouldn't be happening to anyone.
(Disclaimer: I liked MEEPT.)
I miss Meept.
I had no idea that having atrocious grammar and spelling didn't make someone appear to be somewhat less intelligent. I'm sorry to have offended you, since you are quite clearly correct.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Is there any way to incorporate an "acknowledged" factor to the AC post moderation? i.e. If a logged-in user posts a reply to an AC post, the AC's post is considered "more valid", and automatically boosted up to a 1-level comment?
This way, lurk-readers can read at a 1-threshold and not miss out on context started by an AC post, and moderators need not worry about wasting points on "me-too/first" comments.
Thoughts?
(Aside: As a 2-level poster, it would be nice to be able to pre-moderate my comments down a notch when they're off-topic or off-the-cuff. Save the 2-level for more relevant/topical postings.)
--The more you know, the less you know.
It is interesting to see how defensive people are about the censorship vs. preventing denial of service. My point being that no matter how you say, there is very often a need for some form of censorship that is valid. Which seems to be a very touchy subject for USA people, who appear to be always complaining about censorship and freedom of speech issues. I think some people need to admit that not all censorship is bad.
We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. We shall prevail!
Put a "delete" tab next to all comments rated at -1. Moderators can then specify that they would like a certain comment (or group of comments on any particular page) deleted. When enough (say, 3? 5?) moderators decide a comment should be obliterated, it is then removed entirely. This way *Rob* isn't the one charged with deleting comments -- it's the job of everyone. Comments with no merit whatsoever are dealt with in a way that should make just about everyone happy.
Good idea?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I think a way to improve the moderation system would be to have an option to randomize the order of the posts. The way the system works now, when there're too many posts, later posts don't get moderated up because it's too difficult for moderators to plough through everything to get to them. An option to randomize the order which posts are displayed ensures that everything gets a fair shot at being seen.
First posts really don't seem to be as big of an issue as they once were. It is MUCH easier to wade through "FIRST POST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?$^#&^$&*" than it is to wade through 15 levels of "Spurtjizz Nutwallop," and a helluva lot less disturbing than digging though a 45 comment thread about why it is good that an intelligent man who has contributed to the community has died, because he doesn't like your OS of choice.
On a side note, I also find myself running out of moderator points too fast when zapping a series of dumbasses. I rather like the idea of positive and negative moderator points, or perhaps a -2 level that cannot be set as your default reading level, but only specifically clicked on (x replies beneath your current threshold).
Time to sign off. I appologize for the rambling nature of this post, but its time for sleepies.
5 exclamation marks are a sure sign of someone who wears their underpants on their heard, aren't they?
heard?
If I had a heard to wear my underpants on, I wouldn't, nor would I use 5 exclamation marks.
Thank you for your time, and have a nice day.
Insert mind here.
Look who's talking. I took a quick peek at your user info, and honestly, how do you expect people to react when you post stuff like "Apple is raping everyone in the ass"?
Mind if I call you an anti-Apple zealot?
An article or thread could be marked as "Inflamatory" or something like that, with suitably low scoring (-5?) The Inflamatory rating (the idea is, something worse than an ordinary troll) could be earned with a mechanism like this:
Each moderator can rate the article or thread as Inflamatory. This rating would be orthogonal to the usual moderating up or down, i.e. no moderation points would be spent in this special case.
If only one or two moderators do this, nothing happens. But if a plurality/majority of moderators coincide on this rating, then the article/thread would be red-flagged as such. Since moderators don't know who the other moderators are (I think) collusion between them would not be an issue.
Sorry if something like this has been posted already. Don't have the bandwidth today to check on all the other messages.
I think this was hinted at by another reply: Allow moderators (possibly only highly active moderators) to mark reply as "system interference". This would do something horrible to the reply (drop the score 10 points or some such), and send a notice to the Slashdot staff. This would only be for abuse that approaches denial of service; run-of-the-mill flamebait, even nasty flamebait, probably wouldn't qualify. Moderators who "supermoderated" a reply would be warned that this should only be used for blatant system abuse, and using it lightly would bring CmdrTaco's wrath. They could then confirm the moderation, the reply would drop out of circulation, and the staff would be alerted of the abuse. Perhaps, just to make sure that a single moderator doesn't go berzerk, the first supermoderation of a reply would send it to the Slashdot staff, and the second supermoderation of the same reply would cause it to drop 10 points. The moderators don't necessarily need to know that the abusive message is already supermoderated once; 2 moderators are likely to see the abuse fairly quickly and take action. This supermoderation doesn't even need to take away from the moderator's arsenal of normal points, since waking up the Slashdot staff should be enough to keep the generally-responsible moderators in line.
This doesn't address larger moderation issues on Slashdot, but I think that allowing moderators to let loose quickly on system abuse would take the wind out of the worst problem, without requiring the Slashdot staff to have to comb through all the replies.
Feel free to "just ignore it" all you want, but the rest of us don't feel like spending hours wading through crap to find the good Slashdot posts.
For all the great thing /. gives you, it also goves you the ability to make an anonymous, off-the-cuff remark, and inject it into the fray without any consideration for whether it is useful or even acceptable.
Looking for real quality converations in an open forum is going to be futile.
The only solution I see is to make /. membership a paid subscription.
That way, if you want to flame, go ahead...at least you put down your ten buckls for the privilege.
This has probably been suggested before, but I'm too lazy to search all the comments ever posted. Here's what I'm thinking:
In the user's Preferences, allow him or her to choose which moderators to listen to. This will add some complexity to the system, but it will make it so nobody can complain of censorship, because they can choose to ignore any moderator whose moderation they don't like.
In addition, make it possible to look at a moderator's history (at least the most recent moderations they've done), and to look at which moderators have moderated a given article. This will make it easier for users to choose which moderators to accept and which to ignore.
Yes there are some extremists nerds here (and many hypocrites who spout off about the virtues of Open Source when they themselves have contributed nothing to Open Source other than ranting at people who don't use the same desktop manager they do) but the bigger problem being addressed here is people who insert complete garbage into the discussion. We need an effective way of disposing of trolls on site. All other comments on topic can be scored accordingly.
I think a better solution would be to just call them "Anonymous" instead of "coward." I know it is supposed to be funny, but I think it is just an encouragement for people to post stupid stuff.
email it to the user?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Well, it should, anyway. :-) The problem is that some people are living off of automatic 2 scores that they earned ages ago. So now there are just a huge number of posts at 2 that, while there's certainly nothing wrong with those comments, there nothing worthy of getting a 2. Plus, once you do reach that plateau where everything you say starts out as a 2, it's next to impossible to ever go back down to the level of the normal poster -- it's a self-sustaining feature, because as long as they don't suddenly turn into trolls for an extended period of time, most people aren't going to bother to knock down a so-so 2 comment that really deserves a 1.
What I suggest is to completely clear everyone's karma from time to time, say once every 2 or 3 weeks, so that when I want to use thresholds, I have some slight assurance that those with 2s will have said something interesting recently (not because they happened to have a good week back in 1998).
I don't see this as penalizing those with automatic 2s, just something to make the system better for the reader.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Summary:
:). I wonder what would happen if policital systems were run like that (hmm how about companies/organisations[1]?). e.g.
Approach #1: Power from the people
Approach #2: You may like/dislike this post coz others who tend to think like you like/dislike it.
Description:
#1
How about being able to give/deduct a certain amount of points to/from others?
Heh if you really want a dynamic system you could set it up that the more points you have the more abilities you get.
Talk about getting power from the people
100MegaPoints: Declare Global Thermonuclear War
50MP: Declare martial law
5MP: Propose amendment to constitution.
2MP: Sack someone.
Of course the problem is if people create lots of dud accounts to cause trouble. That would make this system unworkable.
#2
Another alternative which could cause a fragmentation of Slashdot- Slashdotters see different points depending on their preference. Basically if A hates post X, and B hates post X, when B hates post Y, when A is viewing B's markdown will be weighted higher than other people's mark up.
So if some idiot creates 1000 accounts to mark stuff up/down, and the other slashdotters tend to disagree, the idiot will end up living in his/her/its own slashdot world.
But like I said that would tend to create a fragmentation.
Of course it still shouldn't be a problem cater for the people who want to see everything.
Cheerio,
Link.
[1] You could also have a similar system substituting points for cash. E.g. Say the GNU people get donations from the various people around the world. The GNU people can then cross donate to each other based on whatever they think is appropriate. A "salary" could come out from the general GNU account.
There is no doubt in my mind that the average "mental maturity" of slashdot posters is adolecent. But some (not all) of the borderline trolls are pretty good.
The fact that the comments are negitive about a person, project, product, or concept are not in itself a troll. The ones that stick out in my mind are the posts reguarding Red Hat, SGI, and X-windows. These topics always bring with them a small segment of "flame-bait" posts. But, although some are flat out flame bait, some comments are actually solid criticism, with a leg to stand on.
Red Hat != Microsoft, and blatent flames are anoying, with "Red Hat Sucks" being a common responce. But, with all of Red Hats newfound money, it's odd that they don't clean up thier contribs, and they have been shortsighted in not accepting input from the outside world. They did screw up the squid packages when there were good squid packages in the contribs. They have made a mistake making thier base install a minimum of 120M. Some criticisms are well justified. Calling them the Microsoft of Linux, flaming them for the simple fact that they are now worth a few billion, and some of the harsher comments with no basis are flames. But not all criticisms are flames.
SGI obviously has some problems. Thier investors have a right to be consirned when at one time SGI was worth over $40 a share, and now hover around $10 a share. Thier motives in suddenly embraceing the GNU/GPL community seem a little suspect. They have lost key developers. There are many negitive things about the company that can be discussed intellegently. And it almost seems that it's some of the "positive" comments that are "flamebait." I have long respected thier MIPS based hardware, and listening to SlashDot script kiddies say how much "SGI rocks" because they now have an Intel based Linux box makes me feel like an intellegent discussion about the company impossable.
X-Windows, and specifically the XFree86 project are no doubt greatly benificial to almost everyone using a open source *NIX OS. Yet, there are still some shortfalls and limitations. I have never seen a truely intellegent discussion on SlashDot about what is good and bad in XFree86, only people spouting off how "we need a replacement, like Berlin" without supporting the comment, or "I can't wait for 4.0 because that will have all the cool stuff in it" without actually justifing what the needs for these new features will be. I don't doubt that an OpenGL implementation will be benificial, I know it will hell people who run software that requires OpenGL, but frankly, the only products I have used personally that use OpenGL are propriatary and don't run on Linux or any other free OS to start with. A vast majority of the comments, good and bad, might qualify as trolls.
So, I guess what I am saying is, just because a comment is negitive doesn't qualify it as a trool. There are many "This Rocks" type comments that are equally trolls. There are many "This sucks because X should do Y and part ABC has been core dumping every time you do a PDQ procedure" that are negitive, but not trolls, just true observations about shortfalls of the subject in question.
So, moderation may help. But, the true problem is probably that most SlashDot readers are more likely to be in the adolecent phase of "UNIX is cool, computers rock, I'm a 3113+3 H4X0R" catagory, and too few of slashdots readers bring long term, educated and experianced comments to the table.
Which "hurtful" comment is he referring to in this article?
He does NOT look like an idiot! How the fsck can you judge someone by the way he talks and not by what he says??? _That_ is idiotic...
so that was the sound of a modern day mountain man preparing for the new milenium?
matguy
Net. Admin.
matguy(.com)
There are really _two_ issues here, how do you stifle trolls with accounts, and how do you stifle AC trolls? For the accounted folk, what say that anyone w/account has a post moderated down below 0 (that is 2 downgrades) has all of their responses for a particular listing stuck down at the bottom? That way they can keep their comments available (albeit in a less advantageous position) and everyone will know that flamebait is at the back of the bus with all of the bad kids? You can spit out the window, but sit away from the driver. For the anonymous ones, put 'em all at the end of the thread. Still there but hiding. As they should be.
In my experience, a troll message follows these general rules:
1) It is a relatively short message.
2) It contains poorly-spelled words or odd (or no) capitalization.
2a) It contains multiple exclamation marks or question marks.
3) It contains obscene language or four-letter words.
4) It generally does *not* contain a URL.
5) It often (but not always) comes from ACs.
Based on these criteria, it seems to me that an automatic troll filter could be built fairly easily that automatically deprecates messages that fall into these categories. Perhaps the spell-checking would be awkward from a CPU time perspective, but the other stuff should be straightforward.
email it to the user? you know.. it's a password.. i have to remember my atm pin, my ss card number and ten other accts.. i think one more won't hurt.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The issue of possibly forking BSD and GPL-ing a fork is a real and valid one.
I don't want to provoke a BSD flame war here, but there is merit to the idea (it would keep BSD Free) and it is legal under the BSD licence.
The anti-GPL faction within the BSD community is frankly horrified by such a concept, and there are differences there that will be difficult to resolve, but there is nothing *wrong* with attempting to GPL BSD.
I do agree though that delivery is everything. It's one thing to make a well reasoned and researched argument for why BSD should be GPLed, and quite another for a "Hey, we can GPL BSD! Ha! Ha! You can't stop us!" post.
That there is contention over an issue does not make it bad. Posting an opinion on a contentious issue is not trolling. Being intentionally provocative or vile is.
I share the opinion that the posts in the recently deceased gentleman's thread are disgusting. The Linux/Perl/Free Software community is not like that. I don't know who the trolls are, but they are not one of us.
I'd much rather the posts be a black-helicopter Microsoft plan to discredit Slashdot than for the trolls to be coming from our own ranks. The alternative is too painful.
BSD folks, let's leave any argument over GPLing BSD for another day, OK? Now is not the time.
Postings by none other than Alan himself, Bob Young, Jim Pick, Rasterman, and someone at Transmeta. And absolutely no mention of any bodily fluid. :/
Rob, I hate to see it, but I hope that your new code to deal with the trolls helps with the recent problems. I was saddened by the posts I saw yesterday. It's amazing how callous people can be. Sad little boys...
s/\/\./\.\// -- er, yeah, something like that. Oops.
So what you are saying is that because DaveO has a writing style different from the "normal;", YOU decide he is therefore a troll?
:((((
Jeez!!!!
WTF is the world coming to?
/me shakes his head sadly, realising that fascism is alive and well and activly practised at SlashDot
Personally I feel that ANY censorship is bad
/. quality is going downhill as the popularity has gone uphill. I think this is a natural law or something. I have used /. since the very early days before the 200+ posts to a thread and pre scoreing days.
I dislike spam and I dislike idiots posting idiotic crap on this forum. I put up with it in order to glean the quality that does cross this site on a regular basis. For some reason I skim almost all of a thread that I am interested in. The problem I have is that
Much like my favorite fishing hole and hunting spot, the very reason it _WAS_ so good has been the cause of its decline in appeal to me. This leads to the trash, noise and crowding that the average person seems to leave in their wake upon discovery of some hidden jewel and the rush to exploit it. Add in the corporatization of my beloved internet and all that that implies and the whole damn thing just pisses me off. Much like idiot neighbors in real life since you can't kill them or otherwise get rid of them, you just need to find a way to deal with it yourself. Don't expect whatever authority figure you see as "in charge" to fix it. They can't.
Troll is a fishing term and if you respond to a troll they win, they "caught" you. If, however, you see the troll for what it is and dutifully ignore it you win because the bait was recognized as what is was.
Duh, more than I expected to rant about. There it is.
#941
Get so pissed when /.ers don't use the subject line.
/. could replace the quad Xeon w. a 486....
/. download:
When viewing threaded comments 90% of the bandwidth is wasted just repeating the subject of the original post.
Here's a carrot: Moderate up FIVE a comment that puts some usefull information in the subject line, saving bandwidth (easy to implement just check to see if the subject line is changed on the replys)
Hell, if you threw out all comments that don't put the subject line to good use,
Here's a typical
Geez...YOU DON'T NEED A FLOPPY DRIVE!! by LordRathma Sunday September 05, @03:06PM EDT
Re:Geez...YOU DON'T NEED A FLOPPY DRIVE!! by Anonymous Coward Sunday September 05, @03:26PM EDT
Re:Geez...YOU DON'T NEED A FLOPPY DRIVE!! by Anonymous Coward Sunday September 05, @04:14PM EDT
Re:Geez...YOU DON'T NEED A FLOPPY DRIVE!! by Kris_J (Score:1) Sunday September 05, @07:37PM EDT
Re:Geez...YOU DON'T NEED A FLOPPY DRIVE!! by TheRhino (Score:1) Sunday September 05, @09:02PM EDT
We're still going to have floppies for a while by Chas (Score:1) Sunday September 05, @10:12PM EDT
Re:We're still going to have floppies for a while by oldstrat (Score:1) Sunday September 05, @11:40PM EDT
Re:We're still going to have floppies for a while by Anonymous Coward Monday September 06, @02:33AM EDT
Re:We're still going to have floppies for a while by Chas (Scor
Censorship on /. seems really wrong to me, especially considering the recent article posted by Hemos on Congress trying to force censorship on the media. How is this any better? I believe it is a lot worse. Rob, even you admit that this "fix" has loopholes. What about people abusing the system to lock out other people from posting? (via open proxies)
/. is to get a rise out of people. Take that away, and the trolls go away.
/. community problem that requires the community to fix it. No manner of technology can fix it.
/. advocating censorship, that's just one more nail in the freedom coffin.
If you really want to stop things like hate speech or blatent trolls, the only way to stop them is to get/teach people to NOT respond. The only reason someone posts this on a public forum like
Let's face it, this is a
I hope Rob you'll reconsider this move. 99.99999% of us may loathe 0.0001% of the posts, but that doesn't mean that we should censor them out, even if they are blatent trolls. We all have to learn to grow up and just ignore them. Trying to censor them won't make them go away; rather it will just make them more determined to find a way to work around the censorship.
Until we as a society learn that we don't really want the government/media to protect us from ourselves, we're doomed as a nation to greater losses of freedoms. By
If you want to rate them -20 or something like that, so that people have to opt-in to read trolls, that's fine. But don't kill the posts.
I agree with Rob. You can't just let any idiot "express" himself (if trolls are an expression form) at the loss of others.
Freedom of speech OK, anarchy NO.
Most of the people who will protest against Rob's decision are the ones who, in their posts, usually promote the idea of censoring everybody who doesn't share their opinions.
Every society finds itself confronted with this very problem eventually, which can be seen i.e. with the "first ammendment" of the US constitution. On behalf of a supposedly guaranteed freedom of speech, how many morons/lunatics/facists abuse the system every day? I'm not promoting censorship (censorshit?), far from it. Just agreeing with the idea of keeping immature and stupid people away from what would one consider as an intelligent discussion space, at least until they *learn* something from their peers.
Opinions are like assholes, we all got one but you ain't forced to show it to everybody.
Just my 0.02 (let's be different!)
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
I would highly suggest aganst publishing the netblocks that are blackholed. This would lead to DOS problems for the abuser's ISP by the lynch mob and open /. up to many calls from lawyers.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Or have A/C posts start out at -1 or -2.
Set things up so that all A/C posts have to be moderated up to be seen by default. If you are going to post anonymously and want your comment to be seen by default - then it better be good, and be prepared to wait for the moderators to get to it.
This will encourage people to sign in. It's not censorship, as people will still be able to read these comments by choice. And if they've chosen to do so, then they have no right to get upset.
Of course, A/C's will not be able to see their own posts by default - but this is as it should be, because the casual viewer who might be offended may very well be an A/C on their first visit.
A/C's should not be catered to. They are IMNSHO second-class citizens on Slashdot, and are so by their own choice. Don't be afraid to treat them as such.
Another thing that could help is a filter which just drops and post with a large percentage of CAPS in the title or body.
They're not really interested in you, unless you're doing wrong. I'm not an advocate of "Big Brother" per se, but sometimes, I feel peoples ill-founded paranoia gets the better off them.
You say the problem is what they can do *legaly* with them.
Erm... So, they see you've downloaded a driver, read some sports news... maybe you even looked at some porn, got some new warez - so what? They are simply NOT interested in you. You are NOT going to get siezed from the street and bundled off, never to be seen again.
About the only thing you can say about giving your details online is that it will be used by marketing ppl - get a spam account, Mailcity isn't too bad for this, also Hotmail actually asks if you're willing to recieve "spam" - if not, you don't get it. Furthermore, don't give your real details unless you really must. Finally, although Slashdot has become (kinda) commercial, it still doesn't disclose your details to anyone - and it doesn't even demand your details.
So there
Mong.
* Paul Madley
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
Well, when one considers that /. recently permitted the posting of the horribly inaccurate email tax story, I think the moderators need scoring and control more than posters. I mean, you're just sooo right that a registration of a free nick with an anonymous email account adds veritable loads of validity and credibility to one's posts. How silly of me to never see the superior logic at work in such reasoning. If I reg a nick of Odie, and then use a hotmail account, my comments are so much more important than any anon's. *WHAT* was I thinking!? Oh, and let's not forget the scoring! I'm always trying to get a higher score here with my posts! THAT is really important to me and all /. readers, scores! Rah, rah!
I don't know how the system is on LinuxToday.. but whenever you post a comment it says to wait for it to be moderated and checked out. Do they do this by person or automatically(which would be impossible). If it is auto.. then maybe slashdot could impliment it?
--
Scott Miga
You're doing the right thing, Rob.
Slashdot is the first news forum I've ever been on where reader comments more or less work. It's one of the few places where I might actually *want* to read what everyone has to say about a story. The Slashdot team deserves a lot of credit for this, as does the Slashdot readership.
As Slashdot has grown and become more of a mainstream medium the quality of the comments has gone down. Not just the obvious flamebait, but lots of uninformed speculation and general cluelessness. This is to be expected, it is the natural lifespan of a medium. Slashdot has weathered this fairly well, and the moderation system is a big help.
Collaborative moderation is very difficult, I am impressed to see it working so well. These kinds of tweaks are necessary, and every one seems to improve things. I think Slashdot is doing a good job of walking the line between censorship and editing.
Jeez, a couple kids pull a prank and you all act like it's the end of the world. I just don't see what the big deal is. I looked through the offending thread, if you're browsing at 0 or 1, you wouldn't see any of the silliness, so what's the big deal? The moderation system works, the internet is still the internet, people with the minds of 13 year olds act like 13 year olds, life goes on.
You're all ready to move to a gated community in the suburbs because someone spray painted graffiti on your garage.
And filtering on IP just ain't gonna work, if I felt like it, I could hate spam a thread and get the IPs for my university's dial up accounts on the shit list, and then you're denying 10000 people the chance to be heard because of 1 weasel, that's just dumb. Not to mention that I'm sure there are people out there who know how to spoof an IP address and get any IP they want filtered out.
And doing something about AC's isn't going to work either, some of the troll's on that thread were from people with accounts, I mean getting an account at Slashdot ain't exactly like passing the bar exam or something.
Just chill out, if you don't want to read stupid shit, set your preferences accordingly, if you get a cheap laugh out of stupid shit, set your filter to -1 and go take a look at the story, 1 or 2 of the posts out of the 50 I read were half way funny in a demented kind of way....
It's apparently the "hip" thing to bash on Linux and Linux users now, and the trolling is just a part of this.
The only real solution is to eliminate AC posting once and for all.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
Karma is the sum of all moderations done to a person's post in the past three weeks. Reputation is the score at which a person's posts start out.
The Anonymous Coward always has a Reputation of 0, whereas user accounts start with a Reputation of 1. The first time the user posts in a given day, the Karma is tallied up.
If the person's Karma is 10 or more, his/her Reputation increases by 1 and the Karma score is reduced by 10 (to offset the increase in Reputation). Note that a user can recieve only one such increase per day.
If the poster's Karma is 5 to 9, his/her Reputation does not change, nor does the Karma score
If the poster's Karma is -2 to 4, his/her Reputation is decreased by 1, down to a minimum of 1. This allows for a person to make a few small slip-ups without a severe penalty. It also decreases the Reputation of people who do not post for a long time, but does not let that Reputation slip below that of an ordinary user ( if the person's Reputation is already 1 or less, it does not change). It is also an attempt to offset the effect on Karma of a good post dropping off the list.
If the poster's Karma is below -2, his/her Reputation is decreased by 1, to a minimum of -1. The person's Karma score is increased to -2 (to offset the decrease in Reputation) If the person was already at -1 Reputation, that person is given Troll status.
If a person is at Troll status, his/her posts start off at -1 regardless of his/her actual Reputation. Troll status is automatically lifted once the person reaches a Reputation of 1 again. In other words, a person with Troll status can only lose that status by a consistent string of good posts.
Note that as a corollary to this system, a person should be able to know his/her exact Karma score at any given moment (probably best to put it in a Slashbox).
What if we allowed any registered user to have a sort of micro-moderator power, perhaps the ability to alter the score of a post by a very small fraction of a point. That way, posts that were recognized as detrimental by the whole community (ie trolls) could be moderated down without wasting precious moderator points. Since it would take hundreds or maybe even thousands of users to change a score substantially, it would be extremely hard to censor legitimate opinions.... Just my $.02
Can your IM do this?
Unfortunately, quickly disposing of trolls would make for interesting problems if someone has a vendetta against someone else. "Oh hey, I have moderator points, and mister smartypants posted something just slightly troll-ish... I can marr him as a troll! Yippee!"
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Then you say,
In effect, what you are really saying is, "I'm going to express my ideology, which I know offends the sensibilities of many people. What's more, I want to slip in a comment expressing this offensive idea without getting any arguments, so I'm going to claim that any such response would be appropriate. See how clever I am?"
The fact is that there IS something very wrong about GPLing BSD, and that is that it uses the authors' work in a way in which they would not have wished it to be used. Perhaps the ONLY way, since they -- unlike the GPL crowd -- have no problem with it being used commercially. What developers of BSD do NOT want is for their code to be used as a weapon to advance an agenda which pits programmer against programmer, destroying markets and livelihoods. This is what the GPL really does, and it's spiteful and hurtful. As much as the "posts in the deceased gentleman's thread" above -- if not more so.
In short, even if it is legally possible to GPL BSD, it is unethical to do so.
The responses to Jon Katz's essay on ethics, posted a few days ago, indicate that there are at least some hackers who do not give a hoot about ethics. And ideology -- especially destructive and radical idologoies such as that of Richard Stallman -- often serves to persuade people to abandon ethics in the name of a cause. (That's why, perversely, religion has caused so many horrifically bloody wars.) But most people believe that human beings SHOULD be ethical and should respect one another -- especially their peers and colleagues. This is the principle that is lost in the "GPLing BSD" flamewar, and should not be.
--Brett Glass
1 - Moderators should get more points - I often don't moderate comments down because I feel my points would be better served highlighting the more insiteful comments than by filtering out people... With more points, I would feel more tempted to help point out the trolls.
I don't know how many points a moderator gets, but how does this sound:
A moderator gets a total of 15 points.
5 points only used for "upward" moderation.
5 points only used for "downward" moderation.
5 points for moderation in any direction.
This way you could moderate down flamebait and trolls without worrying about having some left over for moderating up posts.
"would be appropriate" should be "would not be appropriate" above. --Brett Glass
Hm. When put that way, yeah, lynch-mob tactics don't seem so good anymore... Come to think of it, they didn't work so well for Hobbes either. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
While i agree with several previous posts that the automatic upping of points is not good if they ever want to make a post they know does not deserve +2, so I suggest possibly an option that the user can use to reduce their own points. Or just remove upping and have only downing from karma. I hate to lose anonymous posting (partly because I tend to lose my password and post anonymously myself), however, the recent attacks on Stevens in comments offering condolensces towards his death and commemorating his works were really frightening. Does anonymity remove all sense of decency? Too often people use anonymity as an excuse to say things which no human being would say if they had to put that behind their name and image. All this puts Rob in a tough spot. Everyone wants him to find a way to remove this vulgarity, yet, their is equally as much whining about some posts being moderated down. I see the best bet being a rating system with no upping (except recovery from past downing which has to be a slow process) but still the downing from karma. Also, if the downing gets low enough on a response, maybe a posting of the IP address of the AC would be in order (though this leads to a lot of other worse consequences). The only real sure fire way to fix this is for certain people to gain some maturity and decency, but in this world those things are relatively rare. Hope I didn't ramble too much. (typhatix who forgot his password AGAIN)
The separate +1 and -1 points is a good idea. Not overly complicated like some other suggestions are.
If the moderation system is messed with too much, it'll become completely incomprehensible and result in even more complaining newbies.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Microsoft bashing is not childish, if it is based on sound reasoning. Besides, people would have behaved rudely regardless of the rules. Thats how these things work.
daveo above seems justified in his unhappiness about
being moderated down. His past comments have never
got a score less than zero (or more -- though some
were quite informative) and his comments in this
thread don't deserve a minus 1 either.
Could it be someone dislikes daveo?
I've posted only 2-3 times earlier, lets see
how this one fares...
As a person that often moderates when I am allowed to I can tell you that the restrictions on the moderators are already quite strict. I did not moderate the comments to the specific article that drew up this discussion because I personally could not stomach wasting all of my moderation points on trying to get all of the inflamatory posts marked down.
I also could not read the entire thing or deal with what I was seeing.
Now, as far as giving moderators the ability to use their combined points to delete a post, I can tell you that it would almost never happen. I get somewhere around five moderation points for fifty comments last I checked, you know I am not going to waste them trying to get some one deleted when I see an comment that actually makes a point. I do look for insightful comments that have been underrated. I also read all of the comments, including the ones that have already received a score or -1 to see if that score is fair or not. Most every one else I know of that has gotten to be a moderator on some occasion does this as well.
When the whole moderators thing started, I was one of the people to pester our friend Rob about setting up some guidelines. Since then I got busy and was not able to post or read articles. I have since returned and read the guidelines which are quite well thought out. I think if any one person has tried to use the moderation system in ways not desired by Mr. Malda and his cohorts (as in trying to get people riled up through blatant bias) they would have difficulty doing that. If you read the guidelines they will basically tell you the way the system is set up the actual moderators have very little power, it is only as a group that they have any control over things here.
If I wanted to stir up trouble here, I would write up a post, not moderate. Writting wreaks much more havoc than reading and making a simple discerment of value.
Also, I think CmrdTaco, Hemos, John Kats, and the rest do know how to set up their email to ignore matters from certain people that would try to mailbomb them for having their comment deleted or otherwise make a pain out of themselves. They have been managing this site for years so I do think they know how to handle themselves with J. Q. Public and Harison Troll.
I personally will volenteer right here and now to be the one to delete obviously inflamatory posts. You all know the ones, they read "F*ck Canada", "God Hates Fags", "Die Bill Gates, Die!" and the like. When a post is clearly derogatory toward one person or a group of people without anything otherwise of merit, it is a waste of your time and mine to read. These posts are usually quite rare so I would not mind taking the heat for it. Any one that actually knows me knows that I value actual thought above most anything else around, so I would do the deleting if they would let me.
Rather than deleting the post, I would personally put it in the hall of shame. A rubish bin icon that you can click on and read all of the posts that made it there through people that took the time and wasted the moderator points to get it off of the thread. That way the post would be availible, but the writter would have to just deal with it.
--telosphilos, dame among cats
"Alt-F4 that's for quitting" quoth Dan_Wood
Select a number of attributes (such as Humour, Technical Merit, Spam, Flamebait ...) and moderators can promote or demote as they feel appropriate.
I can understand some of the younger readers may actually enjoy reading more rebelious postings. It's part of the growing process for many people. This allows everyone to set their preferences to read comments most beneficial for them.
Just a random thought from an AC.
I've realized that if I really have something I want to say, I will put my name to it. Even it is something controversial or disturbing.
Anonymous writings lack credibility and conviction.
I am an avid /. reader... I have had my share of trolls in the past, but I think people are taking this rating thing too seriously. Who cares what some guy sitting at his computer thinks of you because of your rating. I have personally seen the most insightful comments get a normal "average" score. All I am saying is that you guys take this too seriously. If you don't like what people are saying just scroll past their comments. It's not like /. is posting your telephone #. This is an (I hate to use this terminology) online community. There are going to be people who "First Post" or "Flame *BSD or Linux ***distro*here***". I shouldn't upset you people. I for one enjoy reading the trolls and flamebaits sometimes. You have to treat the comments like reality. Most of us have "jobs" (except for you rob and hemos, you guys have fun) and we deal with crap all the time. All I am saying is, I guess, it doesn't need to be that complicated. Bill
I read the W. Richard Stevens article at -1, and while the content of many of the posts was distrbing, it was quite obvious that the majorty of the worst posts were done by only one or two people. These people are not the majority of slashdot readers. It is sad to see anyone disrespecting someone that so many people looked up to, but these posts were most likely just to anger people, not to disrespect Mr. Stevens.
It is sad that these people must be so immature and irresponsible as to write disrespectful, and in many case completely false things about someone who as died. This group does not represent the majority of us, but they do represent a problem. I do not enjoy reading through 4th grade insults and mistruths, and i doubt that most of you do. What rob has but into place is the best that he can do to prevent this, and while it may interfear with firewalls, it is a small sacrafice. My suggestion here is to only disallow anonymous posters on banned ips.
There were also several posts about Mr. Stevens and his dislike of perl. These posts, while not near as bad as the rest, were still very disrespectful. These posts were made by several people, however they only make up a miniscule part of the slashdot readership.
One post that made me think asked what would happen if Bill Gates died. This person said that similar comments would be made, however they would not be moderated down. I do not believe this, and while i am one of the many slashdot readers that dislike microsoft (especialy today), i do not think this would happen. The majority of slashdot readers are mature enough to realize that human life is far more important that a computer.
I access slashdot through a firewall that implements PAT. I know of a certainty that the same IP address is assigned to approx. a thousand users. And I also suppose there are at least a dozen that access /. I guess they are all nice (they are my collegues) but I can't know for sure whetherthey post stuff that you wantto moderate, or not. So I agree you can moderate by username, but why by IP addy?
Sigged!
Secondly, you can do all you want to the ACs, but if they start generating slews of new user IDs, the best way to prevent them from doing their dirty work would be a waiting period before new accounts were allowed to post. Like 3 to 5 days. Like every other solution, this one has its drawbacks, too.
You're trying to apply a digital solution to an analog problem, and the analogs will always find exploits. Worst of all you could get a "hostage crisis" DoS attack where someone blocks off an entire ISP by trolling from different dynamic IP's. (This is done a lot in IRC where some op from mindspring.com is trolled by another mindspring.com user until you can't have the op *OR* the troll around because the troll will basically keep redialing in ... so they lock it up with +mi, effectively killing the chat.) The best solution is 1) Users should use discretion and not read troll posts 2) Limit the posts per minute rate by a single IP. 3) Moderators scan the posts and knock them off with total impugnity 4) If you have fascist nazi moderators the chain of command should react and toss them. That is far from perfect (fascist moderators can cause mucho pain and suffering with their naturally biased, capricious ways), but IMO it is the least dangerous route.
I think Daveo gets moderated down a lot because his posts are different from most posts. This is not a good reason for downward moderation.
It's akin to downward moderation for spelling or grammar -- clearly an English-centric bias.
This is online, we don't know why Daveo posts like he does. Nor is trying to find out in a public forum at all appropriate. Perhaps he's trying to be irritating, but I see no evidence of that, his posts don't have content that you would associate with that. The point is, he may have perfectly good reasons for using third person and even all caps -- we should be more tolerant of form and concentrate on the content. Isn't that what the online culture is partially about?
To the topic, perhaps holding someone's whole moderation history against them is inappropriate in case some cultural or behavioral difference caused a lot of negative moderation. Having to get moderated up in order to recover is hardly fair if the problem is moderator bias. Note in this thread how many of the moderated up posts are saying Daveo should just "be normal" or "start posting better comments." Perhaps ignoring negative moderation karma unless its within the last month or few would be fairer.
One of my biggest complaints with the current moderation system is the fact that most of the time I'll see a single post that comes at the end of a thread, which 95% of the time is completely meaningless without reading the rest of the thread.
/.s. One allows A.C. postings, the other does not.
With that complaint off my chest, I'd like to suggest that we could move the A.C. posts to the end of the page (or perhaps a separate page). Any non-anonymous replies to A.C. posts would appear below the appropriate post (exactly like the current threaded view.)
Alternatively, we could simply have "two"
Like it says on the side-bar (or wherever), e-mail instances of moderator abuse to Rob (malda@slashdot.org).
Sorry dude, but there is a clear pro-linux moderation bias.
I think that one of the most important goals for the comment section should be to encourage people to contribute particularly good comments as well as encouraging moderators to hilite these comments. To accomplish these goals, it might be effective to offer a reward in a uniquely /. way.
My idea is as follows... When an article achieves a score of 5, the moderators are given their moderation point back. Additionally, if the author has a "good enough" karma, the author also gets a moderation point. To prevent abuse, it may be necessary to not give the final moderator his/her point back.
BTW, I also like the idea of the letting posters preset the score to any value beneath or equal to their current score.
I suggest going back to original Slashdot (not completely though.. message threading style is nice since the number of users has grown).
I believe we should have a form where you can type in the name and email address. Very little noise was generated when Slashdot was simple to use.
The reason much of the posting is garbage is, IMO, because Slashdot feels more like prison (not quite.. but same feel I suppose). You can't just come, type in a login and post a message freely. You're bogged down with creating a login (which many people never use) and remembering the password.
In other words K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid).
I don't want to fly a spaceship and keep avoiding nasty aliens (flamers). All I really want to do is read some interesting technical news (with a few stories and humor here and there). The original Slashdot was fine and dandy. Very simple and elegant. Now it's bloated (and probably obfuscated to newcomers). I suggest improve quality of stories and forget about quality of readers. Stories are directly related to types of readers present.
Another Idea i had was to be able to filter by thread. Kinda like a cross between nested and threaded.
Next to the 'Reply to This' and 'Parent' there would be 'Collapse this Thread'. Which would change that entire thread to 'Threaded' mode.
When an thread is in 'Threaded' mode there would be a 'Expand this Thread' and that would make the whole thread into 'Nested' mode.
Along with the feature to the break out comments that have a score above a threshold would make slashdot more readable, then I could kill the thread when I don't want to hear anymore about how DAVEO is a troll
But one wonders how one can envisage referring to oneself in the second person, if one wishes to avoid the third person?
...
Inquiring minds want Dr. No
Will in Seattle
Maybe I don't frequent the same places that you do, but I don't see this stuff at most places. Well, I see some of it, but in not nearly the quantity that I do here.
It's not a matter of quality that I'm talking about, but the pure venom on display and the glee taken in other people's suffering: losing their jobs, dying, whatever. Again, I see it other places sometimes, but I don't really count on seeing it regularly except when I'm here. I realize that it almost gets to be contagious, as there've been times that I've gone down into the gutter myself here.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I too think that it would be useful to be able for real users (not ACs) to moderate up or down an AC post. But I think that we should only allow this to happen +1 to -2 for this feature. Call it "instant moderation karma". That way, an AC at 0 could quickly go down to -2, or at most up to +1 without a "true" moderator having to use up all the moderation points.
When I moderated a thread, I couldn't moderate all the trolls down - there were just way too many.
Will in Seattle
Stealing from a post by Foogle (#74, if memory serves), perhaps a revamping of the moderation is in order. He suggested that every regular /. user should also be a micro-moderater. Thus, when micro-moderating a comment, you might put in your two percents worth (sorry, I had to). In addition to this, perhaps the moderation should be two or three dimensional: one axis for insightfulness, another for entertainment, and a third for originality. Thus, you could set your thresholds to ignore poorly written or researched comments, but not later clones that expand or correct the original. Please give me your opinions on this.
Here is how it could be implemented:
- every user has a small number of parameters associated derived from their global and/or recent history, in the range -1 to 1. The categories would be based on the moderation categories. This gives a point in an n-dimensional cube
- ACs have 0 on everything, or some other default
- Newbies have another default (or maybe can choose one of several profiles)
- Each posting to
/. also gives a point in n-dimensional space, depending on the poster's profile and subsequent moderation. - The filters applied to
/. sessions apply to the dot product (sorry, IANAnonmathematician) of the story and the logged in user. In effect, this "tilts the playing field" in the direction of the user.
How will this help?- People with a good history of insightful posts will gain filters attuned to insightfulness.
- People who flood
/. with drivel which no-one reads nor cares about will only get weak filters. - People with strongly negative scores will get "inverted" filters that they will have to set to "-5" to see the good stuff. They can happily engage in pissing wars in their own little private corner of the n-dimensional
/. universe.
An advantage of this is simplicity - dot product is easy to compute, and it needn't be a float value - just rescale an integer value.Some drawbacks:
-- open source? sounds like the real book --
Now before you decide I'm an idiot and that trolls would just abuse this, listen for a sec here.
Heres how it works, any registered user can specify that an comment is a troll by just clicking a link in the header. This pops up a window* with options such as downward moderation, and maybe upwards moderation, whatever. If you specify downward moderation it subtracts 1/20th of a point from the score this to a given article. This would resolve the waste of moderation points on trolls and also not let trolls abuse it if they had a dynamic IP. The loss from people within the same subnet would be minimal I think, as there are pleanty of users out there, and I don't know of any ISPs that have more than two or threee class-Cs for a given modem pool.
*yeh, I know, popups suck but reloading big comments page with >100 comments sucks more.
Sorry, I'm afraid I have to disagree with that. I like anonymity of moderators, as is currently the case. My biggest fear is that if it is known who is and is not a moderator, people will start "sucking up" to the moderators in an attempt to get higher scores on their posts. This isn't really an abuse of moderator status; you can't really blame a moderator for what other people are doing, and would, I think, be detrimental to Slashdot as a whole.
:-)
I support anonymous moderation!
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Deciding when it is the right time to step in and discontinue a thread is a highly controversial topic. On /. there's a great concern over not allowing ACs to post. We've all seen the trouble that ACs have caused in the past. Maybe the new change with /. is really just a bandaid for a greater problem. ACs sometimes ruin it for all of us.
I suggest AC status be a privaledge, not a right. If someone wants to post as an AC, they must prove themself by making valid, worth while and non-flamebait posts that the moderators pick up on. After increasing their score, they can obtain a rank, which in turn gives them a checkbox in the post form allowing their posts to appear as AC.
These people could also turn this feature on and off through out the life cycle of a post should they remain in good standing. This will give them the option of accepting direct responses to an opinion or denying them -- long before the messages arrive in their inbox.
I think this will provide us all with a kinder, gentler AC that we can live with as well as protect the rights of the ACs who aren't abusing their privaledge (and us).
On the Subject of Trolls ...
Occasionally comments get
(Read More... 4 of 9 comments | Discussion... 101 of 120 comments )
Thanks for reading.
The above AC is right! Being too leaneant on trolling idiots just creates a haven for idiots. Let them bitch all they want about censorship -- eventually they will get the hint and leave and go back to flooding IRC channels. One of Slashdot's redeeming qualities (that is starting to slip) is intelligent discussion. If you're not being intelligent then your posting shall be deleted, now take a hike! Bitch all you want! See you later! Go crying to some liberal forum that gives a damn!
it dosn't deserve -1
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
mdrtaco & hemo,
/. brainless kiddie morons automatically htinks AC==cowards. No, you are a fucking stupid coward. Some of us simply do not wish to have an account with /.
/. is commercial, censorship kicks in in one way or another. Let's call it: growing pains.
/. and enjoy every minute of it.
/. morons: try to educate yourselfs in humanity studies, such as classical philosophy, sociology, history, and classical literature. Try to be less sloppy in things. Try to get quality in what you do. Try to be professional. Be sure you have quality content before opening your mouth.
/. after all. what a humor.)
I have a good solution that will solve all the pain in your ass: YOU grow up!
Your reader is a reflection of what you write. slashdot comments being moronic is merely the nature of things. Try to be professional.
PS I'm not an "Anonymous Coward". Rob & hemo simply label users who do not have an account AC, and the
Now
Yes, I have a mental problem. My problem is that I cannot stand people who doesn't think. Worse is that I love to deal with those people. That's why I read
My fart just flew off your head? Ok, here's somethig concrete: Rob & Hemo & generic
(oh what am I doing... this is
Xah
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
When someone gets a -5 for the day, their entire /24 subnet should be banned with the message "Sorry, but [username,] a user at (their IP address) at (time of last bad posting) has messed things up for you by being an abusive poster. You may want to contact your ISP's abuse department so this user [(email address)] can be dealt with. This temporary block can go away in 24 hours."
Of course, this global block would only apply to ACs and registered users whose karmas are less than, say, +10.
I think with the threat of someone losing their Internet access they'd think twice before racking up a -5 daily karma.
Of course, this is still open to abuses (as I stated elsewhere), and it'd certainly be problematic for non-trolls who get affected by this - but that's the whole point. Kind of the "Since Private Pyle has donuts, I'm going to make the rest of you do pushups while he eats them all!" trick.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Yes, and this is also why Rob insists that moderators (though this should apply to non-moderators as well) look out for abuses of moderation and email the posting link to him so he can deal with the post and moderator.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Umm, not true.
...
But I think the option to post at lower karma is a good one. Sometimes I would love to just post as a 1 because I'm just saying something average.
And then there are all those ethnic or OS debates, where almost everyone should post at 0 or 1. Kind of like the Jar Jar effect
Will in Seattle
For example, we would moderate the post this replies to down, as it is one looonnnnggg run-on sentence and it hurts the brain to read it.
... darn.
;-)
But, if you ignore the structure, it was actually an Informative post.
So, it falls between the cracks
Will in Seattle
Quite true. Or at least it was for my brother ...
Will in Seattle
Another possible solution would be to change the moderator point allocation system to promote each moderator to do both upward and downward moderation. Try this:
Keep the number of moderation points per moderator at 5. Make a moderator's first 3 +1 moderations cost him/her only 1/3 of a point each; further +1 moderations cost 1 point each. Make a moderator's first 3 -1 moderations cost him/her 1/3 of a point each; further -1 moderations cost 1 point each.
This method allows a moderator to moderate three trolls downward while sacrificing only one moderation point -- he/she could decide to raise 7 posts, or he/she could raise 6 and lower 3.
If a poster has a trollish history, make all "Troll" moderations count triple. That way trolls will still get moderated down with the normal moderation system, people who want to read EVERYTHING (on slashdot, not Everything :) ) will still get to see them, but moderation points will still be available to moderate up good posts.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
Hmmm, I sense an RPG player, probably a GM... ;-)
Mostly just wanted to let you know somebody else saw the idea and liked it. Not being a moderator today, a short chatty post is the only way.
cheers,
-matt
The problem I see with this, is the old addige, who polices the police. It's human nature. Each of us here don't like trolls, but... one man's troll is another mans hero.
If it where me, the corse of action I would have taken is force folks to use AC for there first few posts and then get a regular account like the rest of us. Give the AC's a 0 that cant be changed except by a negitive number, make by default any new account or ac not be able to see a -1 or lower. any troll or "spam" be sent as a -1 and there for not be able to be seen except by registered users who HAVE to set a threshold to -1.
Which hopefully would result in any new user checking it out, cant see the trolls. if someone has made say 5 good posts with out making any troll or flame bate then can get an account. All accounts would be set to a thresh hold of 0 by default.
If we want to see the neg. numbers we have to go digging into preferences and force it.
I didnt figure out the XX of XX thing till today. that if i clicked the higher number (which I did cause I "thought" I would get more comments on a page) I saw the "flame bait and trolls" if you remove that option, it may make some of the trolls and flame baiters leave.
Just my thoughts on the subject...
Cormac
Just another Techno-geek lost in cyberspace.
...are involved in the discussion. One can discuss contentious issues without resorting to flames.
And despite your... paranoia, my intent on bringing in examples of the pro-"GPL BSD" arguements were not to score "points" for the arguement, but to illustrate that there are, in fact, reasoned arguments for the position, and reasonable people behind those arguemnts.
Not every "GPL BSD!" poster is a troll, nor are they single-minded fanatics that mindlessly call for the GPL for every bit of Free Software that is currently not GPL-ed.
Unfortunately, examples of both do exist. Just as unfortunately, there are those in the BSD camp that do not understand the GPL, have not taken the opportunity to attempt to understand the GPL, and who instead mindlessly flame anything and everything covered by the GPL.
These creatures are easy to recognise - they use words like "unethical" and "which pits programmer against programmer, destroying markets and livelihoods." when referring to the GPL. They see the trees, but miss the forest.
In fact, this brand of BSD-fanatic remind me of nothing as much as McCarthyism - "if it's Communist, it must be Bad!" - only now it's "If it's GPLed, it must be bad!"
Thankfully, there do exist BSD people who do have open minds, and who are willing to listen. There are legitimate fears and uncertainties amongst BSD-style developers that must be addressed, and those of us who "get" what the GPL really means do a poor job of communicating it. And frankly, our chief spokespeople are a little extreme and frightening in their own right. We could do a better job.
But labelling any discussion of GPLing BSD as "flamebait" is misguided - unless, of course, one has reason to fear a well-presented argument for the GPL "converting" BSD developers - meaning, of course, that rational discussion must be prevented at all costs, even if it means resorting to flames and FUD.
Which in my book, would be unethical.
DG
This comment is very late, and I haven't read all the comments on this article, so apologies if someone's already mentioned this.
The basic idea is in the subject line - allow comments to be moderated out of existence (when they get to a score below -1). This doesn't solve the problem completely, but at least the noise in the discussion due to crazy posts won't last too long.
I haven't thought this through completely, but I thought I'd throw the idea out anyway and see what others thought of it.
-Chetan
I think that if you are going to throw away posts, either by IP or by userid, you need to make your "enemies list" public. I'm not saying that no suck blocks should ever be in place, but I do think that when these blocks are imposed, there should be a chance for some public discussion of why.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
Have you considered limiting the number of anonymous posts a registered/logged in user can have in one month? This way you're not eliminating anonymous posting, but people will probably be more conservative with anonymous posting if they know that they can only do it say twice a month. Just my 2 cents.
~Caliban
do not understand the GPL, have not taken the opportunity to attempt to understand the GPL, and who instead mindlessly flame anything and everything covered by the GPL.
All of which is totally incorrect. My characterization of the GPL is based on thorough analysis and is shared by many. But of course, because I disagree with you, I am a "BSD-fanatic." Not.
The fact is that the GPL is designed to destroy markets and deprive programmers of their livelihoods. This goal was (and is) prominently stated by the author of the GPL, Richard Stallman, on the FSF Web site. Sorry, but no attempt to "spin" this intent -- a la Microsoft -- will work; the evidence is there.
--Brett Glass
Really, this bogus "blame everything on Linux users" thing is really grating on the nerves.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
I have my threshold set to 2. Why? Because lately, I don't have time to wade through 300 posts, especially the toll ones, or those of us who are registered who respond to the trolls' nonsense. I also have less time to read slashdot than before. For those of us on the move, reading the top 25 posts out of 300 does wonders. You always get the best comments out of whatever topic interests you.
With that said, I think Rob has done well with his decision. I didn't read the thread that made him do this (yet) but I did read one about a week or two back that was just as bad (somebody saying Windows was the best, etc, etc over and over). And I only saw that because someone who had score of 2 had said something about all the off topic posts. I'm glad we all have a choice to view what we want, but when people just keep posting crap, over and over, it just reminds me of when Usenet went to shit way back when.
We all have to remember though, this is Rob's site, he can be as hard or easy on anyone as he wants, and he should have that right. He's the one who's put in the hours and hours of hard work for all of us. And I for one would like to thank him for making the net a better place, regardless of how many "bad apples" are out there.
Anarchists believe that is possible to exist a system (called anarchism) where people are organized and cooperated without the need of a authority, power or currency.
Read more at: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/
From an anarchist point of view, I think trolls should be just ignored.
"While the popular understanding of anarchism is of a violent, anti-State movement, anarchism is a much more subtle and nuanced tradition then a simple opposition to government power. Anarchists oppose the idea that power and domination are necessary for society, and instead advocate more co-operative, anti-hierarchical forms of social, political and economic organisation." [The Politics of Individualism, p. 106]
-- You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.
-E
> Some of us simply do not wish to have an account with
My main reason still staying anonymous on slashdot is, that the server is based in the USA, a country with nearly no privacy laws at all. It doesn't matter what slashdot does or doesn't do with my datas, the problem is what they can do *legaly* with them.
BTW: That's why I never use yahoo & co. since I've heard, that they do profiling their users etc....
Taco, Have you considered setting the points available in any particular article for each moderator as a ratio of moderators/postings? Having fixed points available isn't going to work, as you can still get spammed. Of course, the s/n ratio increases so this won't be a complete solution. The other thing that seems to be needed is moderation of complete discussion trees. It's disconserting to see a whole bunch of RE:FIRST articles disembodied in the comments after the original article is moderated away. Moderation points should propogate to the replies. Michael
I think a good solution would be a personal kill file, where certain troublesome users could be filtered on an individual basis (or automatically given -1, or 0). This would also be a welcome feature for avoiding Bible thumpers and Mac zealots, since you can't really moderate them down across the board (well you can, but it would be in very poor taste)
This wouldn't help much for AC's, so I propose getting rid of them entirely. If someone waned to post something anonymously, they still could. You could also have 'soft' anonymity, and 'hard' anonymity. With Soft, things like default scores, and kill files would still work. Hard anonymity would strip the identity in the software, forever removing any record of 'who' posted. It would get a +1 score. Perhaps for problem users, we could remove the 'hard' anonymity option
Sorry my writing is so crappy, I just woke up
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
This is the THIRD TIME today he said something insightful that only people who like to browse at -1 could see. Damn Rob, this is TOTALLY FLAWED!!!
is a good idea, but posters who start out at +2 should have the option of starting their post at a lower score. Heck, maybe we should let AC's score themselves -1 when they know they're not adding anything to the conversation so moderators don't have to waste points.
I normally surf at -1, so I see almost all of the posts (unless something gets -2, witch has happened, I had to change my threshold in the URL to see it). At one point I wanted to read the comments on a topic that had received hundreds of posts, so I set my threshold to '1'. The problem was that registered users were replying to ACs, and at '1' it was impossible to follow the discussion. Setting your threshold to 2 would also filter out *a lot* of important information... there isn't really that much moderation going on.
:) and then give them unlimited moderator points
I also think one of the best things that we could do would be to remove the 'automatic' moderators. Instead, moderators should be hand picked based on there posts by Commander Taco, or Hemos or someone. Or me
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
What a crazy idea. Considering /. is now owned by andover and considering andover is charging about 8 times what /. use to charge for advertising, there should be some extra money left over for paying for 1 or perhaps 2, full time person/people to moderate slashdot stories. These people should supplement the automatic moderation points assigned to registered users and their primary goal should be to eliminate obvious trolls and take proper measures to prevent DoS attacks. I think 1 or two full time people working during slashdot's 'prime time of activity' would be more than sufficient to eliminate the aforementioned problem with script kiddies and trolls. Of course, the price of increased subjectivity is more money.
The claim that "he GPL is designed to destroy markets and deprive programmers of their livelihoods" - besides being wrong - is as ad-hominem as any other I've seen.
Prove it. Quote the passages from the FSF website where this aim is stated. You claim evidence: produce it.
And BTW, I never once claimed that you, personally, were a "BSD-Fanatic". You hung that label on yourself, based on my description of same.
Well, if the shoe fits...
You're feeling weird because you've planted both feet at the top of a slippery slope. This is a step outside principles that Slashdot has upheld very well sofar.
The fact that someone can't be bothered to jack up their threshold to 1, and is suddenly offended, is no reason to begin censorship. Period. Increase Slashdot's moderation system's sophistication some other way. I feel like an easily offended person's extreme laziness is contributing to a reduction in MY options, and I'm getting mad.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
Spurtjizz Nutwallop sez, "Made you look! Ha ha!"
You promote an atmosphere of microsoft bashing and other childish behavior. Then you get upset when it attracts people who follow your lead in a different manner?
You are reaping what you have sown.
And what about the useless 'first post' ers? Could be funny, but mostly irritating, especially when there are several 'firsters', each claiming some grand illusion. Good for /. I applaud the effort.
Why not just post anonymous people's IP, so they will either register or fear the threat of being harassed by people?
Currently, if my threshhold is set to 1 and I check "Reparent Highly Rated Comments", then any registered user's followup (no matter how asinine) to a -1 post is reparented and displayed. I would think the purpose of reparenting would be to catch the +2 or +3 responses, but there's no way to have only that happen under the current implemenation.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I'm surprised I haven't seen this suggested yet: What about giving moderators separate +1 and -1 moderation points? So moderators could moderate down without feeling they're wasting moderation points.
Heck, with all the fancy suggestions for fractional and longer-lived moderation points, Slashdot could be turned into a real-life role-playing game, with hit points, magic points, strength, dexterity, and the whole lot. Hey, didn't Ultima III have some spell to magically kill Trolls?
*** Work like a king, command like a slave, create like a dog.
Think of it. Everyone MUST be registered, but they get to choose if they remain anonymous to the public? ('sporty' would be replaced by anonymous coward to the public)
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
First, the moderation system setup by slashdot is the best I have seen. I also like the fact that anonymous posting is allowed, so I can make comments without having to worry about justifying my opinion on some topic to my employer.
The only comments I have just been infuriated by are the "lime and the coconut" posts. Why not give some of the emplyees of Slashdot special powers to mark non-content posts down to -5. This power should never be used to moderate any post which includes an actual opinion, even trolling, as the Slashdoterati will take care of those.
The moderation system seems to me like a gentic algorithm, survival of the fittest. Those users and comments that score highest in the fitness function are rewarded and those that don't are discarded and the loop go on.
;o) ) then slashdot gets left behind.
The thing to be worried about is overadaption to certain ecological niches. Creatures that are supremely adapted to a particular environment don't survive when that environment changes. It is better to maintain flexibility and variety so that different and what appear to be useless and wasteful traits still appear in a population. That way when the the environment changes, when new abilities are needed, they exist in the population. If they don't the population dies out.
To translate back to slashdot. If people who are liked at slashdot are the only ones who score well at slashdot then the varied points of view, the genetic diversity, dies out and we get a bunch of people patting each other on the backs and telling each other how smart they are to use linux and read slashdot. No variety of ideas or insights. No robustness in the population. When things change in the computer industry (well nothing ever changes in computers
Maybe there should be a lottery function thrown in. At random times random idiots should get a whole lot of moderation points regardless of their merit and past performance. Or even because they were such jerks in the past. That way, people would be more cautious how they treat others and what they say because the people "on the outs" with those who temporarily have the "power" might not be the ones with "power" tomorrow.
Read Juan Louis Borges short story I think it is "The Lottery in Babylon"
I think that moderation is working very well on Slashdot. It isn't perfect, but it makes Slashdot much more readable than most of Usenet.
If anything, I would suggest that moderation scores be more fine-grained, say by running from -10 to +100 rather than about -1 to 2 as it is now. In the current system, you see much fewer posts when you raise your threshhold by just one unit, usually excluding far more than I would care to leave out. The effect is that I never adjust my threshhold. I would be much more likely to take advantage of it if I could set it to, say, +40 out of +100.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
If you don't like it, open your own site.
Rob, as i pointed out in the other story which got trolled to death, giving more points oto moderators would effectively cure the trolling problem. Also marking down posts (all posts) with the same IP address would be a nice touch. Im not sure i like or agree with this new system..banning users from posting if they post behind a firewall or proxy with the same ip address is bad imho.
I hope you really don't work with that many people who are like that.
But if you have a better solution, email Rob. Basically he's taking the necessary steps to stop excessive troll-bombing. I don't see another way.
Require all users to log in to post but give a simple checkbox or something to turn on Anonymous posting. Making people type something in and wait for s second might change their mind about posting bars 10,000 times.
For moderators: separate points up and points down. Give more points down.
Only take 1/2 point away when moderating a AC. That way there's twice the number of points to eliminate trolls and twice to raise valid AC comments.
Expect some zealots to use the triple power for something else...
Give us their IP
Real simple, post the IP at some level of abuse and I'm sure we can take care em'.
Seems a little like a vigilante effort but if you knew that some one could show up at your ISP's door you might be a little less of an asshole.
I have read everything raw till now, yesterday was the first time I considered setting a block level.
CC
"Pray arm me further by your reply" Winston Churchill
From reading through the comments one thing in particular jumps out at me. We seem to have people pulling in two conflicting directions. That is some people want to moderate bad comments down and other people want to moderate good comments up.
... the noise floor. Moderators only moderate up out of the noise floor. So, so posts rise only so far, good posts rise higher, etc.
The whole point of the moderation system is to (if I may use an EE metaphor here) lower the noise floor. Ie: to move the useless comments below a certain threshold leaving only good ones above it.
Since the moderation points are a limited resource you want to use them where they will make most difference. Here comes the assumption: there are less good comments than bad ones. Therefore moderating down bad comments is a waste of points.
If everyone starts at a certain intermediate level and posts are moderated up and down then many good and bad posts stay at the default level and a certain few get moderated down and up. This leaves a lot of comments in that intermediate state which is noisy. The points to moderate down comments have been wasted because the only useful 'signal' that's been amplified is in the moderated _up_ comments.
So here's my take: start everyone at the bottom
You see, by keeping Anonymous Posting in this fine establishment, you are actually saying, "We'll give you Freedom of Speech. If you post as an AC, you might start off lower in the score, but hey, you can say what you want."
Now, if you give AC's that power, and enforce these rules, your just putting more restrictions on the people who do good.
I know your dreading my saying this... but moderation needs to be changed. Maybe by making it so when your a moderator, your a moderator for a week, with unlimited points. The first sign of corruption from that moderator would make them lose their status. The unlimited points would allow the moderators to up the articles they enjoy without worrying about spending points to turn posts to Trolls.
Another thing I was thinking of, that would have a DRASTIC effect on the way things are done, would be to actually include the names of the moderators that moderated the post in the header.
This would actually do some great things. With your name up there, your only going to moderate posts where you stand behind your moderation on them. Your not going to moderate a post for the sake of moderating it, or because everyone else is, but because your name is going to be up there for everyone to see, you just might be a little more hesitant. Just an idea...
But the synopsis? If you continue to have Anonymous Coward posting, you continue to support the First Amendment. That means everyone has the right to say anything they want, short of being abusive or causing harm to someone else.
That also means, that if someone wants to say, "Lets kill Bill Gates," they have every right to do so; until Anonymous Posting is taken away.
-Pandaemonium
Only those who escape reality are the ones who truly know reality
Another Idea on how to deal with really offensive posts:
If, say, tree different moderators decide to moderate a post down, they get back the moderation point they used. This way, stamping really obnoxious stuff doesn't cost the moderators any points and can thus be done witout running into the "moderation DoS attack".
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OK...I realize that you may be trolling me, but, given that you have what appears to many to be a legitimate beef, I will address it.
I have seen this complaint posted over and over and over and over, and every time I ask for evidence of such behavior, it is met with deafening silence.
Why don't we take a gamble, and actually look at some evidence?
You gave the example of BSD vs. GPL licensing; let's look at the most two recent threads involving BSD:
The most recent was: Berkeley removes Licensing Clause.
In this thread, contrary to your claims, the highest rated comments are neither pro- or anti- either license (at least not strongly.
Lower down in the thread, we see a post that was moderated down which celebrates the license change and suggests GPLing BSD. It was borderline; it didn't really have any content, so I think it was properly moderated.
On the other hand, Brett Glass (or an AC posting as him) went on a trollfest, starting with an attack on the FSF. Not one of his anti-GPL ravings (which included red-baiting) was moderated down.
In the next most recent thread, Clearing up FreeBSD confusion, which, if it were a post rather than an article, would qualify as borderline flamebait, the most highly rated comment, Try it, then decide for yourself...I know I will is mildly anti-Linux (at least anti-Linux-user).
In summary, the most recent evidence contridicts your claims, and shows that anti-Linux comments are indeed being moderated up, not down.
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Anarchy is a political system with close ties to socialism. Read more at An Anarchist FAQ Webpage .
I can understand why Anonoymous Cowards are needed. Sometimes people don't want/can't have something attributed to them either for job safety or some other situation where saying the wrong things could get someone in trouble. I however don't understand why moderation has to be anonymous. I think alot of bad moderation would be discouraged if people knew that they could be judged by how they moderate. Just put their name on the top of the post or something.
Just what the voices on Echelon have been telling me