Slashdot Mirror
More Moderation Madness
Karma
By far the most popular topic is karma. When it was just called "Points" nobody really cared, but now that I changed the name to "Karma" everyone has input on it. Must have a few MUDers out there.
Since I intend to start using karma in a few other places, I added a field to display it on your user preferences page. I might add it to the comments display, but I'm holding on that for now since it will
just clutter things up.
Default Comment Scores
For many moons now, users with high or low karma were given either a +1 (k:25) or -1 (k:-10) on their comments. Yesterday I added an additional -1 (k:-20) that I have since removed. Many people argued reasonably against it, so its gone.
In addition, I added a much requested feature to allow posters to optionally pass on the +1 bonus when they post. Many people who have earned the bonus point occasionally wanted to say something that they didn't feel deserved the bonus. I guess thats fair.
Anonymous Posting w/o Logging Out
Due to popular demand, I've added an option to allow logged in users to post anonymously. If you use this option, you are every bit as anonymous as you would be if you had logged out, except if
you have a +1 bonus, your comment will still get it.
At some point I may eliminate the old AC posting in favor of this one, if only to eliminate a certain amount of knee-jerk posting, but I'm not convinced on this one. I really believe that people should be able to post anonymously, and this system while it still allows that, it would require a login. Its just a hoop- the comment is every bit as anonymous, but I suspect I'll take some flame for making people jump through the hoop. Then again, the flamers are probably a large part of the problem ;) Anyway, I'm not sold on the idea, so I'll probably leave it as is.
Meta Moderation
So who moderates the moderators? Every day comments are mailed to me with a note saying 'this comment was unfairly moderated'. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're wrong. But regardless, it seems like the community should be able to regulate this itself. So I've implemented MetaModeration.
I'm debugging it now, and it should be online within the next few days, but I want to post the concept for evaluation:
Basically, anyone who is eligible to moderate is eligible to MetaModerate [M2]. (Registered users with non-negative karma who have had accounts for "awhile" (the definition of which is likely to change but right now is probably a month or so)).
An M2 gets 10 comments, and the moderation done to them. They are then asked to decide if the moderation was fair or unfair. The opinion of the M2 affects the original moderators karma. In otherwords, if you moderate good, you get better karma, you moderate bad, you lose the ability to moderate in the future. As a side bonus, users will get some karma (on a sliding scale so it won't be much) for being an M2.
Its just a thin layer of accountability, but if everyone plays fair, it'll work. (Just please don't start asking for M3 or M4 moderation or I'll start crying).
Some other stuff
So I labored on my labor day (and Andover even has it officially listed as a holiday!) Thanks for all the feedback (good and bad!) in the last few days, please keep it up. I'm sorry we can't implement all the suggestions, but of course some of them aren't feasible, and some are just silly. But as a whole, I think we're getting better. (Or at least my TODO list is getting shorter ;)
If in the future, people are required to give a handle or an email address to post "anonymously", their identity could be compromised, since /. would have an email address that might be possible to use to track down the person.
Not that I don't trust Rob and Co. with my privacy-- they have proved time and time again to be reliable. But such a record of the source of "anonymous" postings might even be exploited against their will.
Case in point: some guy X posts something "anonymously" in slashdot that offends some powerful company. Company considers the post to be difamatory, and demands slashdot give the email address of the poster. Slashdot refuses; the company sues slashdot for their posting records.
Even if the suit is unsuccessful, it wouldn't definitely be nice for /. to get harrassed.
---
I mentioned this in another thread, but bottom-line "Anonymous Posting Is Golden" evidence can be found at the following URLs, posted during the NSA Backdoor discussions:
3 /0940241&cid=13 3 /0940241&cid=79
http://www.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/09/0
http://www.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/09/0
Read these to understand why AC posts are excellent to have around.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
i've noticed that sometimes you see real gems maybe three or four levels of replies deep in a conversation.. i mean, stuff that is within the context of that particular thread, but still brings up a point that everyone ought to see.
The thing where it always displays the full text of posts score:4 or higher is nice, but the problem is the moderators usually don't bother reading messages nested that deep. so they just scroll by without even knowing that message is there, and it stays at score:1.
maybe you ought to set up some kind of flagging system, something where everyone, even non-moderators can say "this derserves moderating up".. and even though it wouldn't count in points, a little red icon invisible to non-moderators would appear next to the posting's listing in the parent threads. so that the moderators would know it's worth looking at.
I dunno how well this would work-- seems pretty easy to abuse. You'd have to set it up so people couldn't flag their own posts.. might be worth thinking about though.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
*I also posted this in the slashdot poll*
... so we should think of ways to make it better.
The Steven's piece has pointed out several weaknesses in Slashdot moderation. If Slashdot moderation were ideal all you would have to do is set your threshold to 1 and you wouldn't have to worry about this. This is not an ideal system
Here are some of the previous proposals:
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1) Make it easier to score thing negative.
The current moderation system can be overloaded by spam like attacks. This is useful because you want moderation pts spent on finding good posts, not weeding out bad ones. But how do you make sure this is not abused? or that valid but possibly inflammatory comments are not marked down? Both things will happen.
2) Eliminate Anonymous Cowardice...
This sounds extreme.. even if we do something simple like requiring a mail address to post I think many good comments from knowledgeable
sources will not be made.
3) Combat moderator overload by making more moderators
The problem here is that average posts may get marked higher than they should.
Here goes what I propose as a solution.
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1) Make the score system secondary to classification system. Let moderators classify posts as "Funny", "Informative", or "Flamebait" without spending pts. This way a post might show up as 30%flamebait but 70% funny. This make fair moderation a non-issue because every moderator gets a say about every post. Add a second category to measure the quality of the post as "Must Read", "Good Read", or "Average" this might cost points to moderate or simply be an average of what all the moderators think.
2) Instead of having moderators make only 5 moderations take a look at post volume on that subject. Discussion threads with a very high number of posts need more moderation than normal. Detect this and let moderators make multiple changes cheaply in these threads.
2) Personalize the scoring system for each reader. Already in preferences there are ways to add pts to long posts or subtract from short. This would be an extension to let the reader decide what kind of posts show up. Here goes a list of possible features.
1) each feature listed here may be turned on or off in preferences
2) add/subtract pts to posts from certain authors.
3) subtract pts from all AC's
4) add/subtract from certain types of posts -i.e. humor +1 flamebait -1.
Be insightful. If you can't be insightful, be informative.
If you can't be informative, use my name