The problem with M2 feedback is that it would likely be depressing. I don't think users would necessarily be *encouraged* when they see that they just M2'd 10 times, and there are 10,000 remaining M2s in the system;) And as for total M2s, we actually have that value internally, but I'm hesitant to post it because, like karma, it might be turned into a game.
I hadn't thought about 'Shadowing' a journal into a story for a journals section. Thats not a bad idea, except that I suspect that many journals will become "Good" only by reading the comments posted. So the shadow sorta penalizes the comment posters. Plus it means that a general user would essentially be seeing something different then the author who 'Approved' the story in the first place.
As for what I do, I delete submissions, read email, keep track of who's doing what, manage bugs in teh source forge project page, delete more submissions, read our anti robot reports, moderate, decide policy, and hopefully when all of that is done, try to design new functionality
for the site, keep track of scheduling to make sure someone is always on the site. I'm a manager you see- a PHB. Truth be told there's very little time for that. I spent 2 full work days posting comments, and replying to email realted to the TMF plum. Thank god we don't do that every week.
M2 Feedback I just don't know what information would be helpful. Maybe some general stats.... like 14,000 comments pending M2? Thing is that M2 uses 5-7 'votes' on each M1, so "Done" takes awhile;)
Journal Ratings the problem with "Higher Karma" voting higher is that Karma is highly gamable. The more you work with it, the more you learn to understand what it means. Bad karma means an untrustworthy user, but high karma doesn't necessarily mean that the user is good. Some of the most obnoxious trolls on Slashdot have good karma.
I'd rather make such an indicator more transparent. Perhaps a factor of reads, posts, moderation, and karma. We'd likely still have some thin level of editor approval for cool journals to be approved by authors, and also, accepted journals would also become uneditable by the author. We have to be careful to not allow someone to get their journal accepted, and then replace the text with COCK SHIT ASS FUCK BITCH;)
As for what we're busy with, Krow is busy with slash functionality specific to other OSDN sites besides Slashdot. Pudge is working on anti robot measures, Cowboyneal has a few bugs to fix, Jamie is working on all sorts of subscriber related functions. You can usually get a good idea of what we're working on by checking out the SourceForge project page. Anything with a high priority assigned to someone is usually being worked on. We always have "Secret" stuff that you guys can't see (like stuff related to denial of service attacks, robots, trolling, security etc etc) but you can often see with a quick glance of the 'Bugs' page and the 'Features' page what stuff is on the TODO list.
I don't know offhand how many comments get more than 10 moderations, but thats not really my point. Even if we said the number was like 7, the point is that after a certain number of eyeballs, moderators should move on. We usually have 2x the comments as we do the moderations after all...
As for "Penalizing" users with the +1 Karma Bonus, I'm sure we could solve that somehow. Regardless, this is a hypothetical feature, and not one I see a huge need for by itself. I really think that this is a fundamental issue with our existing scoring system, and one that would be more easily solved by rewriting the scoring code. I have a plan for that (see my journal for various notes) where the +1 Karma Bonus wouldn't matter so much.
Yeah, there's no way to read -1's with upmods, but they also are a rarity. I'm hesitant to implement a feature like this simply because I don't really know how I could do it intelligently in the UI. One of the core design decisions of the moderation system is that moderation should happen as part of your normal reading... what you describe would perhaps be nice, but it would require a lot of extra effort on the moderators part. You might do it, but I really doubt very many people would bother.
Yes, we're concerned with the mod point inflation. We had a *huge* change in dynamic when we altered the index to include a note telling users when they had mod points. This caused hundreds (perhaps thousands) of additional moderation points to be used every day... hundreds of users didn't realize they had points (remember that 50% of our readers don't regularly read comments).
There are a few solutions to this problem. A simple one would be to make the leap from Score:4 to Score:5 to require 2 mod points. Essentially creating Score:4.5. Of course this gets messy really fast.
As for cutting the number of mod points in half, I simply disagree. If we had more meta moderation occuring, I'd rather *double* the mod points in the system, and rework the scoring system. I think we have enough data that we could rank every comment in a given story from best to worst, and then assign the score based on that. In that case, more mod points would mean (hopefully) a more accurate sort.
But that folks, is a lot of work, and is well beyond the scope of this discussion;)
There is no way to see the Top N comments based on moderator points used on them currently.
In fact, I probably will eventually make such a stat totally worthless by capping moderation. I really think that the difference between a comment rated 4 and 5 is pretty much irrelevant. I'd prefer to "End" moderation after, say, 10 moderations. At some point, we're just nitpicking anyway... so lets force users to move on to more comments. The point of the mod system isn't to haggle over those last points... is a 5 overrated or a 4 underrated...
The 10 hot comments box is worthless. Its only here for legacy.
I think an indicator of an articles value would simply be the quantity of upmods given to it, and an indicator of a discussion quality would be some sort of ratio of up to down to total comments. I've never really thought through what exactly that would be. It certainly could be used to generate a Top Discussions list... or perhaps a top Journals list somehow. Certainly worth thinking about.
Context Yeah, its hard to miss that link that says 'See Context' immediately adjacent to the radio buttons for Fair & Unfair;)
M2 Feedback Yeah I guess I hadn't really thought so much about that. Someone should submit a feature request asking for more M2 feedback. I bet we could provide some nice charts or something in response to M2 so users could see where we were at at some point in time. Those charts wouldn't be real time or anything, but it would at least let people know where we're at.
Journals Those are all reasonable suggestions but there's a lot of potential for problems. You hit on a few of the problems, for example a "Cool" journal gets promoted, so the posting restrictions would have to change. I wouldn't want that to happen to my nice private little journal, so that would have to be an option. Plus we'd have to make sure that users can moderate their own journal. We could use other factors as well (number of logged in users who visited the journal? number of posts? Number of up moderations?) but each of those can be gamed with a robot or something, so there's more to it then that.
As I said before, this is a complex problem that I would love to see solved, but don't really have the time to design the solution, and slahsteam doesn't have much time to code it...
It depends on the patch. If someone pulled an item out of the SourceForge TODO list and submitted a patch, and we really wanted the feature, we'd definitely work with them. However we're pretty hard about UI and Performance. We don't necessarily give paragraphs of feedback for a 12 line patch, but if someone went and implemented a feature we really wanted, we'd work with them. We don't get very many patches after all.
There's also a mailing list and a website to follow, although those tend to be more of tech support for people who can't figure something out for themselves and less of 'Heres a great new feature I coded'
wrt to meta moderation, there is a link to see context. And yeah, you can M2 twice a day now. Or don't. But we really need people to M2 for moderation to work. We break even on M2 most of the time, but some days we run short... that means less accurate M2, which means bad moderation can be missed. On the whole, M2 works pretty well tho.
We plan to expand journals at some point, but its a lot of work to do a good job of it. This is definitely an area where a user could come in and design a system that we could consider: code to rate hot journals somehow in real time to make a journals.slashdot.org that was really useful.
There are technical issues with changing the range from -1..10. The biggest problem I see is that creates a confusing divide between "New" and "Old" stories. A user sets his threshold to 7, suddenly sees 0 comments on old stories!
No, I think the real solution is to change the meaning of scores from -1..5. I've written a few journal entries on the subject, and don't really feel like repeating myself now tho. Lets save that for another day.
I just don't think your fears would actually play out as you do. Maybe I'm just more trusting. Maybe I just understand the moderation system better and the limits imposed on people.
If someone posts early, they will be seen by more people. So if they troll, they will be moderated down. Repeated down mods lowers your starting score, and your chance to mod.
Certainly it could be done. But its a lot harder then you're making it seem. Sure, the $5 for a Slashdot subscription is negligible, but crafting a troll that would escape moderation, especially when placed under increased visibility that posting during this window would cause, well lets just say its not going to work any better than it already does.
I guess my point is that if this could happen, it is already. Changing post times won't really matter much. In fact, I think it could seriously improve posting.
Because AC posting allows a user to circumvent moderation to a certain extent.
The Karma Bonus is a good example- using it increases the chance that you will be moderated down. This creates a balance: Use it properly, or you will get moderated down. If this happens enough, you loose the bonus.
If we force users to be logged in to post during the TMF Window, they are accountable for their words. They'll perhaps think twice. And the end result will hopefully be a better discussion.
I only mind when the gaming aspect overrides the posting of quality insightful interesting informative content. Unfortunately a large part of trolling comes from the days of karma whoring. So the "Game" actually causes poor content to be intentionally posted to lure moderation away from "Real" content.
The real variable here of course is what ratio of users post AC vs Not, what ratio post good vs bad, and then how many people actually subscribe.
Half our posts are AC. Of the logged in users, it'll be interesting to see what % of them both post & subscribe.
My point is that if there are only 1000 users who Login, Post Logged in, and Subscribe, then that 20 minute window could be awful quiet... not fun for anyone.
I don't know, it'll really depend on the % of active logged in posters who are also subscribers. That number is going to change dramatically over the next week since our subscriber numbers obviously spiked yesterday.
There is only 1 person guaranteed to be online from 8am until midnight on Slashdot. The so called "Daddy Pants" for that shift. So a 3-way signoff isn't possible. Usually there is 2-3 people available, but we can't require more than 1. You still want content, right?
As for the rest, well we can always just disagree;)
My point is that writing code for Slashdot is much harder then saying "I don't like zoo and I think it should do this and that".
We love patches. But especially for anything relating to the homepage display time generation, and moderation, we need to really be careful. Besides our hardware limitations, you have to think of security, and the potential for gaming of the system.
It's very tricky and we screw up a lot. But I gotta admit, I find it frusterating when people say they don't like something and propose something that clearly would be better... but there's no way we could computationally do it given our hardware limitations.
Fortunately hardware keeps getting cheaper. If Slashdot keeps surviving, we'll need to constatnly upgrade the databases... and that means more cycles for features!
Right. I think that this is the biggest argument for allowing posts during TMF. But posts during that window will need disclaimers during posting telling posters that the story could be rejected at any time... and users will be able to assign scoring bonus/penalties to early comments.
Well in all fairness, that FAQ is way out of date. We've got 3-4 databases now, and a dozen webheads, plus numerous machines relating to development not in there. If weeks were longer, the FAQ would be more up to date;)
No way, we're money grubbing whores. Karma for Kash! I can see the bumper stickers already.... I'd totally do it if we had the time. If only to prove to people that karma is not important! Next time I guess I'll have to remember to amplify the sarcasm too.
Forcing a delay for ACs is something we've considered in the past, but we've always rejected it. The logic is that ACs have a lower score *already*. How much more "Punishment" do they need? Set your threshold to 1, and they're gone.
I would like to tie scores into some sort of delta since posting to sort of normalize scores over time. 1 mod point used on a comment posted 12 hours after the story goes live probably means as much as 2 mod points used 1 hour after the story posted, simply because of the number of eyeballs involved.
As for more stories, we've definitely stepped up teh story posting in the last year, but I don't know how much more we really want to stretch it. When we have good stories we always post them... at some point tho, more stories means a quality hit.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with M2 feedback is that it would likely be depressing. I don't think users would necessarily be *encouraged* when they see that they just M2'd 10 times, and there are 10,000 remaining M2s in the system ;) And as for total M2s, we actually have that value internally, but I'm hesitant to post it because, like karma, it might be turned into a game.
I hadn't thought about 'Shadowing' a journal into a story for a journals section. Thats not a bad idea, except that I suspect that many journals will become "Good" only by reading the comments posted. So the shadow sorta penalizes the comment posters. Plus it means that a general user would essentially be seeing something different then the author who 'Approved' the story in the first place.
As for what I do, I delete submissions, read email, keep track of who's doing what, manage bugs in teh source forge project page, delete more submissions, read our anti robot reports, moderate, decide policy, and hopefully when all of that is done, try to design new functionality for the site, keep track of scheduling to make sure someone is always on the site. I'm a manager you see- a PHB. Truth be told there's very little time for that. I spent 2 full work days posting comments, and replying to email realted to the TMF plum. Thank god we don't do that every week.
M2 Feedback I just don't know what information would be helpful. Maybe some general stats.... like 14,000 comments pending M2? Thing is that M2 uses 5-7 'votes' on each M1, so "Done" takes awhile ;)
Journal Ratings the problem with "Higher Karma" voting higher is that Karma is highly gamable. The more you work with it, the more you learn to understand what it means. Bad karma means an untrustworthy user, but high karma doesn't necessarily mean that the user is good. Some of the most obnoxious trolls on Slashdot have good karma.
I'd rather make such an indicator more transparent. Perhaps a factor of reads, posts, moderation, and karma. We'd likely still have some thin level of editor approval for cool journals to be approved by authors, and also, accepted journals would also become uneditable by the author. We have to be careful to not allow someone to get their journal accepted, and then replace the text with COCK SHIT ASS FUCK BITCH ;)
As for what we're busy with, Krow is busy with slash functionality specific to other OSDN sites besides Slashdot. Pudge is working on anti robot measures, Cowboyneal has a few bugs to fix, Jamie is working on all sorts of subscriber related functions. You can usually get a good idea of what we're working on by checking out the SourceForge project page. Anything with a high priority assigned to someone is usually being worked on. We always have "Secret" stuff that you guys can't see (like stuff related to denial of service attacks, robots, trolling, security etc etc) but you can often see with a quick glance of the 'Bugs' page and the 'Features' page what stuff is on the TODO list.
As for "Penalizing" users with the +1 Karma Bonus, I'm sure we could solve that somehow. Regardless, this is a hypothetical feature, and not one I see a huge need for by itself. I really think that this is a fundamental issue with our existing scoring system, and one that would be more easily solved by rewriting the scoring code. I have a plan for that (see my journal for various notes) where the +1 Karma Bonus wouldn't matter so much.
Yeah, there's no way to read -1's with upmods, but they also are a rarity. I'm hesitant to implement a feature like this simply because I don't really know how I could do it intelligently in the UI. One of the core design decisions of the moderation system is that moderation should happen as part of your normal reading... what you describe would perhaps be nice, but it would require a lot of extra effort on the moderators part. You might do it, but I really doubt very many people would bother.
Yes, we're concerned with the mod point inflation. We had a *huge* change in dynamic when we altered the index to include a note telling users when they had mod points. This caused hundreds (perhaps thousands) of additional moderation points to be used every day... hundreds of users didn't realize they had points (remember that 50% of our readers don't regularly read comments).
There are a few solutions to this problem. A simple one would be to make the leap from Score:4 to Score:5 to require 2 mod points. Essentially creating Score:4.5. Of course this gets messy really fast.
As for cutting the number of mod points in half, I simply disagree. If we had more meta moderation occuring, I'd rather *double* the mod points in the system, and rework the scoring system. I think we have enough data that we could rank every comment in a given story from best to worst, and then assign the score based on that. In that case, more mod points would mean (hopefully) a more accurate sort.
But that folks, is a lot of work, and is well beyond the scope of this discussion ;)
In fact, I probably will eventually make such a stat totally worthless by capping moderation. I really think that the difference between a comment rated 4 and 5 is pretty much irrelevant. I'd prefer to "End" moderation after, say, 10 moderations. At some point, we're just nitpicking anyway... so lets force users to move on to more comments. The point of the mod system isn't to haggle over those last points... is a 5 overrated or a 4 underrated...
The 10 hot comments box is worthless. Its only here for legacy.
I think an indicator of an articles value would simply be the quantity of upmods given to it, and an indicator of a discussion quality would be some sort of ratio of up to down to total comments. I've never really thought through what exactly that would be. It certainly could be used to generate a Top Discussions list... or perhaps a top Journals list somehow. Certainly worth thinking about.
M2 Feedback Yeah I guess I hadn't really thought so much about that. Someone should submit a feature request asking for more M2 feedback. I bet we could provide some nice charts or something in response to M2 so users could see where we were at at some point in time. Those charts wouldn't be real time or anything, but it would at least let people know where we're at.
Journals Those are all reasonable suggestions but there's a lot of potential for problems. You hit on a few of the problems, for example a "Cool" journal gets promoted, so the posting restrictions would have to change. I wouldn't want that to happen to my nice private little journal, so that would have to be an option. Plus we'd have to make sure that users can moderate their own journal. We could use other factors as well (number of logged in users who visited the journal? number of posts? Number of up moderations?) but each of those can be gamed with a robot or something, so there's more to it then that.
As I said before, this is a complex problem that I would love to see solved, but don't really have the time to design the solution, and slahsteam doesn't have much time to code it...
There's also a mailing list and a website to follow, although those tend to be more of tech support for people who can't figure something out for themselves and less of 'Heres a great new feature I coded'
We plan to expand journals at some point, but its a lot of work to do a good job of it. This is definitely an area where a user could come in and design a system that we could consider: code to rate hot journals somehow in real time to make a journals.slashdot.org that was really useful.
We just disagree about what means "Quality" for Slashdot I guess ;)
No, I think the real solution is to change the meaning of scores from -1..5. I've written a few journal entries on the subject, and don't really feel like repeating myself now tho. Lets save that for another day.
We intentionally suppressed the time stamps to discourage trolling or crapflooding.
My thoughts are that if we allow posting, we must allow moderation during the same window.
Write an email.
If someone posts early, they will be seen by more people. So if they troll, they will be moderated down. Repeated down mods lowers your starting score, and your chance to mod.
Certainly it could be done. But its a lot harder then you're making it seem. Sure, the $5 for a Slashdot subscription is negligible, but crafting a troll that would escape moderation, especially when placed under increased visibility that posting during this window would cause, well lets just say its not going to work any better than it already does.
I guess my point is that if this could happen, it is already. Changing post times won't really matter much. In fact, I think it could seriously improve posting.
The Karma Bonus is a good example- using it increases the chance that you will be moderated down. This creates a balance: Use it properly, or you will get moderated down. If this happens enough, you loose the bonus.
If we force users to be logged in to post during the TMF Window, they are accountable for their words. They'll perhaps think twice. And the end result will hopefully be a better discussion.
I'm not opposed to a peer review of the homepage stories, but why add some clumsy oversimplified webform when its just better to send a message!
That is the problem that I avoid like the plague.
Half our posts are AC. Of the logged in users, it'll be interesting to see what % of them both post & subscribe.
My point is that if there are only 1000 users who Login, Post Logged in, and Subscribe, then that 20 minute window could be awful quiet... not fun for anyone.
I don't know, it'll really depend on the % of active logged in posters who are also subscribers. That number is going to change dramatically over the next week since our subscriber numbers obviously spiked yesterday.
As for the rest, well we can always just disagree ;)
We love patches. But especially for anything relating to the homepage display time generation, and moderation, we need to really be careful. Besides our hardware limitations, you have to think of security, and the potential for gaming of the system.
It's very tricky and we screw up a lot. But I gotta admit, I find it frusterating when people say they don't like something and propose something that clearly would be better... but there's no way we could computationally do it given our hardware limitations.
Fortunately hardware keeps getting cheaper. If Slashdot keeps surviving, we'll need to constatnly upgrade the databases... and that means more cycles for features!
Right. I think that this is the biggest argument for allowing posts during TMF. But posts during that window will need disclaimers during posting telling posters that the story could be rejected at any time... and users will be able to assign scoring bonus/penalties to early comments.
Well in all fairness, that FAQ is way out of date. We've got 3-4 databases now, and a dozen webheads, plus numerous machines relating to development not in there. If weeks were longer, the FAQ would be more up to date ;)
Yes, whatever, and Yes. But you'll have to wait a bit for that ;)
No way, we're money grubbing whores. Karma for Kash! I can see the bumper stickers already.... I'd totally do it if we had the time. If only to prove to people that karma is not important! Next time I guess I'll have to remember to amplify the sarcasm too.
I would like to tie scores into some sort of delta since posting to sort of normalize scores over time. 1 mod point used on a comment posted 12 hours after the story goes live probably means as much as 2 mod points used 1 hour after the story posted, simply because of the number of eyeballs involved.
As for more stories, we've definitely stepped up teh story posting in the last year, but I don't know how much more we really want to stretch it. When we have good stories we always post them... at some point tho, more stories means a quality hit.