Here's a really simple and elegant way to age a poster's average score, or "rating" as I'll call it.
As suggested above, wait a week for scores to 'freeze.'
Then, take 80% of the current rating (e.g. 80% of 3.0 = 2.4) and 20% of the most recent score (e.g. 20% of 5.0 = 1.0). Add them up for the new rating (2.4 + 1.0 = 3.4).
This makes a rating that's exponentially weighted towards more recent posts. It's very very easy to code, and it's easy to tweak the weighting of older versus newer posts.
Now, as for what to do with this rating:
There's obviously huge advantages to including the rating in the filters somehow. This would enable readers to see a new post by a thoughtful commenter, which otherwise would languish in 1-point land until a moderator bumped it.
On the other hand, we don't want to rely *only* on the rating -- then we'd lost the value of each individual post, and we'd be denied great posts by new or sometimes flame-baiting commentors.
Options include taking the higher of the rating or the post score, or averaging them, or keeping the two numbers separate, and letting readers filter for either one.
I suggest that again, we use a simple weighted average, say, 40% rating, and 60% the score of the post.
Anyway, just some more thoughts to throw in the mix...
Slashdot Mirror
Some thoughts on score-averaging:
Here's a really simple and elegant way to age a poster's average score, or "rating" as I'll call it.
As suggested above, wait a week for scores to 'freeze.'
Then, take 80% of the current rating (e.g. 80% of 3.0 = 2.4) and 20% of the most recent score (e.g. 20% of 5.0 = 1.0). Add them up for the new rating (2.4 + 1.0 = 3.4).
This makes a rating that's exponentially weighted towards more recent posts. It's very very easy to code, and it's easy to tweak the weighting of older versus newer posts.
Now, as for what to do with this rating:
There's obviously huge advantages to including the rating in the filters somehow. This would enable readers to see a new post by a thoughtful commenter, which otherwise would languish in 1-point land until a moderator bumped it.
On the other hand, we don't want to rely *only* on the rating -- then we'd lost the value of each individual post, and we'd be denied great posts by new or sometimes flame-baiting commentors.
Options include taking the higher of the rating or the post score, or averaging them, or keeping the two numbers separate, and letting readers filter for either one.
I suggest that again, we use a simple weighted average, say, 40% rating, and 60% the score of the post.
Anyway, just some more thoughts to throw in the mix...