The five-person team behind a simple WordPress plugin, which took three hours to code, never expected to receive worldwide attention as a result. But NRKbeta, the tech-testing group at Norway's largest national media organization, tapped into a meaty vein with the unveiling of last February's Know2Comment, an open source plugin that can attach to any WordPress site's comment section.
"It was a basic idea," NRKbeta developer Ståle Grut told a South By Southwest crowd on Tuesday. "Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it."
[...] NRKbeta took its own advice when a staffer's 2016 article about "pictures of young girls shared on a 'boys forum'" exploded with "shouting and poor discussion" in the comment section. These posts came from readers who don't traditionally visit the NRK's tech-specific subsite, Grut noticed, and his team members decided to write about the rare eruption by asking readers, "What can you learn from meeting the comments section from hell?"
Commenters offered a variety of ideas, which included everything from comment voting to more active moderation. The staff mulled over what they could implement that would be low cost and low impact to its community, and Grut had his own eureka moment while showering before biking to the office: why not a quiz? A WordPress plugin could force users to correctly answer a few multiple-choice questions before the page's comment field would appear. Once he got to the office, he and fellow staffers spent three hours building the plugin, which Grut reminded the crowd is wholly open source.
Source: ArsTechnica
(Score: 3, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday March 18 2018, @09:58AM (13 children)
Get back to us when it works with Slash.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday March 18 2018, @10:17AM (9 children)
You're missing the primary flaw. To answer the questions you'd actually need to RTFA, which would cut allowed commenters for the entire community here down to about three: the first editor, the editor who seconded the story, and someone who randomly happened by for their first visit to the site.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Funny) by RS3 on Sunday March 18 2018, @01:28PM (4 children)
You think anyone reads anything anymore? You sir, are an optimist. I like that.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @04:39PM (2 children)
Apparently it's not required any more, even at the presidential level.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @05:32PM (1 child)
Where are your manners? Don't mess with Mr Clinton.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Tuesday March 20 2018, @05:51PM
George Clinton hasn't been president for over a decade. <sigh>exhales<\sigh>...
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by beckett on Monday March 19 2018, @08:12AM
And My Axe!
(Score: 2) by KiloByte on Sunday March 18 2018, @04:40PM
It's especially the editor who fails to RTFA. To a bigger extent on /., but Soylent isn't immune either.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday March 18 2018, @09:41PM
Furthermore, readers who wish to comment on the topic might happen to subscribe to sites other than those that host the featured article (paywalled) and the secondary source (also paywalled).
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @11:39PM (1 child)
We had a "similar" item around this time last year.
Norwegian Website Requires Readers to Answer 3 Questions Before They Can Comment [soylentnews.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 20 2018, @10:28AM
Well nobody said anything about the eds remembering that they'd read or posted something.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @05:13PM (2 children)
Guess you didn't RTFA, cause you seem to have missed the Github link at the bottom of the summary. "The plugin is made for Wordpress, but the JavaScript component can easily be implemented into other CMS systems as well." Of course very few here care for JS, so it might have to be translated.
You're pretty god at this stuff, you could probably hack this in to SN/ in 30 minutes. Of course getting it past TMB might take weeks, unless his fishing boat is broke.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @11:03PM
> You're pretty god at this stuff,...
I see what you did there!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 20 2018, @10:32AM
Getting it past me wouldn't take that long. I could review the code itself in a morning. Getting Bytram(martyb) to test and sign off on it as QA guy is the bit that would take a while. He's exceedingly anal about his testing, which we lurve about him since he's the one doing all the testing.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jasassin on Sunday March 18 2018, @10:06AM (5 children)
He goes to work and not only him, but his buddies start writing this plugin. Must be a real rough job! I'd get a stern talking to if I went afk for a two minute piss too many times a day. He's lucky he isn't working any of the places I've worked or he'd have been fired!
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @10:22AM
Yes, he is indeed a lucky man, isn't he?
My envy for his working conditions is only overshadowed by my pity for yours. I wish you luck when selecting your next job!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @11:40AM (1 child)
In other words, he's lucky he isn't working in the US. Working conditions in Europe tend to be quite a bit less prison-like. Over the short term it probably hurts productivity, but it does lead to a more relaxed and happier society.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @03:26PM
I doubt you'll find conditions like parent was describing in the tech industry in the US, unless you maybe dropped out of school. Competition is pretty tight now. But the people that have it the best know someone important: there's loads of well-paying, do-nothing jobs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @03:02PM
it seems more like writing the plugin was his job at that time
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Sunday March 18 2018, @11:12PM
He works for a part of NRK, it's the Norwegian state television and radio monopoly. Those things tend to be very laid back even by nordic standards. It's not exactly the private sector.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @11:26AM (3 children)
I tried to RTFA but it's in Norwegian. Not that there's anything wrong with that ... but maybe TFS should mention it.
For those that trust Lé Göøglé, here is a translation. [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday March 18 2018, @12:09PM
Can google translate cope with the quiz?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @12:31PM (1 child)
Those North Weggians - always talking in Weggian.
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Sunday March 18 2018, @12:54PM
yeah, it sounds like English spoken with your mouth full of swedes; only if you listen carefully, you finnish by understanding it's not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday March 18 2018, @01:35PM (5 children)
Seems a multiple choice quiz wouldn't be hard for a blind search bot to beat.
AI can beat most captchas. So I'm a bit surprised captchas remain so popular, but then, they haven't given up on DRM either. Evidently, employing AI isn't so easy.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Sunday March 18 2018, @04:06PM (3 children)
I'm guessing that in the near future the AI will even be able to *make* the stupid comments, leaving us to reach for higher, more worthy goals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @08:19PM (1 child)
You just scared me. What about all the paid astroturfers who will lose their jobs to AI?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Sunday March 18 2018, @09:39PM
As Randall Munroe put it when he described an onboarding flow that begins with a moderation audit followed by a shadowban released once a comment of yours is modded up [xkcd.com]:
Mission. Effing. Accomplished.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday March 18 2018, @08:28PM
> in the near future the AI will even be able to *make* the stupid comments
Hey, I've been doing that for ages!
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Informative) by KiloByte on Sunday March 18 2018, @04:42PM
This has been tackled by XKCD [xkcd.com].
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @04:32PM (1 child)
How long will it take for someone to port this to Congress? The first time you fail a quiz while trying to vote on a bill, it is publicly announced at a press conference. The second time, you are immediately hanged for treason at a press conference.
(Score: 2) by Bobs on Sunday March 18 2018, @06:18PM
Somehow, don't see Congress passing a law like this.
In some states you might get it to land via a ballot initiative [ncsl.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Sunday March 18 2018, @11:05PM (1 child)
Interesting idea, but a bit dated as news..
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @05:31PM
Dated? This was one of the first ways of filtering users. Back when people first started putting up roadblocks, then it was abandoned because it was ineffective. There's only so many questions you can have someone create about a single article without making it too difficult for the readers to answer. Once someone brute forces those questions, bots would easily swamp the comment section. Current systems are designed to make that difficult. The people who wrote this are running in circles ignoring the old cons while being solely focused on the pros. That's a main reason why tech goes through so many of the same cycles over and over again.
The method even pre-dates the world wide web. Floppy-based games used DRM based on reading the manual. "What is the 5th word of paragraph 2 on page 6?" You needed a physical copy of the product instead of just a cloned disk to use the software. One of the first things I used the web for was trying to bypass some of those restrictions. If you got a question like "What was the 1st word..." then you could normally guess "The", "A", "When", etc... and eventually get it right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @11:49AM
uBlock Origin with the Mute filterlist. I never see comments. Ever.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 19 2018, @01:15PM (1 child)
I propose a new plugin: Comment2Read
You can guess what it does from its name.
Hint: you have to post a comment before you are allowed to read the article.
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @04:22PM
But after I post the comment, can I skip the article? or does it become mandatory?