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posted by Blackmoore on Monday December 08 2014, @09:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain dept.

I've been hinting around about this for a week or two, so here it is. I circulated this proposal around the staff mailing list before Thanksgiving and got nobody telling me it sucks and to die in a fire, so it falls to you lot to do it if necessary. Let's be clear beforehand though. This is not a complete solution; no meta-mod consideration included for instance. Nor is it a permanent change. What it is is an experiment. Unless you lot are overwhelmingly opposed, we'll run it for a month or two and either keep it, keep parts of it, or trash it entirely based on staff and community feedback. We're not the other site and this isn't Beta; what we as a community want is what's going to happen.

So, here's the deal with the bit that's likely to be most controversial right out front. Bad downmods and mod-bombing both suck hardcore but you can't really get rid of them and still have downmods even with meta-moderation because you still have the same ideologically driven few who think Troll/Flamebait/Overrated means Disagree. To that end, I converted all the downmods to +0 mods and added a proper Disagree +0 mod. They affect neither score of the comment nor karma of the commenter but will show up beside the comment score (and be subject to user adjustment from their comments preferences page) if they hold a majority vote. It'll be entirely possible, for instance, to have a +5 Troll comment and equally possible that the same comment will show as -1 Troll to someone who has Troll set to -6 in their preferences.

Underrated and Overrated are also out. For Underrated, I for one would really like to know why you think it's underrated. For Overrated, it was almost exclusively used as Disagree, which we now have.

Second, everyone who's been registered for a month or more gets five mod points a day. We're not getting enough mods on comments to suit the number of comments; this should have been tweaked a while back but we quite frankly just let it slip through the cracks. Also, the zero-mod system will need the extra points to reliably push comments from +5 insightful to +5 Flamebait if they warrant it. We may end up tweaking this number as necessary to find the right balance during The Experiment.

Third, we're introducing a new Spam mod. As of this writing it's a -1 to comment score and a -10 to the commenter's karma; this may very well change. Sounds easily abused, yeah? Not so much. Every comment with this mod applied to it will have a link out beside the score that any staff with editor or above clearance on the main site (this excludes me by the way) can simply click to undo every aspect of the spam moderation and ban the moderator(s) who said it was from moderating. First time for a month, second time for six months; these also are arbitrary numbers that could easily change. So, what qualifies as spam so you don't inadvertently get mod-banned?

  • Proper spam. Anything whose primary purpose is advertisement.
  • HOSTS/GNAA/etc... type posts. Recurring, useless annoyances we're all familiar with.
  • Posts so offtopic and lacking value to even be a troll that they can't be called anything else. See here for an example.

Caveats about banning aside, if something is really spam, please use the mod. It will make it much, much easier for us to find spam posts and attempt to block the spammers. One SELECT statement period vs one per post level of easier.

Lastly, if I can find it and change it in time for thorough testing on dev, we'll be doing away with mod-then-post in favor of mod-and-post. Without proper downmods, there's really just no point in limiting you on when you can moderate a comment.

Right, that's pretty much it. Flame or agree as the spirit moves you. Suggestions will all be read and considered but getting them debated, coded, and tested before the January release will be a bit tricky for all but the exceedingly simple ones.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 09 2014, @01:36AM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Tuesday December 09 2014, @01:36AM (#123991) Homepage Journal

    For your "prove it" card's answer. I offer the Scientific Method: Research, Hypothesis, Experiment, Analyze Results. The Experiment will be along very late December or more likely the first week of January and we all get to find out together if we have a Theory or just a few salvageable bits of code.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 09 2014, @02:52AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 09 2014, @02:52AM (#124024)

    That of course is a ridiculous response, as I knew it would be.

    All it would take to "prove it" is an analysis of all down-mods with evaluation as to whether or not they are were even somewhat justifiable. Probably take about a day, maybe two, of effort with access to the back-end database - run a report to list all of those posts along with the post they were responding too and the summary they were posted too. But you haven't done that. Furthermore, even your bullshit answer won't cut it either because without a baseline to compare it to your "experiment" is meaningless - how do you intend to show an improvement in quality of moderations if you don't even know what the current quality of moderations is?

    This is all just self-indulgent fucking around simply because you can. Give a man a little power and not enough real work to keep him occupied and this is exactly the kind of thing that happens. Just like every government ever.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 09 2014, @03:14AM

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Tuesday December 09 2014, @03:14AM (#124035) Homepage Journal

      And if I did all that, you still wouldn't believe me because you hadn't run the queries and seen the evidence yourself. You're not a person who's willing to be pleased on this matter no matter what you're told unless I'm terribly misreading you.

      Which is entirely beside the point. Perception is the key here and if enough users perceive a problem, then it is a problem; period. I don't know if you honestly care about the issue or if you're just trolling but the result is going to be the same either way: when the community says there's a mod problem, we're going to try and fix it.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday December 09 2014, @03:56PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday December 09 2014, @03:56PM (#124208)

      All it would take to "prove it" is an analysis of all down-mods with evaluation as to whether or not they are were even somewhat justifiable. Probably take about a day, maybe two, of effort with access to the back-end database

      How the hell would you do that? It's wildly subjective.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"