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posted by NCommander on Tuesday April 01 2014, @07:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the now-with-longer-half-lifes dept.
*cough*

Ok, I meant to have an open forum about moderation *way* before this point. I did read the various feedback and comments left on my journal and the last moderation, and have made some changes to the moderation system.

First, mod points now expire after eight hours. I'm willing to extend this to 12 or 16 hours after I'm sure comments will still reach +5 fairly regularly. With luck, we'll get to the point we can extend mod-points to last a full 24 hours which I suspect will end most of the complaining on them vanishing too soon.

Second, I'd like to open the floor to making a more fundamental change to the moderation system. Specifically, allowing people to post AND moderate in the same discussion. We've seen plenty of posts get up to +5, which means 3-4 people gave up their right to post to keep our comments high quality. This was brought up during our last plea for stories, and I wanted to solicit more feedback before unleashing this upon the site.

I've floated the idea on IRC, and it seems there's a fair bit of support for removing the post/moderate split, though we'd need to make some changes to prevent rampant abuse. Here's what was suggested to keep things sane:
  • Mod points won't roll back after a post
  • Moderators can post in the same discussion (either before or after moderating), but can not moderate replies to their posts.

I've heard various ideas such as limiting it only after mods have expended their points (this will require implementing a cooldown to prevent a user from getting points again too soon). I want to hear your feedback, and I'll roll together something for the next major update of the site. Leave your comments

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday April 01 2014, @08:37AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @08:37AM (#23971) Journal
    Stick a thread id into the db then. Every new root comment gets a new one, every comment that is a reply inherits. No moderation if you've posted something with the same thread id as the one you're trying to modify.
    --
    sudo mod me up
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=3, Total=3
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday April 01 2014, @08:56AM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Tuesday April 01 2014, @08:56AM (#23983) Homepage Journal

    ++, figure we can cache the value if need be in the database. We can write a slashd check to generate them retroactively by walking the parent on every comment to generate a thread id (which we can pin out somewhere on the comment bar). A good way to limit moderation to specific threads.

    --
    Still always moving
    • (Score: 2) by TheLink on Wednesday April 02 2014, @04:29AM

      by TheLink (332) on Wednesday April 02 2014, @04:29AM (#24615) Journal
      What I'd really prefer is the ability for users to hide an entire thread/branch for themselves alone. Some stories attract "the same old arguments" over and over again. So it will be useful if we can hide|close/unhide|expand threads/branches. Nice but not so important would be a way to toggle all the custom hiding. The hiding shouldn't persist- if you reload/leave the page it should all be forgotten- this should reduce server resource requirements.

      And back to the topic, I used to call the thread id stuff a "genealogy" - each comment would have a genealogy- which is actually all its ancestor's IDs concatenated together. The genealogy can get quite long though. So you might not want to do that sort of thing.

      I don't actually care much either way - modding and commenting on the same story or not. Even if you implement your "no mod on same thread" thing I bet you'd still have people creating multiple accounts to do so, so you could save a fair bit of work by just not allowing it and then the people who really want to do it will create multiple accounts :).

      But if you really want to go overboard and use lots of resources you could allow users to create "Points of Views" - then you can choose to see a discussion as modded by a particular Point of View. After some number crunching of all the PoVs with some fancy math that I don't know but mathematicians must have figured out years ago, you can probably generate Top X group PoVs. But this is probably more useful for something like NetFlix, Amazon, Ebay (which have the problem of not realizing that sometimes you're not picking stuff for yourself, but for your aunt/niece - it doesn't mean you want a zillion "My Little Pony" suggestions just because you bought one item - and it'll be helpful if you can go she likes X Y Z, hates ABC, and the site says ok try shopping with this PoV). But I digress :p.