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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: 1) by gishzida on Tuesday April 01 2014, @10:53AM

    by gishzida (2870) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @10:53AM (#24017) Journal

    One added feature of this to be considered is that down mods have more effect for "up leveled" users.

    Let's consider an example: "Jane Moderator" has ten points... She sees that "George Shiny-Karma" has made a bad comment... She down mods him... she does not know he is a "leveled up user" [this is a reason why public ranking might be discouraged... Karma is personal and does not need to be advertised if a person has good Karma it will probably be obvious to other members of the community]. But here is "Shiny-Karma making a bad comment-- so She gives "Shiny-Karma" a down mod... but the effect on Shiny-Karma's points is in proportion to his karmic level.. so if he has hit the 100 point level, the down mod costs 2 points rather than 1 one point... if he is above 200 points in costs him 3 points and so forth...

    The idea here is that a "good" user will pay more heavily for bad behavior... but not terribly so unless the behavior continues. The net effect here is to try to suppress bad behavior at "high levels of Karma" while continuing to reward for good behavior... other added bonuses might be allowing high karmic users able to vote on the inbound article queues or other things that "proven good community member" can be "trusted" to do.

    Think of this "software project" is an "open source news and idea stream". How would you want to reward "commits" and discourage code trash and commentary sludge? Rewards for good behavior should be as good as punishments are bad.

  • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday April 01 2014, @01:05PM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Tuesday April 01 2014, @01:05PM (#24112) Homepage Journal

    The trick here is though that if we have uncapped karma, you'd still need one hell of a hit to make it work, and if someone is vidictively downmodding, it could be UGLY.

    My thought here is to have a second "recent karma" value that goes from -10 to 10, and caps at 10. At 5, you get the +1 bonus, at -5, you post at 0, and each period of aging (once a week?), the value moves closer to 0. This allows a disruptive user to get squelched, and allowed someone who's been vindictively downmodded to recover without loosing months/years of progress.

    --
    Still always moving
    • (Score: 2) by lhsi on Wednesday April 02 2014, @07:29AM

      by lhsi (711) on Wednesday April 02 2014, @07:29AM (#24650) Journal

      if someone is vidictively downmodding, it could be UGLY

      Is it possible/feasible to prevent someone from modding the same user account more than once with the same set of points? I generally prefer the idea of making downmods "cost" more, or restricting them to only one or two downmods per set of points, but limiting downmods to a user could also be considered.