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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:
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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Moderation: Discussing !(post^moderate)
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You own a dog, but you can only feed a cat.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday April 01 2014, @07:27AM
Complicated to code because of the way slash handles comments/parenting unless I ping the database a shit ton. That being said, changing the behavior to restore mod points may be the way to go here.
This will require a behavioral logic that after X period of time, points are either not refunded, or rollbacks don't occur to prevent people from being able to get modpoints "on demand" so to speak.
Still always moving
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday April 01 2014, @08:37AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday April 01 2014, @08:56AM
++, 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
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
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Reziac on Wednesday April 02 2014, @10:12PM
I think the reason being unable to mod on a discussion where you've also posted is a concern is because post counts are still relatively small, making it easier to add to a discussion (feel more like you'll be heard) and discussions still need all the comments they can get... meaning LESS chance to spend mod points, because, well, *discussion*.
Second, I'd be more likely to spend all my mod points over 3 days than over 4 or 8 or 24 hours. I take it seriously and I only mod up (a post must be truly egregious before I'll mod down, and I think that's happened all of twice in 15 years). I feel a responsibility to use them well, not to use them fast, and that conflicts with their short shelf life.
Also, I think worrying over "reaching +5" is silly -- if anything, right now a lot of marginal and meh posts are winding up at +4 and +5, probably because the mod points expisre so fast that they're just being flung at the nearest halfway-intelligent comment, oft as not.
In short, I'm good with the slashdot system; obviously it worked very well for a long time, and survived a number of upheavals and shifts in the userbase without becoming either a burden or a drawback to discussion. Let nature take its course and don't try to micromanage, and all will go well.
(Been on the road 4 days and where do I come to catch up on the world? You guessed it. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.