SoylentNews

So for the curious (or the morbid), I thought I'd do a bit of a writeup on how modpoints worked in the stock slashcode. To my knowledge, this is how they work on slashdot.org today, and all other Slash sites.That being said, caveat emperor. I'm not QUITE sure I understood the code correctly, and I'm writing this from memory, but if enough people want it, I'll fish the old code out of git, and paste it here.

In stock slashcode, every user has something called a "Token" count, which represents their chances at getting modpoints. The best way to think of tokens is like chances at winning a raffle. Keep this in mind, as it will become relevant in short order. Tokens are (theoretically) generated from various clicks in the site UI,and are granted off some serious voodoo involving magic numbers, and other such insanity.

My best understanding is tokens are only issued after a specific random number of clicks are hit, and are later pulled out of the access log by the process_modertion slashd script. But more on that later. The logic that does this is fairly uncommented perl spread across several perl modules, so its rather hard to keep track off.

Tokens convert to modpoints on a strict ratio (if I remember correctly, its 8 tokens becomes one mod point, so you need at least 40 tokens to be eligible to receive modpoints, stock slash only hands out modpoints in increments of five).

Having tokens is not however enough to make you eligible for mod points, it only represents your chances at getting modpoints. When process_moderate kicked, it would go through and essentially dump the entire user table for users that had tokens, were willing to moderate, was not banned from moderation and within the 80% percentile of oldest accounts. This is where metamoderation comes into play. (note: this was true when metamod existed, firehose replaced it, and I have no idea how the logic (if at all) has been changed to handle that)

For users that had been metamodded, those acted as a weight, either increasing or decreasing your chances at getting modpoints in the system. For moderations that were good, you got additional chances in the index, and the reverse decreased them. It also appears that your individual metamods were (somehow) taken into account, but I haven't quite pierced the logic of that. As the metamod module is broken, I never looked to see how it works in practice.

Now, none of this promises you'll actually GET modpoints. As I said, its a raffle. And its a raffle that includes accounts that been inactive but still have tokens. At this point, random users are choosen to get modpoints, which then converts your tokens to modpoints. If you get picked more than once, then you get another increment of 5.

So far, so good? Right now, you might be asking what's the problem with that. Aside from being perhaps a bit longwinded, there seems to be nothing wrong. The problem isn't that the algorithm is wrong, its fundamentally broken.

If you want a hint, I recommend checking out http://slashdot.jp or http://barrapunto.com/ (which are the only other slash sites still on the net that I know of), and look for +5 comments. Take your time, I'll wait.

The problem comes from what ISN'T in the algorithm; it takes no account into how many modpoints MUST be in circulation. I had the advantage of being a frequent poster on macslash.org while it was still around. In the years I was active on that site, I can count the number of +5 comments I saw on one hand. +4s were almost just as rare.

For a comment from an normal user to get to +5, it needs four seperate people with mod points to vote it up four times, and it needs that many people who 1. have modpoint 2. want to use them 3. want to use them on THAT comment.

That's a lot of freaking ifs. While this site was still in closed-testing, the stock modpoint algorithm ran from Monday to Friday until I ripped it out and replaced it with my version of it. In that entire time, it issued a grand whooping total of 10 modpoints (5 to my dummy account which I use for account testing, I don't remember where the other 5 went). At that point, we were getting about 20 comments per article.

In short, the stock modpoint method is not only broken, it is fundamentally broken, and it only works on Slashdot because their userbase is large enough that it works out of dumb luck. Even then, I question that as a lot of good comments never seem to get to +2 or +3, let alone the higher tears. This is was prompted the rewrite, which I'll document in my next journal.

Testing some UTF-8:

占星術を科学的でないと考える米国人の割合が減少しているという米国立科学財団(NSF)のリポート(/.J記事)に対し、実は「占星術

Current dev notes:

Admin privs work, sec levels are as such
100 = editor
500 = editor with security (can use security page)
1000 = admin
10000 = su_admin