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posted by martyb on Friday June 25 2021, @12:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the The-Mod-Squad dept.

There has been some discussion about moderation on this site leading to some misconceptions and misstatements. This story is an attempt to set things straight. It lays out the historical underpinnings for moderation, history of its implementation on Slashdot, and its later refinement on SoylentNews.

Before that, though, I am going to take this opportunity to thank fnord666 who is out Alternate Editor-in-Chief. I could not handle the load alone and his efforts have made a huge difference! Further, please join me in thanking him as he reached a new milestone: over 6,500 stories posted to the site! Many a late night or rare free moment has been generously given to the site. Teamwork++!

History:
The code for this site is a fork of code written for Slashdot. In that site's early days, it was apparent that some comments were much more interesting and informative than others. It was just as apparent that some users would just as gleefully troll the community. Moderation was conceived as a way to sift the wheat from the chaff and help users more easily avoid the "lesser" comments and more easily find the "gems".

Further, to encourage posting "good" comments, Karma was introduced. "Good" comments earned Karma; "bad" comments lost Karma. Moderation was a mechanism by which Karma could be allocated.

Slashdot experimented with several ways to moderate comments. First, it was just the staff who could moderate. Soon, there were too many comments to keep up, so a select group of members from the community were invited to moderate comments. Again, that failed to scale up, so those who had been selected were invited to recommend still other users to moderate. And, again, there were scaling issues.

Solution: make Mod Points (modpoints) available to every registered user in good standing and who indicated in their preferences that they were willing to moderate.

Originally, mod points were handed out randomly and expired after something like 6 hours: "Use 'em or lose 'em".

For the most part, that seemed to work. But there were some perceived issues and meta-moderation was implemented and introduced — moderate the moderations. Unfortunately, it experienced many of the same issues that it was supposed to rectify with comments, just one level abstracted. Further, it was unwieldy and when all was said and done, didn't work all that well, anyway.

Early Tweaking:
Such was the state of things when SoylentNews started. Well sort of. The code base we started with was not current and the meta-moderation code was broken. So much so, that meta-moderation was ripped out of the code just so regular moderation could be made to work. With that behind us, we finally we had a working moderation system on our site. Yay!

That worked okay for a while, but we found ourselves with complaints from many users that they wanted to moderate and lacked mod points. Nice problem to have, right? This was combined with many more comments than moderations. It was thought that we needed more mod points made available to the community. So, after unsuccessfully tweaking the mod point allocation algorithm, it was decided to just not expire mod points until day's end. Every user in good standing got 5 mod points each morning (00:10 UTC) and those were available until day's end whereupon any remaining modpoints were reset and a new set of 5 of modpoints were allocated.

That helped! But jerks will be jerks.

Mod Bombs:
We started to run into problems with "mod bombs" where one user "A" would apply all 5 of their mod points to downmod one other user "B". So code was written to allow checking for such moderations. Staff could generate a report and find such activity. It was decided that:

If you used ALL of your modpoints to downmod ONE user, that was a modbomb. IOW, 5 downmods bad; 4 downmods were permitted.

Initially, anyone who "modbombed" was manually given a "timeout". The first time earned a one month suspension of moderation privileges. A second occurrence earned a six month suspension.

Later, because there were still many more comments than moderations, the number of modpoints allocated to each registered user having good Karma was increased from 5 to 10 per day. The modbomb threshold was, however, kept the same: 4 downmods was still okay, 5 (or more) downmods to the same user was "bad".

A complication arose in that there is no easy way for users to keep track of how many downmods they had made on one other user. User "A" may do 3 downmods of user "B" in the morning and 4 down mods of other (unrelated) users. In the afternoon they might perform 2 more downmods of user "B". Purely unintentional transgression. When you only have 5 mod points it was reasonable to assume that a user could mentally track how many times they downmodded a single user in one day. With 10 daily mod points available, that became less reasonable.

So, along with the allocation of 10 modpoints per day (easy) it was intended to have code written that would kick in when processing moderations: when the threshold was exceeded, the excess downmods would be automatically rejected. And that is still the intent.

The upshot of all that is that when checking for modbombs, we no longer give a "timeout" for 5 downmods against a single user in one day. We just revert the excess mods. We do take note of repeated excesses and are fully prepared to issue a "timeout" when warranted. (e.g. 8 downmods in one day, or several days in close proximity targeting the same user. This is not done unilaterally but rather in consultation with other staff for confirmation.)

Sock Bombs:
First, there some who failed to take the hint that, maybe, they should take a look at what they were posting when they received repeated downmods. We are a community, not your personal soapbox. So, they created new ("sock puppet") accounts and proceeded to upmod their own comments, aka a "sockbomb". Staff have ways to note such behavior based on the IPID and SUBNETID that is recorded with every comment and every moderation. We try to give the benefit of the doubt. But, certain patterns do become apparent and are not tolerated. Upmodding your own comment is grounds for an immediate moderation ban.

Second, just as there is a limit on how many downmods can be targeted at one user in a day, so there is a limit on upmods. The same limits apply, each user "A" is limited to 4 upmods of user "B" in a given day, just like for "modbombs". Again with the caveat of no up-mods of your own account..

Summary:
Our experience is that the current system could stand some refinement, automation of transgression detection and mitigation is in plan (but it will be a while), but for the most part, what we have works well in the vast majority of cases. In short, Wheaton's Law still applies: "don't be a dick". Following that seems to work the best for the most. (With apologies to anyone named Richard. =)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Friday June 25 2021, @04:44PM (10 children)

    by looorg (578) on Friday June 25 2021, @04:44PM (#1149163)

    I think that is more in line with how you mod, with your "real" account, if you have one.

    I try to stick with the tripple-I mods for the most part for things that I do find interesting (etc), it can still be things that I don't particularly care for. If a post is to be modded as Funny I at least have to chuckle a bit as I read it. Touche is self-explanatory. I don't think I use the others to much, mostly cause my points tend to run out before I get to the annoying posts, ie there are more interesting posts then posts I don't care for. I think I have learned to mentally just phase out all the jew-shit-posts etc.

    Still perhaps it would be funny, or interesting, if you could see the spread of your mods, but it might not be possible I guess.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @06:31PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @06:31PM (#1149232)

    "My mods?" I am AC and have never had an account. I'm the guy who says he values his privacy. My solution to dealing with junk posts is to just skim over them.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @06:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @06:43PM (#1149237)

      --nomsg

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 26 2021, @02:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 26 2021, @02:55PM (#1149649)
      It would be trivial to add the ability for ACs who have never registered an account to be able to moderate. You already have all the info you need in the logs to create a shadow account and award them mod points same as everyone else.

      So either moderation is important enough to give it to ACs (who apparently post some of the best comments) or it's just b0rked. Or both.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @08:30PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @08:30PM (#1149305)
    Why not have Funny add to karma? After all, it does in real life. Someone who can be both helpful and funny is much more appreciated than a grumpy sullen whatever.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @10:23PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @10:23PM (#1149367)

      I believe it's to discourage people from going for funny all the time, leaving the site without any productive discourse. Funny is all well and good, but without people engaged in more useful discourse, I wouldn't come here.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @11:35PM (4 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @11:35PM (#1149389)

        Funny is all well and good, but without people engaged in more useful discourse, I wouldn't come here.

        The fact you can't think a useful discourse could be funny too? That is sad indeed. In the name of the rose, Jorge.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 26 2021, @03:32AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 26 2021, @03:32AM (#1149489)

          That's what those other mods are for. In cases like that, you'd use informative, underrated or insightful.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 26 2021, @04:04AM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 26 2021, @04:04AM (#1149495)
          They probably also don't get satire. eing funny while skewering and barbecuing sacred cows is something ourt jesters turned into an art.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 26 2021, @11:03AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 26 2021, @11:03AM (#1149582)

            here, you dropped these; B, c.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 27 2021, @02:39AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 27 2021, @02:39AM (#1149846)
              That's _e_ause I'm wat_hing TV. Judging from oth_r _omments, I'm not alone. Smartphones make me stupid.