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In this comment, Hyperturtle appeared unclear on how Rehash, the message board software used by SoylentNews, calculated the score of this comment by aristarchus. I'll attempt an explanation. (I took it to a journal because it is technically off-topic.)

Click the comment ID (#773324) to see the comment's moderation details.

Starting Score: 1 point

This is based on the user's karma at the time the user submitted the comment. Comments by users with karma 0 or greater start at 1. Comments by users with karma -1 or less start at 0. Comments by users with strongly negative karma start at -1.

Moderation: +3

The sum of all moderations applied by other SN users to the comment times the default weight for each moderation's reason is 3.

Insightful=1, Informative=1, Funny=1, Disagree=1, Total=4

Four users moderated this comment. One moderated it "Insightful", which is configured with a weight of 1. A second moderated it "Informative", which is configured with a weight of 1. A third moderated it "Funny", which is configured with a weight of 1. A fourth moderated it "Disagree", which is configured with a weight of 0.

Extra 'Disagree' Modifier: 0 (Edit)

Rehash calculates the plurality moderation reason for each comment, breaking ties in some way of which I am unaware. Logged-in users can configure an additional score modifier to apply to comments with each plurality reason. As far as I'm aware, "Overrated" and "Underrated" are excluded from this calculation.

Karma-Bonus Modifier: +1 (Edit)

A user with karma at least 25 or so can choose to apply "karma bonus" to the score of each comment that the user posts. By default, this is +1, but a logged-in user can choose to change this amount. Users with an active subscription to SoylentNews reportedly get another bonus they can apply.

Total Score: 5

The starting score is the sum of the comment's score, weighted moderation, reason modifier if applicable, karma bonus modifier if used, and subscription bonus modifier is used, clamped to the range [-1..5].

Most of Rehash's formula is the same as that of Slash, the software powering Slashdot. Rehash is based on the last public source code release of Slash. At some point, Slashdot had changed the display of moderation reasons to attempt to hide the total number of moderations applied to a particular comment. It instead displays percentages rounded to the nearest ten percent. I assume this change was made because users were bragging about how controversial certain comments were, particularly with respect to this off-topic sub-thread in the 2002 story "Oracle Breakable After All".

Did I get something wrong? Is further clarification needed?

Popular literary analysis wiki TV Tropes has become a pay site. Please consider using All The Tropes instead.

In this comment, c0lo wrote:

you'll have to admit that forced work camps still fit your wording.

From the linked page:

This is page #1 that you have viewed this day

Please consider creating an account or whitelisting our site on AdBlock so that we can continue to remain free for all users.

Allow ads on TV Tropes | Buy an ad removal pass

I'm not using an ad blocker. I'm using the tracking protection feature built into Firefox. This feature is enabled by default in Private Browsing windows, and there is an about:config setting to enable it throughout Firefox. When I followed the "Allow ads on TV Tropes" link, I got instructions for how to disable Adblock Plus. As I have never used Adblock Plus, I followed the "Don't see the red octagon" link and chose "Firefox Private Browsing" from the menu. This gave the following instructions:

If you are using Firefox Private Browsing with Tracking Protection, a shield icon is displayed to the left of the Firefox address bar. Tracking Protection blocks ads from being displayed.

1. Click the shield icon to the left of the address bar.
2. Select "Disable protection for this session".
3. Click "Done" below to close this window and refresh the page.

This is oversimplified. Tracking Protection doesn't block ads from being displayed if they're hosted on the same domain as the website. It blocks only third-party ads based on tracking each viewer's behavior across websites to infer his or her interests in order to stalk the viewer with creepy "retargeting" ads. And these third-party ads have been associated with malware transmission far more often than self-hosted ads. I'm not disabling antivirus just because a website can't fall back to self-hosted ads.

Fortunately, a backup of TV Tropes was taken in early July 2012, prior to TV Tropes' switch from the free CC BY-SA license to a non-free license in likely violation of its contributors' copyrights and its short-lived experiment with assignment of copyright in contributions. This backup was used to seed a fork, called All The Tropes, which is hosted on Miraheze. Instead of carrying advertising, projects on Miraheze are supported the same way as Wikimedia projects, namely through voluntary donations from readers.

The corresponding article on All The Tropes is Literal Genie.

On June 2, in a discussion about whether browsers ought to support JavaScript in the first place, I wrote a comment that cited the article "Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects" by Drew DeVault that recommended IRC over Slack, Skype, Discord, and other proprietary web chat platforms. I mentioned that IRC alone is incomplete for the job without a logging bouncer to keep a log and an attachment pastebin to hold pictures, documents, and the like.

In that comment, I mentioned having read a different article about why IRC is just as bad because real-time communication discriminates against users in minority time zones, who might miss the opportunity to participate due to being asleep or at work. But I couldn't dig it up at the time. Today I happened upon it again: "Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications" by Dave Cheney recommends that projects instead use forum-like asynchronous communication, such as mailing lists and issue trackers, where each thought has its own URI and there's not as much shame in being a day behind.

It goes to show the use of trying different search engines. Google and DuckDuckGo gave different results for a query expressing the key concept that I took from Cheney's article (chat discriminates by time zone). DuckDuckGo pulled up Cheney's article first, while Google tried to second guess what I wanted: "Missing: chat discriminates"