Talk:FeatureList

(Pardon my editing. If anyone is more familiar with wiki editing than I, maybe they would care to format this more appropriately. However, I would not appreciate any editing of my comments other than for format.)

MODDING

First: I recommend against allowing mods in any discussion in which you have taken part. Preventing mods only to "your comment chain" would be far too complicated to implement and there are too many potential holes to exploit if someone wants to cheat.

Actually it's not hard to implement. The key here is that CIDs contain an articleID they were posted against, so it's fairly easy to

a) When moderating, check all the posts on an article_ID made by you, then enumerate all ancestors. Check to see if the comment to mod CID matches any in that set. Then enumerate the ancestors of the CID to be modded and match that against the initial list of posts. Any collisions deny the moderation. That's it.

b) When posting, do the same logic except switch the CID of "all my moderations" with "all my existing posts", in a), and then undo all those moderations (could be pushed into a queue, doesn't need to be in a transaction slowing the page refresh).

These queries are fast because they are required for fetching page thread fragments for displaying spill views and comment details (comment perma-link page rendering)

You're right it's not technically complicated. I do this stuff for a living so I know. I should have said unnecessarily complicated. I don't see why it's really a desirable feature. You're opening the door to people gaming the system by modding other comments in the topic that they don't like, in order to support the comments in that topic that they did make. If you mod all your enemies down, and your own and friends' comments up, you distort the whole picture. My opinion is no. It's just a bad idea to allow mods in the same forum you comment in. (Please understand that my intention here is to be constructive. I used to think this should be allowed on the original site too, but after giving it more thought I changed my mind.)

Second: I recommend against giving users the ability to mod ACs up. Why bother? They're ACs. Allow downmodding but not upmodding. That gives them incentive to create an account. (I realize this would penalize the occasional brilliant comment from an AC... still, I say: let them create an account.)

ACs do sometimes post very good content. Sometimes individuals mentioned in an article feel the need to post with some plausible deniability. I'd advise against this. Perhaps a feature might be to simply hide AC posts as a display option (but not the default).

"Sometimes individuals mentioned in an article feel the need to post with some plausible deniability." Regardless of the occasional "good" purpose this can be used for, this is called sock-puppet activity and is pretty universally despised in online forums. Encouraging this kind of behavior will not do your site any favors.

Third: I do not think fractional mod points is a good idea. It adds unnecessary complication, decimal numbers use up more space in the database and add performance penalties, etc. If you want to make some mods worth more than others, make them worth more than one point. E.g., 2 points and 1 point rather than 1 point and 0.5 points.

You wouldn't store decimals, just the traditional modpoints times 2. The fractions are a UI detail and their conversion (and truncation) are a function of the code that prepares fetched data to be templated and rendered to HTML. The reason for adding this is so that the default rendering option still shows a -1 to 5 scale as before, but allows for Funny and Flamebait to be de-emphasized. It's really a matter of empowering the default, non-logged in view, which we can't ignore.

I know how it works. You are still adding needless complication. Regardless of whether it's "just display" or not, you are adding floating-point arithmetic that simply isn't necessary.

"but allows for Funny and Flamebait to be de-emphasized" Why would you want to de-emphasize them? I think Funny is well-deserving of a full point, and Flamebait, while sometimes misused, is still a worthy mod.

Fourth: I would give a lot of strong thought to some kind of means to limit sock-puppet accounts and especially sock-puppet mods. I doubt there is any perfect way to do it, but having many times been victim of sock-puppet mods, I think it should be harder than in the original version. It should also be made clear to users that sock-puppets are considered the lowest of the low by the community. (They already are, but it should be made explicitly clear.)

Perhaps a new requirement is a feature in the backend that uses cookies and/or IP/browser fingerprinting to cluster accounts, and then further watch for correlated activity among them to identify potential sockpuppet accounts. A manual adjudication process would be necessary. While multiple accounts would not be specifically against the ToS, the site would reserve the right to ban accounts believed to be acting in bad faith (trolling, spam, sockpuppetry).

I agree. I think a form in the user area could be used to register a "complaint" about suspected sock-puppet mods. This could run an automatic routine to find correlations to cookies or IPs (cookies is probably more reliable). If that is above a certain threshold, it could be forwarded to moderators for a review. Just an idea, but that would give users a way to complain, without incessantly bothering moderators, yet allow moderators to act if anything is real.

Fifth: I recommend adding an "I disagree" mod, which would be worth +1 point.  :)

Only if you change it to be "Devil's Advocate" and conversely a "Groupthink" downmod at -1. These are more descriptive rather than opinion-based tags (even though they really all are) which are easier to metamod and force you to think about your perception of the community attitude, not just your own.

It was just a joke. I like the groupthink idea, though (a "Kool-Aid" mod). I think it might be abused though.

Sixth: "What about not-posting in the thread where you moderated? Good or bad rule? Maybe if you really must post, allow cryptocoin paying for post?" HELL NO. People should not have more say just because they have more money. This is a very bad idea.

Agreed. This is a dangerous precedence. Also, I don't think it's a good idea to incentive-ize anything beyond low UIDs, more browsing options (site scraping, CPU-taxing searches), maybe auctions for popular channel names to be owner/editor on.

KARMA (CHOPS)

I really don't think mod points or karma should depend on user's customized point systems. Leaving it open to customized scoring could make your karma system vulnerable to cabals of users, unintended consequences, or a form of "elitism" (Good Old Boy Syndrome). It's been known to happen. There should be a clearly articulable standard that cannot be modified by users. Anything else is subject to chaos. If you don't give users a clearly defined standard, they won't know how to behave.

Note about the above: if what was meant was that it shows differently to users based on their custom scorings, fine. But the internal base scoring should not be modifiable by users.

Eeep edit conflict ... YES that's what I meant and I agree

A Karma (or Chops) system needs to go above what the original system uses (only a few levels, with "Excellent" being the top). The current system allows people to receive massive numbers of positive mod points, but still remain at "Excellent" karma, which can be lost in a single day; they can find their karma at 0 if they are ganged up on by others and receive only a few downmods in a single conversation. Yes, it does happen. Karma should be allowed to accumulate (negative OR positive) beyond just a few points on either side of zero. It need not go on forever, but people should be allowed to develop some kind of persistence of positive or negative karma. That way somebody with a few years of good karma won't find themselves below 0 due to a single flamewar. And vice versa.

This already happens from what I understand. Karma isn't totally capped right now on slashdot; there's a functional limit for display purposes and mod perks. I think there's a weighting system where karma for everything older than a few months or so "sum from back then", capped at the functional limit, and then all the subsequent karma-affecting activity since then allows it to go above or below that number, and it's again capped at the limit for checks. And then they summarize the oldest month on some periodic basis into the new "sum from back then", but they again are capping it when stored so all the extra upmods in the past can't outweigh current downmods now.

I don't think they really do this. I say that because I have had many years of good /. karma, with consistently many more upmods than down, only to see it literally disappear in a single day, over a single discussion in which I took a "politically incorrect" position (about 5 downmods). I had to re-build it from scratch. I thought that was really pretty terrible: losing years of reputation in a single discussion. That should not be allowed, but was.

I'd like to continue using such a system so that you're given the ability to carry Chops above the "Excellent" threshold value, but summarization means that you can't "bank" good behavior limitlessly and it also cuts down on expensive database queries for long-lived accounts.

I don't think limitless would be a good idea either. But I also don't think big queries should be necessary. Just accumulate points in a field of the main user record. Allow the accumulation of a certain amount of points above "Excellent", or below "Terrible" (or whatever the low limit is... I've never been there). I don't see the utility of maintaining complex running averages, when a simple accumulator achieves most of the same goals, as long as you let it go somewhat above the top visual rating and below the bottom visual rating. (And as I mentioned before, I don't think the original site actually does averages, either.)

Care should be taken to avoid multiplication of karma points, either positive or negative. I.e., you should not receive more positive points for having positive points.

I can't think of a situation where this occurs as exists or proposed (except with sockpuppetry... )

I agree. I just thought it was worth mention because I had at first misunderstood your description of how reputation is scored. The "Reddit effect" is somewhat minimimized on Slashdot because comments don't move to the top based on their score. But on Reddit (if they still do it the same way) it is a serious positive feedback effect, in which mediocre comments can get shoved to the top if they get a few upmods early, while more insightful comments get buried in the noise. That's not directly related to karma (chops), but the effect should be avoided in any scoring system.