faq  code  awards  privacy  slashNET  older stuff  rob's page  preferences  andover.net  submit story  advertising  supporters  past polls  topics  about  jobs  hof Sections 8/15 apache 8/14 (8) askslashdot 1/27 awards 8/8 books 8/14 (2) bsd 8/14 features 7/28 interviews 6/22 radio 8/14 (2) science 8/14 (5) yro OSDN Freshmeat Linux.com SourceForge ThinkGeek Question  Exchange

Previous section Next section Index What's up with flat/threaded/nested comments? These are just different ways of displaying what can be a rather long list of comments. Here's the rundown: Flat mode displays all the comments in one gigantic list, without showing anything in the way of relationships between comments. Threaded shows a hierarchy of responses, with replies as links to new pages. Nested displays the same hierarchy of responses, but displays all of the comments. (This can be a bitch of a page to render on weaker platforms and in longer discussions.) Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 Why did my comment get deleted? The only time we ever delete comments is if the comment contains malformed HTML that is somehow causing Slashdot to fail to display properly. Comments are not deleted on the basis of content. If you posted a comment and you don't see it now, it may have been moderated down below your threshold (see below). If you set your threshold to -1, you should be able to see it again. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 Why did it take so long for my comment to appear? If the system told you that your comment got submitted, it'll show up. Because of the way data gets cached in our system, it could take as much as ten or fifteen minutes (although it doesn't usually take that long). Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 What's up with "First Post" comments? "First Post" comments are one of those odd little memetic hiccups that come out of nowhere and run amok. Basically, people with altogether far too much spare time sit and reload Slashdot, hoping that they will get the "First Post" in a discussion. This is one of those things that the moderation system was designed to clean up, and for the most part, it works. "First Post" comments usually get moderated down as off-topic almost instantly. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 It seems like the quality of comment posts is declining. Are you doing anything about it? We have a moderation system. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the increasing popularity of Slashdot is that the number of trolls, flame-warriors and all-around lamers increases as well, and it only takes a relatively small number of them to make a lot of noise. Keeping this noise to a minimum is one of the primary goals of the moderation system (which is explained in detail elsewhere in this FAQ). Since this system is essentially an experiment in trying to solve the problems inherent in mass communication, one would expect its success to be variable, and indeed, this is the case. Some days it works great, and some days it doesn't. Answered by: CmdrTaco Maintained by Joe Last Modified: 6/12/00 Moderation seems restrictive. Is it really necessary? In short, yes. As you might have noticed, Slashdot gets a lot of comments. Thousands a day. Tens of thousands a month. At any given time, the database holds 40,000+ comments. A single story might have a thousand replies- and let's be realistic: Not all of the comments are that great. In fact, some are down right terrible, but others are truly gems. The moderation system is designed to sort the gems and the crap from the steady stream of information that flows through the pipe. And wherever possible, it tries to make the readers of the site take on the responsibility. The goal is that each reader will be able to read Slashdot at a level that they find appropriate. The impatient can read nothing at all but the original stories. Some will only want to read the highest rated of comments, some will want to eliminate anonymous posts, and others will want to read every last drip of data, from the First Posts! to the spam. The system we've created here will make that happen. Or at least, it sure will try... Goals 1.Promote quality, discourage crap. 2.Make Slashdot as readable as possible for as many people as possible. 3.Do not require a huge amount of time from any single moderator. 4.Do not allow a single moderator a "reign of terror." On the whole, we think the moderation system works really well, but often people disagree. Their disagreement usually stems from different expectations. They see a bunch of moderations countering each other. They see a comment moderated blatantly wrong. A 'Troll' flagged 'Off topic' (or vice versa) and feel that the system is flawed. Of course it is flawed! It's built upon the efforts of diverse human beings volunteering their time to help! Some humans are selfish and destructive. Others work hard and fair. It's my opinion that the sum of all their efforts is pretty damn good. Read Slashdot at a threshold of 3 and behold the quality of the comments you read. Certainly you aren't reading a wild and freewheeling discussion anymore, but you are reading many valid points from many intelligent people. I am actually pretty amazed. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/26/00 How did the moderation system develop? In order to understand the system, it might help to understand how we got there. It wasn't random, it was trial and error and progression. I'm constantly tweaking and changing, trying to squeeze more out. Trying to make a more efficient, more fair system. Before Moderation In the beginning, Slashdot was small. We got dozens of posts each day, and it was good. The signal was high, the noise was low. Moderation was unnecessary because we were nobody. It was a different world then. Each day we grew, adding more and more users, and increasing the number of comments submitted. As this happened, many users discovered new and annoying ways to abuse the system. The authors had but one option: Delete annoying comments. But as the system grew, we knew that we would never be able to keep up. We were outnumbered. Hand Picked Few So, I picked people to help. Just a few. 25 or so at the end. They were given the simple ability to add or subtract points to comments. The primary function of these brave souls was to weed out spam and First Post and flame bait. Plus, when they found smart stuff, to bring it out. The system worked pretty well, but as Slashdot continued to grow, it was obvious that these 25 people wouldn't be enough to keep up with the thousands of posts we were getting each day. It was obvious that we needed more. 400 Lucky Winners So we picked more the only way we could. Using the actions of the original 25 moderators, we picked 400 more. We picked the 400 people who had posted good comments: comments that had been flagged as the cream of Slashdot. Immediately several dozen of these new moderators had their access revoked for being abusive, but they settled down. At this time I began to experiment with ways of restricting the power of moderators to prevent abuses. 25 people are easy to keep an eye on, but 400 is another matter. I knew that someday I would have even less control since I intended to eventually give access to even more people. While moderators still added and subtracted points, the number of points they were given dropped from hundreds to dozens. As time went on, I began working on the next phase: mass moderation. I learned a lot from having so many moderators. I learned that I needed to limit the power of each person to prevent a single rogue from spoiling it for everyone. And then we took the next step. Today: Most Anyone Today any regular Slashdot reader is probably eligible to become a moderator. A variety of factors weigh into it, but if you are logged in when you browse Slashdot comments, you might occasionally be granted moderator access. Don't worry about it. Just keep reading this document and learn what to do about it! Who It's probably the most difficult part of the process: who is allowed to moderate. On one hand, many people say "Everyone," but I've chosen to avoid that path because the potential for abuse is so great. Instead, I've set up a few simple rules for determining who is eligible to moderate. Logged In User If the system can't keep track, it won't work, so you gotta log in. Sorry if you're paranoid, but this system demands a certain level of accountability. Regular Slashdot Readers The scripts track average accesses from each logged-in user. It then selects eligible users who read an average number of times. The homepage doesn't count either. It then picks users from the middle of the pack- no obsessive compulsive reloaders, and nobody who just happened to read an article this week. Long Time Readers The system throws out the newest few thousand accounts. This prevents people from creating new accounts to simply get moderator access, but more importantly, means that newbies will have to be part of the community for a few weeks before they gain access to the controls to a system they don't understand. Willing to Serve If you don't want to moderate, just visit your user preferences, and set yourself as "Unwilling." Positive Contributors Slashdot tracks your "karma." If you have positive karma, this means you have posted more good comments than bad, and are eligible to moderate. This weeds out spam accounts. The end result is a pool of eligible users that represent (hopefully) average, positive Slashdot contributors. Occasionally (well, every 30 minutes actually), the system checks the number of comments that have been posted, and gives a proportionate number of eligible users "tokens." When any user acquires a certain number of tokens, he or she becomes a moderator. This means that you'll need to be eligible for many of these slices in order to actually gain access. It all works to make sure that everyone takes turns, and nobody can abuse the system, and that only "regular" readers become moderators (as opposed to some random newbie ;) Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 How does moderation work? When moderators are given access, they are given a number of points of influence to play with. Each comment they moderate deducts a point. When they run out of points, they are done serving until next time it is their turn. Moderation takes place by selecting an adjective from a drop down list that appears next to comments containing descriptive words like "Flamebait" or "Informative." Bad words will reduce the comment's score by a single point, and good words increase a comment's score by a single point. All comments are scored on an absolute scale from -1 to 5. Logged-in users start at 1 (although this can vary from 0 to 2 based on their karma) and anonymous users start at 0. Moderators can not participate in the same discussion as both a moderator and a poster. This is to prevent abuses, and while it is one of the more controversial aspects of the system, I'm sticking to it. There are enough lurkers that moderate that, if you want to post, feel free. Moderation points expire after 3 days if they are left unused. You then go back into the pool and might someday be given access again. Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles. And to keep the children who like to spam Slashdot in check. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/19/00 Why didn't I get karma for a Quickie or a Backslash story? This is a shortcoming in the code that we haven't solved yet. Essentially, the system can easily track a submittor of a story and grant them karma, but quickies and backslash each operate differently. A dozen or more people might contribute directly to any one of those stories. The system doesn't really have any internal record to handle sorting out the karma distribution. Besides that, we currently grant 3 karma points for an accepted homepage story. If 10 people each have an entry in the quickies, that's 1/3rd of a point each. Since karma is an integer, that rounds to zero. So just pretend that your karma got rounded out ;) Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/19/00 What are thresholds? Your "threshold" is the minimum score that a comment needs to have if it is to be displayed to you. Comments are scored from -1 to 5, and you can set your threshold at any score within that range. So, for example, if you set your threshold at 2, only comments with scores of 2 or above would be displayed. Setting your threshold at -1 will display all comments. 0 is almost all comments. 1 filters out most Anonymous Cowards, and so on. Higher threshold settings reduce the number of comments you see, but (in theory, anyway) the quality of the posts you do see increases. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 What is karma? Your karma is a score that primarily represents how your comments have been moderated in the past. If a comment you post is moderated up, your karma will rise by 1, and if it is moderated down, you will lose a point. In addition to moderation, other things factor into karma as well. You can get some karma by submitting a story that we decide to post. Also, metamoderation can cause your karma to change. This encourages good moderators, and ideally removes moderator access from bad ones. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/19/00 What is karma good for? Karma is used to determine who moderates and who doesn't. Extremely bad karma usually indicates a user account that is being used to spam the discussion board. Secondly, users with higher karma are given a bonus point. Logged-in users normally post comments with a score of 1, but the theory is that if a user earns higher karma, they may post with a score of 2. Essentially its a reward for being a good participant on Slashdot, or a punishment for being a bad one. Users with very low karma might lose the +1 associated with being a logged-in user. Extremely bad users might even be penalized to a -1. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 Why is my karma not what I expect? If you've been moderating or posting, your karma will likely fluctuate a little as you are moderated or metamoderate. Don't worry about it; this is normal. Please remember that this is just a number in a database that helps us determine who gets selected as a moderator. It doesn't determine your IQ or your value as a human being. It's simply not a big deal. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 Whenever I use my +1 Bonus, I get moderated down and lose Karma! As a good poster, you earned a bonus: you are allowed to speak slightly "louder" then other people. In most cases, this is because you've earned it. But with that right comes a responsibility - you have to justify that bonus score. The louder you speak, the more likely you are to be moderated down, unless you're sufficiently interesting to prompt the moderators to let you keep your bonus score. This is how the system is designed to work: you can't just rack up big karma scores, and then post nonsense. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 I just got moderator access. What do I do? Moderate! Read comments (preferably at a low threshold) and when you see comments that are very insightful, or perhaps just plain off topic, select that option from the drop down list. When you are done, hit the 'Moderate' button. That's it! Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 Why can't I moderate any more? You used up your moderator points. Moderation is like jury duty. You never know when you're gonna have to do it, and when you get it, you only do it for a little bit. Once those points are gone, you're done. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 Why don't you give moderators unlimited moderator access to 5 stories instead of giving them just 5 points? It's a good question. Moderators' primary complaint is that they are often crippled by the tiny amount of points they have, and the overwhelming amount of comments that need moderation. If a good moderator could moderate all the comments in a given story, certainly that would be a great improvement. The problem is that a single bad moderator could wreak havoc across those same 5 stories. By limiting the number of moderation points to 5, any single moderator can only do so much damage. Sure they can only do so much *good* too, but that's the trade-off. I'd rather see a hundred comments unmoderated then see a hundred comments moderated badly by some jerk with an axe to grind. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/26/00 I found a comment that was unfairly moderated! Most of the time we've found that, for every moderator out there pushing an agenda, there are a dozen good moderators making sure that everyone is getting a fair say. However, to the extent that there may be problems with unfair moderation, we have come up with a system of meta-moderation (moderating the moderation) to address this. Answered by: Loon Last Modified: 6/12/00 Is this censorship? I don't think so. Nothing is deleted: if you want to read the raw, uncut Slashdot, simply set your threshold to -1 and go crazy! This system is simply a method for us to try to work together to categorize the thousands of comments that are posted each day in such a way that we can benefit from the wisdom contained in the discussions. It's in there! It just takes some work to find it. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 I found a comment Rated -2 or 6! This is a bug, not a feature. :-) This isn't the Slashdot Big Brother wreaking havocl; rather, it's bug ridden code wreaking havoc! There's a bug in the Slashcode somewhere that causes this to happen. We're working on it, and hopefully, we'll have it squashed soon. (Actually, it hasn't happened in a while, so it may have been fixed.) If you see one of these comments, don't freak out. Let us know about it. We'll push the comment back into range, and try to figure out what caused it. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 What is a good comment? A bad comment? A good comment says something interesting or insightful. It has a link to a relevant piece of information that will add something to the discussion. It might not be Shakespeare, but it's not Beavis and Butthead. It's not off topic or flamey. It doesn't call someone names. It doesn't personally attack someone because of a disagreement of opinion. Some of my favorite "bad" or off-topic comments are things like "Slashdot sucks!" and "This isn't news for nerds!" and "Moderate this XXX!" Any of these may be true, but they're probably off topic! Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 3 days is not enough time to moderate! I disagree. The 3 day limit exists to help push the system along. If users were allowed to hang on to their points, they could save them for a discussion within which they wanted to push an agenda. It's all right if points go unused- points are free, and there are always hundreds of users with more points who can fill in. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 If I Post in a Discussion I moderated, Why Don't I get My Points Back? This is intentional. If you could retrieve your points, you could abuse the system very easily. Here is an example: Naughty Bob moderates 5 comments in a discussion. He uses up his points. Naughty Bob waits 2 days, and then posts a message to that discussion. Naughty Bob gets his 5 moderator points back! GOTO 1 If Naughty Bob was out pushing an agenda, he could keep his 5 points indefinitely, saving them to push discussions around. By taking his points away, he is unable to do that. Now Naughty Bob has to wait until the next time he gets points. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 How can I improve my karma? What follows was originally a story submission by dkh2. It seemed to me that it would better serve readers here: 10 Tips for Improving Your Karma: Post Intelligently: Interesting, insightful, thought provoking comments are rated higher on a fairly consistent basis. Post Calmly: Nobody likes a flame war. In fact, more times than not the flamer gets burned much more than their target."Flame Bait" is hit quickly and consistently with "-1" by moderators. As the bumper sticker says... "Don't be a dick." If You Can't Be Deep, Be Funny: If you don't have something truly developing to the topic, some humor is welcome. Humor is lacking in our lives and will continue to be promoted. Remember though, what rips your sides out may be completely inane to somebody else. Post Early: If an article has over a certain number of posts on it already, yours is less likely to be moderated. This is less likely both statistically (there are more to choose from) and due to positioning (as a moderator I have to actually find your post waaay at the end of a long list.) Post Often: If you only post once a month you can expect your karma to remain low. Also, lively discussion in an open forum is what makes Slashdot really "Rock the Casbah." Stay On Topic: Off topic posts are slapped quickly and consistently with "-1" by moderators. Be Original: Avoid being redundant and just repeating what has already been said. Smirk. Yes, being moderated as "redundant" is worth "-1" to your post and your karma. Especially to be avoided are the "what he said" and "me too" posts. Read It Before You Post: Does it say what you really want it to say? Check your own spelling and grammar. Occasionally, a perfectly beneficial post is passed over by moderators because of this completely irrelevant-to-content feature. This is also a good approach to checking yourself for what you're really saying. Can't tell you the number of times I've stopped myself from saying the opposite of what I meant by checking my own spelling and grammar. Log In As a Registered User: I know, this sounds obvious but, "Anonymous Coward" does not have a karma rating. You can't reap the perceived benefits of your own accidental brilliance if you post anonymously. Have pride in your work and take credit for it. Read Slashdot Regularly: You can't possibly contribute to the discussion if you're not in the room. Come to the party and play. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 What sorts of anti-troll filters exist? A handful of filters have been put into place to try to make sure that people don't abuse the system. The most important is that the same person can't post more than once every 60 seconds. Identical comments are rejected. Also, if a single user is moderated down several times in a short time frame, a 24 hour ban will be imposed on that user... a cooling off period if you will. The vast majority of you will never encounter any of these troll filters. If you do encounter one unfairly, let us know so we can fix it. This stuff is fairly beta code, so there are bound to be problems. Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/12/00 Previous section Next section Index

		Should I start with the time I SWITCHED personalities with a BEATNIK hair stylist or my failure to refer five TEENAGERS to a good OCULIST?
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2000 Andover.Net.