Next Generation Comment Moderation for the Dot
While KDE 4.1 is really shaping up there are still some things that are really lagging behind in the land of the Kool, namely, the websites. If you've read comments on dot.kde.org within the last couple years you will have realized that like every other online community the quality of the comments range from being completely awesome, and also all the way down to being something akin to pond scum. It is the Internet after all, and on the Internet, everyone is our neighbor (including people with way too much time on their hands).
This is a poor situation, and really a sieve is needed to filter the gold out of the stream. For instance, Slashdot has an excellent comment moderation system that is user driven.
There is however a problem. The software which the Dot is running on is incredibly old. It's using Python from eight years ago. Which makes trying to do updates to this system difficult at best.
So something needs to change. But thankfully, many open source content management systems have become powerful and mature in the last eight years. One of those is Drupal. Drupal has a lot of strong points. It is extensible, so if we ever wanted to expand the capabilities of the Dot we could. It has a large developer community, so that bugs are quickly fixed, and we can see serious improvements in a reasonable amount of time. It is already being used for a number of KDE sites. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the KDE and Drupal communities are similar in nature and attitude and anything which would foster more collaboration between the two would be awesome. Drupal would be an excellent choice for bringing web services to the KDE desktop.
So, where do I come into this? I work a lot with Drupal, and right now Drupal is the leading choice to replace the software which currently runs dot.kde.org. I will be writing a comment moderation module for Drupal and I will be helping to port over stories and comments from the Dot (which danimo will be helping me a lot with I'm sure :). The comment moderation will be community driven (ala Slashdot), and may have some other features. So I ask you (the Internet of course), what would you like to see comment moderation wise on the Dot? I can't guarantee that I'll implement every suggestion, but I will read your comments.
This is just the first of many changes that will come to the Dot, and over the next couple of months there will be a lot of improvements. Stay tuned!
Comments
Ranking Staus
Well one thing I would like to know is would individuals all hold the same weight? If everyone is modding down someone would the votes they put in have the same weight as someone who consistently submits community approved things?
Another is categorization of moderation. Will someone who is new in the community be able to go through the comments of old articles (to them of course) and see why certain people/comments are rejected or praised? I've no real idea how it would work in terms of flexibility while still being concise and understandable but We have had in recent history as well as many times in the past people who have through built relationships been able to make good comments or references that may not be instantly recognizable by someone new or someone can after many times of being corrected bring up the same FUDish tired arguement which may seem reasonable as a one time arguement to someone glancing at it. (I'm rambling now I'll stop)
Third thing is can we pretty please have an option to not use JS? ^_^ I know that there are many good uses for it but sometimes it can be problematic. I've seen some moderation systems that literally fade out words to the same colour as the background as they get modded down. Not asking that there is no fancy popNswish (since we are making a mod system that befits the renewed impressive KDE) but if possible one that can still be successfully used even when caught in plainer environments.
Thanks a lot for undertaking this! How much work will be required to import the old articles? doesn't sound like great fun.
One thing at a time
At first at least, everyone will have equal weight. I'm trying to keep things relatively simple at first, and in the future I will begin to tweak the system. This is because I don't know exactly what the winning formula will be right off the bat, but with some experience I think that what's going to work will become clear.
At first there won't be any categorization. Again, for now I'm sticking to the basics and creating a simple but robust system, bells and whistles will be added. In the future, users will probably have "Karma" and that will pretty much determine how much their votes count. If you have bad Karma it will be somewhere between 0 and 1. If you have good karma it will be somewhere above 1.
Well, for now, there won't be too much fancy JS, and I'm following the Drupal way (more or less) so as far as I know, everything will be non-js accessible. This is something that I will make sure to test nonetheless because I know that not all browsers handle JS well.
Cool
Cool! It's good to hear that The Dot will get updated!
Stuff from Slashdot that
Stuff from Slashdot that would be welcome:
Give people with a SVN account a starting score of say +2.
Who should be able to mod? I say copy Digg: everyone, always, but require registration. Random gits who happened to hit The Dot will be too lazy to go through that.
Hope something good comes out of this.. might even get me posting on The Dot again.
Hehe that's quite a list
Hehe that's quite a list :p
one thing which would be on my wish list: be able to see insightful comments on trolls. That could mean that the top-level post is visible, the troll reply is not (or collapsed), but the insightful reply to that is visible.
I think this saves us from more trolling because the good explanations won't be hidden.
Ya, probably be taking a lot of Slashdot
Eventually, there will probably be a lot of those features. I don't know if I will put them all in right away, my first goal is to get the basic functionality down.
Admin mode
While community rating and hiding of comments under a certain threshold is nice there should be two ways to ensure that bullshit is hidden and that developers can still speak:
- each logged in member (= KDE community people) with a certain trust should always be above a certain threshold with his/her comments
- there should be some ways for elected administrators to quickly shut down/delete hostile threads
most excellent
nothing fancy is needed, as soon as user moderation is functional and we can prevent ourselves from reading the mind boggling comments, it is ready to go.I m glad to hear that you took it into your hands, thanks.
Comment Bury/Promote
Great to hear someone is going to work on this. There is already a module floating around which seems to do what you're suggesting, maybe you could use it as a starting point:
http://drupal.org/project/comment_bury_promote
I've checked it out
I've looked at comment bury promote, however things will be running on Drupal 6 so this won't work out. Also, it kind of lacks abstraction, you can't vote on other things like nodes or users. Because of this, I will be writing something using Voting API which has a lot of compelling features. This also seems to be the way preferred my fellow Drupal developers.