Geez. It’s like you think science works, or something.
Nah, it IS SB’s Powerful magic. 
It’s all strictly the scientific method until I manage to break something, at which point I have to resort to other techniques. 
He has unicorn hair and peanut butter in his wand. Um, don’t try and picture that.
Posts per page selection? I sometimes adjust that for bandwidth.
Unfortunately no. I could probably hack something together though for a sort of alternate view of threads for offline or image-free viewing.
Meanwhile, I’m testing a quick test of the input filters (probably won’t work):
Test
Advanced post editor test.
Test
Test here
Test
Another test
Test
BTW, what are your thoughts on a comment moderation / feedback system?
I don’t know if anything already exists for Drupal, but I’m thinking something like…
- Each comment can be up-voted or down-voted up to one time per user.
- Votes may possibly be more than just plus or minus — qualifiers like “informative”, “insightful”, “funny”, “amazing”, “off-topic”, “redundant”, “flamebait”, “troll”, “overrated”, etc. Similar to slashdot, maybe, or facebook’s new ‘like’ system. (like, wow, lol, angry, flame, …)
- Comments start with 1 point and can go up or down as far as people vote them, but scores below zero won’t be shown.
- Comments with extremely negative scores could possibly be omitted from the default view.
- People who get a lot of downvotes (only flamebait- or troll-category downvotes) may periodically be reviewed, lose permission to vote, and possibly have more serious actions taken.
- If necessary for site performance reasons, comments older than N (120?) days won’t be vote-able, and will have their votes reduced to a sum instead of tracking individual votes. Hopefully this could keep the vote table sizes under control. Or perhaps comments which haven’t received any votes for N days. Or something like that.
This should provide positive reinforcement when people make good posts, but does not reward trolls who aim for extremely low scores. It also helps quantify who causes the most problems, so they can be dealt with. Hopefully it could improve the overall tone of the forum by giving less attention to trolls and more reward for quality comments.
Just something to think about as the forum grows. There’s a point, eventually, when it’s more effective to influence behavior through architectural means rather than doing it on a strictly personal basis.
Edit: It might also be important to not grant voting permission until someone has had their account for a certain length of time and possibly until they have made a certain number of posts, or something like that. To prevent flash mobs of sock puppets, in case that’s a risk worth caring about.
I LOLed
Thanks for your thoughts ToyKeeper.
I’ve stated in the past that I really don’t want BLF to turn into Slashdot/Reddit. From what I’ve seen at those sites, the up/down voting doesn’t really seem to encourage friendliness or helpfulness. Snarky comments are often seen as funny and get huge upvotes, and it actually seems to bring out the worst in people. And as you mentioned, the persistent trolls want to be downvoted, and they continue posting with impunity. Sometimes they even get upvotes from their cliques.
But as you said, it is true that there is a point where it’s hard or impossible to reign people in without a squad of moderators, which I also prefer not to have. I briefly tried implementing a “thanks” kind of button here, which didn’t work for technical reasons, but I could probably work something out. Another option might be an additional button to mark a post as “offensive” but not let others see it. I think that not allowing others to see the number of flags is best, so as to avoid the mob mentality that seems to be stirred up when users see a very high or very low voted post on the likes of Slashdot. But if 10 or 20 people all independently consider a post to be offensive, it’s a pretty safe bet that it is.
So I’m definitely open to ideas (although I still have some other more important features to work through first), but up/down votes visible to everyone definitely sounds like trouble to me.
IMHO I believe BLF is doing very well as is.
This up-voting/down-voting will have unexpected & unintended consequences. It could easily change the tone of BLF.
It will also make it easier for some people to organise against other(s). And some people will become obsessed with their post(s)'s score(s).
I have seen too many wars on other forums, & SB/BLF has succesfully "restrained/constrained/limited" their occurrence to date.
Best Regards,
George
+1,000,000,000,000,000 
Best Regards,
George