[07-MAR-2016] Current status of BLF upgrade process

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

thats my line :smiley:

I’ve fielded some of my opinions on this before, but since the subject has come up… here they are again! :wink:

  1. A “like” button is good. I see a lot of posts where I have nothing to add but would like to acknowledge that something is cool, informative, etc. IMO this forms the positive reinforcement that TK is looking for, encouraging users to make informative and well thought out posts. I think this is very valuable.
  2. IMO BLF doesn’t have the population / activity levels necessary for effective use of upvote-categorization. Subdividing “votes” into funny / informative / flamebait / whatever will just dilute the affect of the system.
  3. Performance: hmm. Now that I step through a “like system” implementation in my mind I see that this is more complex than my knee-jerk reaction lead me to believe. I wonder how other forum engines do it. I’d love to be able to have the like button active forever. I often run into old posts which I’d like to hit “like” on.
  4. Downvoting is bad. Sometimes users get ganged up on, both elsewhere and here. Being able to automatically hide a post or having any public visibility on downvotes encourages downvote-bullying.
  5. A “Report!” button can be a workable alternative to downvoting, although I’m not certain that we have a genuine need for it. If a user is causing a problem eventually someone will mention it to SB… and since SB’s the only moderator a report button which was as easy to use as the SPAM button would probably be a burden. One alternative might be a “Report!” button which basically lead to a contact form and required a brief summary of the type of problem. Again, I just don’t feel that we have enough bad behavior to merit this sort of thing.

Those are good points. I had considered the downsides of showing downvotes, since that turns trolling into a quantifiable game. However, visibly-quantified upvotes could be a problem too. Even slashdot caps the range at –1 to 5, unlike reddit and digg and facebook. Total opaqueness, or maybe a visible range of 0 to 1 or 0 to 2, might be a preferable approach.

The score could be omitted entirely, or be displayed as merely a smiley if the total is at or above a given level. Users could perhaps see the score for their own above-zero posts (and only their own), or maybe just see a total non-negative karma value for everything they have ever posted. This would still give positive feedback, like a food pellet to let them know they did the dance correctly, but maybe avoid some of the potential downsides.

I have doubts about the value of a lifetime karma score though, since it would mostly just correlate with total posts. It might be more useful as average karma per 100 posts, or simply not shown.

The idea is to ignore (or even hide) bad behavior while rewarding good behavior. And provide some admin-level feedback to show when problems are happening.

I’m definitely onboard with this part.

Thanks for the discussion. I don’t have any answers, just ideas. It’s good to hear what others think, especially when they shoot my ideas full of holes.

I’ve often wanted a ‘like’ button too, but don’t want to cause problems with people competing for the highest score. And hopefully without the problem where unfair and divisive posts get ‘likes’ simply due to causing drama. (more info on this problem)

Avoiding competition could be accomplished with silent voting, making the score private. Maybe only indicate a single level of liked-ness by adding a smiley to the post metadata if the score is above, perhaps, 10. And maybe the post author could see the actual score, but only if it’s above zero.

Discouraging divisive posts might be feasible by allowing downvotes (cancel out upvotes from the “other side”). A post could have a hundred upvotes and a hundred downvotes, and would appear as if nobody cared at all. Except of course the admin would potentially be able to see this and use it as a sign of trouble.

Or there could be a totally separate type of downvote, a “this person is behaving badly” button. If someone gets too many of these votes in a given amount of time, or if a thread gets a lot of these, it would indicate that some sort of action might be appropriate.

Or maybe BLF simply isn’t big enough to need this sort of thing, and I just enjoy social architecture puzzles too much. :slight_smile:

I’m perfectly ok with SB as the sole arbiter with no buttons. I’m leery of a disconnect between a button and the reason for pressing it. Even if misunderstood, a posted response contains some effort at communication from which something can be learned. Some can’t learn or won’t try and I’d prefer them posting where that lack shows rather hiding behind a veil of legitimacy. Easier isn’t always better. Ok, enough of cynicism, I’m way to serious. How about a dunking machine? Enough negative hits and you get splashed without being banned or with positive ones get a brass ring/star in either case you don’t see it coming and it doesn’t last beyond your latest session.

:smiley: thanks RBD

I do like the idea of a thanks button, but i found it becomes about getting more thanks, a numbers game, so probably better to avoid it
I do wish we had a report post button, SB has mentioned many times not to use the spam button as a report button so a separate let SB know about this post would be a useful addition

+1

+2 :smiley:

+3.999999 O:-)

I’m probably over-complicating things again. I’m getting the feeling that I’m designing some sort of handlebar heating mesh, powered by dynamos attached to the wheels, to keep my hands warm during cold winter bike rides. Maybe it could even use body heat, transferred via tubes with one-way valves from the torso to the fingers and back, pumped by the sheer motion of activity. That way it could work for joggers too. Finally, a way to avoid frozen fingers during winter activities!

And then someone comes along and says, “Wear gloves, dummy.”

And finally the bumbling fool is enlightened.

But usually there is no passing sage, so I spend life dancing around good ideas without ever seeing the gloves.

Perhaps the answers would be more clear if I got a good night’s sleep, but I just can’t seem to get the calibration quite right on my spring-and-pulley configurable night-time horizontal body-suspension system.

Keep it up TK, I’m a big Rueben Goldberg fan.

I find Bort thinks several steps ahead and most people think he behaves like your explanation then wonder why the next step burned them (while Bort shakes his head). Systems thinking is awesome, but sometimes we miss the obvious while 99% of the time we do better then we would otherwise.