sb56637 wrote:

HKJ wrote:

It looks like I subscribe to any thread I look in.

I believe it’s a glitch due to the other functions being temporarily disabled, but at any rate I also temporarily disabled the subscriptions system.

Slight problem observed. Let’s say I am on page 4 of the home page threads, and then select one of the threads there to read, which takes me to that thread. At this point, if I then want to go back to the thread listings on page 4 where I started, I use the back arrow on my browser (Chrome), and it now takes me all the way back to page 1, instead of page 4 like it used to. Should’t it go back to where you originated once you leave the thread??

Now works just like it used to. Thanks for the quick fix.

sb56637 wrote:

Hi everyone, I’m temporarily disabling the spam moderation and post subscription systems for a few hours to gauge the effect on system load. Sorry for the inconvenience!

ToyKeeper wrote:

sb56637 wrote:

Hi everyone, I’m temporarily disabling the spam moderation and post subscription systems for a few hours to gauge the effect on system load. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Geez. It’s like you think science works, or something.

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.

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.

ToyKeeper wrote:

but does not reward trolls who aim for extremely low scores.

ToyKeeper wrote:

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.

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

sb56637 wrote:

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.

+1,000,000,000,000,000 

Best Regards,

George

keengeorge wrote:

+1,000,000,000,000,000 

 

Best Regards,

George

raccoon city wrote:

keengeorge wrote:

+1,000,000,000,000,000 

 

Best Regards,

George

alt=" />

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

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.

sb56637 wrote:

I really don’t want BLF to turn into Slashdot/Reddit. … (and details about why)

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.

ToyKeeper wrote:

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.