Comment Rating System Now Working!

The Mensactivism.org "comment rating/moderation system" has been broken for a long time, and I finally got around to fixing it tonight. I'd like to take a moment to explain the system as best I can in a few words so that people don't jump to misleading conclusions about the system. Please click Read More below to view my two-minute tutorial...

The Slash web engine which runs this site includes a "comment moderation" system which tries to balance the free speech rights of comment posters without allowing loopholes for trolls and flame posters to sabotage the comment boards. The system, while not perfect, is extremely effective, as is evidenced by its use on the popular Slashdot web site, which receives thousands of comment posts each day.

I find the term "comment moderation" for this system to be a bit misleading, because the normal use of the term "moderation" is when you have a human being checking and approving or rejecting the content of messages manually. Rather, this is more of a comment rating system that through the use of rating thresholds, effectively filters comments based on the score they receive by the administrators and other users.

That's right, it's not just admins who have the power to rate comments. Users, on a somewhat random basis, are allowed a certain number of "moderation points" each day with which they can "mod up" or "mod down" comments, on a scale of -1 to 3. By default, posts by an Anonymous User get a score of 0, and users start with a score of 1 or 2, depending on how many karma points they have. Karma points are obtained by submitting news stories to MANN that get posted, or if comments that you post are frequently modded up. The more karma points you have, the more likely it is you will get automatically chosen to receive moderation points on a certain day.

By default, each user (including people without accounts) have their default Comment Threshold set to 0. That is, they will see all Anon User and registered user comments unless those comments are moderated down to -1. Anyone can chose to change their threshold to -1 to see posts that were modded down to that level, but most posts that are scored so low are offtopic, troll, or flame posts that many of us don't want to waste our time with anyway.

It's very important to understand that by modding down a comment to -1, you're not deleting the post, but you are making it invisible by default for most users. This is what is meant by balancing the free speech rights of users without keeping us open to sabotage by people who want to distract us from the work we're doing in the men's movement. Anyone can now rant and rave all they want, but now people have the ability to mod them down to -1 and make their ravings irrelevent to the rest of us.

I wish I had more time to explain this tonight, but I don't. Please post your questions or concerns here and I'll try to answer them as best I can. Slashdot has an FAQ guide for comments and moderation that many people should take the time to read, even though it's long.

NOTICE: This story was migrated from the old software that used to run Mensactivism.org. Unfortunately, user comments did not get included in the migration. However, you may view a copy of the original story, with comments, at the following link:

http://news.mensactivism.org/articles/02/04/08/0129223.shtml