In this thread: http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=18315
Modding down was totally misused as a "weapon" to belittle opinions different than those of the majority.
User b00gie was particularly hit by this kind of behavior. I was modded down as well in my only post. I believe mine was a perfectly legit opinion: I have never believed that Portage is such a great package manager.
Now you won't notice much of a disaster because I tried to mod everybody back up, but you can give each post only one vote, and of course I couldn't vote for myself.
Reasons to mod a post down:
"Yes, this comment includes personal attacks/offensive language
Yes, this comment is off-topic
Yes, this comment is spam or includes advertisements"
None of the above was applicable.
"Yes, I disagree with this user/opinion"
is NOT a good and accepted reason. Thus most people who mod down not only are cowards, but liars as well.
Bunch of losers!
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2005-04-01
If you choose the "Yes, I disagree with this user/opinion" it will NOT mod down the comment, but rather, warn you that disagreement is not a valid reason.
For a LONG time, I've wanted to rewrite the moderation system to have three categories: agree, disagree, or report. Then it would autohide reported comments past a threshold and people would see the agree and disagree count.
However, implementing this will be a BITCH, because it will affect everyone's trust, every other mod down will need to be discarded or replaced entirely... the entire system for all 300,000+ comments will need to be compensated. I just don't know how to do that yet.
I also want to remove the upper and lower score. No need.
Eventually, these changes will be implemented in some form or another.
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I do not know if there's something in particular that people don't like as much as we've wanted to have the site re-skinned by a professional designer and that's not happened as quickly as we'd have hoped. Also, if it means a lot of changing of the code generated by the PHP backend, that's going to take time.
I appreciate that.
Member since:2006-07-30
Removing score limits is a great idea. It would remove most of the "You are so right, wish I could mod you up!"-comments.
Heck, even I write something similar from time to time when I can't show how much I agree with the post by modding it up.
Another interesting idea (I think someone else came up with it) would be to say mod this post to <insert number>. When the post is below that number, it should be modded up (by 1) and the number of votes should be reduced by one. If the post then gets voted up to a higher number, you get your comment vote back.
This would probably reduce the number of comments on highly controversial topics that oscillate between -5 and +5.
Sometimes I see a comment that has been modded down and I can't see why. So I mod it up, only to find out the next second that some other guys had the same idea.
This means that sometimes a completely dull comment gets +5.
But probably this would be far too complicated to implement and eat lots of precious CPU, as well.
If you really want to change the comment system I think the only reasonable way to do this would be to save everybody's number of comments and average comment score at the time of transition and compute the new comment score somewhat like this:
score=(average_score(new_posts)*#new_posts +old_average*#old_posts)/#all_posts)
I'm aware that the real solution would be hell of a lot more complex but it should probably be along those lines to make sure that trust and scores don't jump up or down.
This way people won't get all mad because their comment scores dropped without any obvious reason. But I don't know your code so I have no idea just how difficult this is going to be.
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