Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 16th Oct 2009 19:48 UTC
For a very long time now, OSNews' comment sections were governed by a set of rules that dated back to the very early days of OSNews. This set of rules has been amended a number of times over the years, but we were never really comfortable with such a dry, silly list of arbitrary rules that nobody read anyway. They were too much like an... EULA. So, we decided a change was in order, and I started work on a completely new approach.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Personally I think that the best approach is a hybrid between completely manual moderation (the way it used to work here) and completely automated moderation (the comment scoring system).
Most of the time, I think that the comment scores system works as intended - good posts are usually rewarded, and disruptive/troll posts are usually buried. But it's less useful overall if there isn't a human being keeping an eye on comment scores and looking for trends/anomalies.
E.g., I imagine that a fairly simple SQL query could reveal the posters here whose comments are consistently given negative scores (something like "SELECT UNIQUE user FROM comments ORDER BY score ASC"). It makes sense to have the process automated up until there - but that would ideally be the point where a live moderator steps in and does some checking to see WHY so-and-so's comments are consistently given negative scores (and takes takes the appropriate action based on what they find).