[thelist] Angora socks comment on DJC article

[Steve Cook]

I've been trying to avoid wading in on this subject, but now I'm hearing
what I've been afraid of since the socks debacle first raised it's head.

Martin's point below is correct... up to a point! Slashdot has a moderation
system, but currently it is failing miserably. As a long time Slashdot user
I despair of the state of the site. It is almost impossible to follow a
thread for the amount of trolling and flaming present and even browsing at
+1 doesn't help any more, as trolls are starting to unify to moderate up
each other's puerile posts and are buying user accounts with enough karma to
give them and automatic score of +2 when they post.

Slashdot is a perfect example of why a site like evolt should have a clear
usage policy and not be afraid to remove posts that go against the policy
(IMHO).

I understand and agree with many of people's concerns about censorship.
evolt is a community site, but at the same time it has moderators. Their job
is to keep the site a community. Just the same as I would hope that the
maintainers of the estate where I live would remove graffiti from the walls,
so I would hope that the evolt maintainers would remove gaffiti from the
evolt site.

Note however that I am talking about having a CLEAR policy. We don't either
want a situation where the criteria for a post's removal are as ambiguous as
(for instance) the censorship laws in the UK!

There have been many good points raised in this discussion so far and I know
what a hot potato this issue is, but at some point, every community has to
decide what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. For evolt, that time
may not be yet - this has been one isolated incident, but I don't envy the
job of taking the decision when it does come.

<tip type="Input formatting">

Clients often ask for the ability to add links (HTML / email) within their
text content for press releases etc on a site. If you have created a simple
administration tool for their use, this is a pretty simple task to automate.
Simply search the incoming text for strings that contain either
"http://blah" or "name at blah" type strings and add the appropriate HTML to
turn these into links before submitting to the database. 

Don't forget that if you have also created a tool that lets the user edit
their text, you should probably strip the html code before adding the text
as the value in a textbox.
</tip>

.steve


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 Wap-Dev - http://www.wap-dev.net
 Cookstour - http://cookstour.org
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> > >a move towards community moderation
> > >may be A Good Thing.
> > >
> > >Models include /. of course, 
> > 
> > I seem to remember seeing one or two 
> inappropriate/offensive posts on /.
> 
> Yes, but if you're using the site with your prefs set to 
> Moderation value +1, then you don't see them at all (cos 
> they've all been moderated down).
> 
> Thus nothing is actually censored (ie removed), but you as a 
> user choose your quality threshold, below which you won't see 
> anything. It's all explained at
> http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml
> 
> Note that /. also moderates the moderators(!):
> http://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml
> 
> Cheers
> Martin
> 
>