Recently, there has been a flood of opinionated, offtopic, philosophical and ideological preaching type posts on Praja. And there are two schools of thought on how to deal with this
- Let it flow, don't waste time moderating. Perhaps, instead, make it easy for members to rank and rate posts and authors.
- Moderate, keep things clean so that we retain only the right type of audience on the site.
We are thinking of updating the moderation system to incorporate a bit of both of above.
With recent changes to the website - the experiement where all members can blog now - its clear on what our preference is. We want the site to be an open place. But at the same time, some manual or automated moderation will be nice.
Some of the ideas are:
- negative points - Penalty/Deduction of Praja points if an author's comment or post gets moderated or deleted
- Encourage strong moderation - Strict guidelines, like, just remove wrongly tagged posts
- Mobocracy - Ranking system for posts and/or authors. And on front page, only show top ranked posts, or posts from top rated authors
- Strict Control - Put all new posts in a moderation queue. A moderator most approve posts before they show up on the site.
- Community moderation - Some sense of democracy. Ex: if more than 10 (or any other reasonable number) moderators flag a post as "unfit", it would get deleted.
Clearly, such hassles are to be expected. But it will be great to hear from members, especially the ones who do not write as often (mostly readers) on what they would like to see implemented.
Remember, we wish to stay as open as possible. But we want to avoid becoming an "anything goes" place, our wish is to attract smart and constructive citizens, and the "influencers" of the society, like netas, babus, journalists and activists.
Essentially, it would be good to put some systems in place before things get worse.
cheers,
Praja Techs
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Suggestion for Moderation
Lots of good ideas. Good work! My 2 cents on the ideas!
Community moderation: Works if all members of Praja are known to atleast one of the Moderators. If spammers queue in, then 10 votes would be too little to avoid spam.
Strict Control: Too much work for the Moderator.
Mobocracy: Totally depends on whether readers are motivated to rank the blogs else good posts will slowly become unread.
Encourage strong moderation: This could help a bit.
negative points: Interesting. It would aid in removing spammers.
My opinion is Strict control should be employed in the beginning (i.e when number of users are limited and it is possible to moderate each post )with constant encouragement to readers to rank posts will help praja. We dont need to make the ranking compulsary but a small banner or Note on the right side of the posts encouraging ranking will help.
The strong moderation will help ensure people post genuine information. The ranking will help people see the best posts on the front page thereby ensuring more readership.
Once a decent group of members is formed (lets say 100), then these form the parliament. We can have a method where posts should be sent to the parliament first and based on rankings can be published to the entire praja. This ensures that you have implemented Mobocracy effectively.
Limited community moderation
The goal I think is to make the process relatively easy as well as reasonably democratic. It also has to be something that scales well for the future. The need to restrict irrelevant posts is there because otherwise Praja will cease being the wonderful forum it is with tons of useless comments.
In my opinion, the moderators should be folks who have a good sense of what is within the scope/mission of this site. Give some 10-20 folks who are "senior" praja members the right to vote down on any posts that violate the guidelines.
If the votes exceed a certain threshold, delete the post and dock the member's Praja points.
This way (a) It is a group of wise men and women making the decision and hence not arbitrary and (b) there is a penalty and (c) One person does not have to read every post to moderate.
Moderation system
Guide lines on Types of Blog entries
Guidelines for Comments
Moderation system
Mobocracy!
Good thread. Something has to be done before this site becomes like the Metroblog site. I suggest the rating system employed by Engadget site. Members rate the posts and they fade away if the protest is sufficiently great. This worked very well in suppressing the Apple fanboys (who are surprisingly, averse to complicated gadgets: I love complicated gadgets! ).
Most of us are committed to making the city livable, and some here (who are the most vocal! ) are intent on just the opposite ). User ratings will reduce the burden on the moderators and will give a unity to the dedicated folks here.
Great, more inputs please
Thanks a bunch for the comments so far. Want to stress that this is a really important thread. The not-so-regular writers/commenters are encouraged write in their suggestions, regular authors are advised to listen than speak.
Please note that our posting guidelines are simple - local, engagement oriented, fact/stats driven or analytical stuff as much as possible - as short and sweet a way as one can describe the Praja guideline in. This is not up for debate.
cheers,
Praja Techs.
Rating system
Does the current rating system provide any weightage to the number of votes? If not I think it should.
Here is one way. http://www.thebroth.com/blog/118/bayesian-rating