Slashdot Moderation:Phase 1.1.1

For the last few days, I've been doing virtually nothing except read email regarding comments, and making changes to the code to implement new ideas that people have suggested. Click the link below to read a summary of the changes.

Its been really interesting so far. Some interesting comments from many people ranging from "You are the Antichrist and I hope you get a disease" to "Hey, not Bad". Here are a list of the major notes, changes, clarifications, and fixes.

1. Moderators can't moderate their own comments.
2. Simply creating an account does not make you a moderator.
3. New moderators will be added and old moderators removed over time. I have ideas about this, but we'll work it out. This will eventually be automated, but right now I'm still resolving technical stuff. A lot of you have suggested great ideas (most of which Jeff and I have already discussed long ago) so just hang in there.
4. The same moderator can't moderate the same comment twice in a row.
5. I yanked about 15 moderators for abuses and violations.
6. I rewrote parts of the Guidelines.
7. I've been rewriting and cleaning up a lot of code. Lemme know if you see bugs. There will be bugs.
8. I've decided on an absolute range from -1 to 5 for scores. I may change that later, but for now, that seems reasonable: It allows users to have an absolute minimum to browse at, It also will mean that abused comments can be promoted relatively easy.
9. Moderation dropped over the week from 30% of comments back down to 10-20% as the bulk of moderators got over the initial excitement (presumably). This is much closer to where it should be.
10. Moderators have been told to concentrate more on promoting good comments then demoting bad ones. I'll probably enforce that somehow someday.
11. I'm working on better controls for customization of the comments on the fly. It might be a bit flakey, but give it a whirl.
12. Remember that if you go to slashdot.org/index.shtml or index_F.shtml, your user preferences will not work. Start at slashdot.org and the system will detect if you are logged in and send you to the correct page.

Overall the feedback has been positive. Let me reiterate here that if you don't like the system, you can simply turn it off. 400 moderators is a lot, and we will have people abusing the trust that we have to place in them. If you don't want that risk, I don't blame you a bit. And if you see abuses, please let us know. We've revoked many people's access already, and we'll continue to do it.

The goal here is to allow enough filtering that the guy who wants to just read 10 good comments happy, but also allow the guy who wants to read a thousand flame infested offtopic comments while slugging out a good debate in the trenches to do just that. And hopefully everyone in between too. I think we're getting pretty damn close to making that possible.