mfh's Journal: On Moderation and PHk - Blogging Suite

I am posting this to my Slashdot journal so you can read what my thoughts are about moderation on Slashdot and how it's influenced my design decisions on PHk, my new blogging suite that is soon to be released under the GPL, through Sourceforge. Still working on getting some of the major issues out of this closed alpha I'm using at my blog.

This will not come as a surprise to many of you, but I have been working on PHk for the past five years, under another name.

PHk will have lots of features, but perhaps the best feature is the ability to drag and drop PHP code into a folder and have it aliased to a URL right away.

ie:
http://yourdomain.com/sideproject/
http://yourdomain.com/news/stuff/
http://yourdomain.com/abc/

This works because PHk uses .htaccess or optionally can use ?z=/news/stuff/

For everyone reading this who is NOT a developer, and who would just use PHk as a blogging suite... read on to learn about how moderation works in PHk as it's different than any other system I've seen.

Moderation only really works on major technical websites like Slashdot BEACAUSE the level of the playing field is generally much higher than the average blog, complete with PHD folks posting what they think about topic X and trolls posting stuff about Y. Slashdot is huge and caters to a wide audience. For the most part, blogs are more narrow and have a more focussed audience.

On your own blog, you will find people saying mostly either insightful or dull things. You will also have a lot of spambots coming in trying to promote their product or service or scam.

On systems like Wordpress, managing spam has always been a problem. Spam runs up the numbers and keeps Wordpress blogs clogged. Playing whack-a-mole doesn't help either.

PHk handles this spam crap a lot differently. You can ban words from appearing in any type of submission. Careful now -- it's powerful. Someone might want to talk about viagara...

So it's a touchy subject and there is a fine line between censorship and ease-of-use.

PHk has a URL banning capability that will block/prevent certain strings from appearing in URLs. So no more 123330-viagara.com sites if you ban viagara, v1agara... etc. Spammers keep changing how they attack sites, so spam still gets through... but it goes to a queue.

The queue contains comments that are not yet posted but could be if the editor wants them to be. Totally separate table than the user-posted comments.

We're not adding capacha yet. But it might come in if it's needed. Basically I would rather try less obtrusive methods of guiding spam to the trash and guiding users to posting good comments.

The blog owner will want to sort the comments in their own way.

But how? Tags, of course.

Each comment is tagged by ONE EDITOR/MODERATOR ONLY: this saves time and there is a general sense of injustice with multiple moderating systems like in Slash and Scoop. The editors also will have the power to choose to display comments in THREAD or BLOCK mode.

Thread: A title line with a link to the comment.
Block: The whole comment shows up.

By default all comments will be threaded.

Admins will also give each comment a rating from 0.1 to 1.0 and that's it.

Each comment will have a button for editors where they can moderate the comment. Press the button and you are taken to a form to quickly fill out with the full comment and your special powers can take over from there. :-)

I would like to also add a user NUDGE feature. It'll be a button where users can click it to suggest that a comment be modded up, or down. This will help the editors use their time more wisely.

Because each comment can be moderated ONCE, then meta-moderation will take place on all comments rated by someone who is NOT an editor.

I will allow admins to add people to their moderator pool. Every user can meta-moderate posts that are not their own.

The effect of metamoderation will be as follows:

Each moderation will have a simple: FAIR checkbox that will default as checked. Each comment that is unchecked will be considered as an unfair moderation.

Most bloggers won't even use this part of the system, so it will be simple and effective, but not too detailed. If you are a moderator, and your metascore dips down past ZERO, you are taken out of the moderation pool until you're put back in.

The system could optionally pick people at random for a day of metamoderation or something like that.

More to come...

Moo

[Chacham]

Looks interesting, maybe i ought to take a look. :)