Headcase88's Journal: Unanonymous modding + Friend/Foe system = Ignore "bad" mods

I was just reading some comments and noticed some mod abuse. Namely, what I believe wasn't flamebait was modded as flamebait. Sure meta-modding was designed for problems like this, but then I got to thinking.

People have different views. Realizing this, /. added a nice friend/foe system. Most of us know how it works. There's little marks next to friends, foes, fans (you're their friend), freaks (you're their enemy), friends of friends, and enemies of friends. You can even make it so foes are ignored and friend's comments appear to have a higher score.

Well, if people have different views, then one person's insightful is another person's flamebait. Metamodding falls into the same pitfall. So I came up a way to fix it.

Firstly, we need the ability to see a list of everyone who modded a comment and how they modded it. For example, the box that shows the score breakdown has a sectoin for moderation that goes like "50% Insightful, 20% informative, blah blah blah". This could easily include a list of each person who modded that way, and a link to their slashdot page. This already wins half the battle. If you see a post you like and it's modded as flamebait, you can at least mark that jerk as your foe.

But the other thing needed is some new prefences: "ignore modding down by foes", and "ignore modding up by foes". If you turn both options on, then if your foe mods, it isn't tabulated into the score (but still seen in the list described above). Personally I'd probably turn on the first but not the second. Now when the afformentioned jerk mods a comment as flamebait, you won't even notice.

Whether any of the above is implemented are not, I think it'd be nice to see what the "real" score of a comment is (ie what the score would look like to someone not logged in). This is important because what might look like a 5 to you ("don't need to mod this up") could be a 2 to most people, if you had a lot of options. But it's especially needed if you start ignoring people as moderators, because now a few foes could be flamebaiting a comment to death (especially if they are ignoring mods that are taking it down) and it would still look like a 4 to you.

I really don't see much wrong with such a plan as far as how it affects actual moderating/commenting. Perhaps some people would be more timid to mod something if they think lots of people will hate them for it, but hey, they should be responsible for their actions. If they believe strongly in something, shouldn't they be standing up for it even if it makes them unpopular?

The real problem, though, is having to load the name of every moderator. I've never even glimpsed Slashcode and wouldn't understand it if I did, but if I were to guess, every individual does not currently recieve the names (or numbers) of every person who has moderated every comment, and they'd need to for the code to process who's a foe and hence should be ignored. Admittedly, comments pages could take a whole lot more bandwidth/server capacity with those lists, perhaps to the point where it's not really worth it, at least not right now. However, the idea about seeing real scores wouldn't need more bandwidth or server performance, I mean, the slashcode has to know the real score before it can adjust it for you, right? So aside from a couple of characters ("Score: 2 (3)" instead of "Score: 2"), no real difference

But aside from that, I would love to see this. Would you have a problem unanonymous modding? Discuss.