CmdrTaco's Journal: Traffic, Noobs, LotR

Slashdot's traffic continues to grow. Recently we set a new single day traffic record of just shy of 4.3 million pages. Even our average days are now around 3.5M. We were around 3 million pages last summer. We're not really sure where the traffic came from. Referrals from Yahoo's RSS definitely is a factor, and our referrals from google also seemed to have grown, but those numbers don't account for the 10-15% growth we're talking about. Strange things.

Cliff Lampe has written a paper which will soon be published where he did a bunch of research on Slashdot new users. The single point that this paper really drives home is the importance of feedback. Slashdot has 2 primary mechanisms of feedback for new users: Moderation, and Replies. Users who get positive are more likely to continue on to get good karma. Of course, this might be only an indicator of their natural ability to write good comments, but I think the idea is worth exploring. We've planned the future moderation system to handle this, but I don't really have any idea of what the results will be. Comparing the Data Cliff recorded and analyzed for this paper to any data from the new system will be very apples to oranges, so I'm wondering if it makes sense to try to kludge something into the system now.

So what i was thinking was something like this: We add a column to the comments table... comments.noob. I don't know how we define it, but my guess is a noob is someone who has posted less than 2 comments, has been moderated less than 2 times, and has a life time reply total of less than 2. I don't know what the real numbers are, but you get the idea.

Then we give certain users access to a new threshold... right now we have -1..5... we add 'Noob' if you are a moderator, or perhaps if you have excellent karma. This would then encourage moderators and experiences readers to be able to find them. We're talking about dozens of comments/day here, so the burden would be relatively trivial.

Patches?

LotR:RotK EE shipped today. It will be in my grubby little mits in the next day or two. I imagine the 10 hours of bonus crap will keep me well occupied for some time... and between that and Knights of the old Republic II, I think this will be a merry christmas indeed!

You can do that now

[sulli]

if you want to, by adding Karma to new users. Last time I checked this was mainly used to penalize new users, however, since new accounts are often perceived as trolls.

Re:You can do that now

[sulli]

oops, I meant a Comment Bonus, not Karma. You can add a bonus of any amount from -6 to +6 to the newest N percent of users.