CmdrTaco's Journal: Office Moves, Server Wonk, Moderation

We're moving offices. For the last year we've been in a really cool location in the basement of a toy store. It's a great space, but somewhat cramped. We needed to move if we were ever to have room to put another desk. And we frequently have other folks visit, and they end up sitting in a chair without a desk. It's very un-ergonomic for them. So anyway, we're moving, all of a block. The space is much more bland. We're trading in hundred year old brick walls for a concrete office block. But what are ya gonna do? Unfortunately, the troubles with this move continued to escalate. The T1 got moved last thursday, despite being scheduled for today (monday). The furniture isn't scheduled to be delivered until this thursday, so we're essentially working in big empty rooms. It'll be nice when it's all settled down, but until then, it's going to be a mess.

Our troubles with the servers continue, but it appears that we've found some of our problems. Hopefully we'll know after today if things are better or not. It's really hard to fix certain problems over a weekend since they don't actually exhibit problems until the peak of a weekday's traffic.

I got my daily "Slashdot Sucks" email first thing this morning. It was a thoughtful message containing all the usual points (Your HTML is dated, your design is ugly, your story selection is lame now, moderation doesn't work etc etc etc). Nothing new, but I figured I'd make a note to tell folks where I'm heading with moderation. We won't be able to touch this until other projects are finished, but I hope that I can make it a priority.

What I'm planning on doing is reworking scoring. Right now, all Slashdot Comments are rated on a scale from -1 to 5. Many things cause comments to change score: The Karma Bonus, The Short Comment Penalty, Excessive Downmods to your Domain, and of course, users moderating the comment up or down. But ultimately, it's very difficult to tell one score:4 comment from another. The difference between 4 & 5 is minimal. The difference between 1 & 2 is almost entirely the AC vs Logged in bonus. The difference between 1 & 2 is almost entirely the karma bonus. -1 is preetty much all crap, and it works well.

What I want to do is expand moderations to take advantage of several pieces of information that we have, that we don't use. And also, add new pieces of data to the mix. For example, comment age, the rate that a comment is moderated up, the total number of moderation points used on a comment, and perhaps bayesian filtering. But ultimately, instead of scores being classified into one of 7 groups, I want to rank them, from "Best" to "Worst". Maybe we retain the -1..5 range, but give the scores a decimel. Maybe we throw out the old scoring entirely, and give every comment a percentile.

The short and long of this whole discussion is that we have a lot of data that we're not using. And when we start making intelligent use of it, we'll dramatically improve the value of discussions.

of course when this happens is a whole different matter. So many things taking priority...