RobertB-DC's Journal: Meta-Moderation: an offer you can't refuse

I haven't been very active lately... it was a bit hard to get to Slashdot for a while. And it was my own fault... in December, I did a little hacking, caused a runaway page request, and got my IP address banned. I'm back -- I don't know if it's the new PC (in which case some poor schmuck in the office can't figure out why he can't get to Slashdot) or if it just timed out after about six months.

So you can imagine my surprise when I tried to access /. just for kicks. Not only was I allowed in... I had this message waiting for me:

Have you Meta Moderated recently?

Wow... I did it! I made it to the next level. And, as was suggested in the replies to my question, "Where are my mod points?" I got Meta-Moderation before actual Moderation. I suppose if I'm successful at M2, I'll get the true plum -- M1, the Godlike power to wield the Sword of Score against the enemies of good sense and humor.

So let's get started!

Today, you have 10 moderations to meta-moderate

Oh, crap. What did I sign up for?

It takes forever on the first one, but I learn how to keep beer cool, keep a CPU cool, and how to fry a laptop all in the same discussion! Doesn't that sum up the Slashdot experience! Moderation as "Funny" was totally appropriate, by the way.

Ok, I'm clearly going to have to speed things up. That one took some research, but there are several "Interesting" mods that I'm going to agree with. Here's something cool: for "Funny" meta-mods, Slashdot asks if the Comment was Funny. On other meta-mods, like "Interesting" or "Flamebait", Slashdot asks if the Moderation was Fair. An interesting distinction!

The M2's that I'll likely concentrate on are the unfair negatives. There's a fine line between "Flamebait" and "Insightful". This one-liner comes close, but it started a discussion of an important point. It got M1 as "Flamebait"... I'm M2'ing that as "Unfair". There's also a sit-on-the-fence middle option, but that's taking the easy way out.

One hint that I got from the /. community, the FAQs, and by other forms of osmosis: don't give bad M2 when you'd simply choose another flavor yourself. This stupid comment is off-topic in an off-topic thread, so I'd call it "Offtopic", not "Flamebait". But that's not worth a bad M2 -- it's fair enough.

All the same, I'll be glad when I have M1. The final M2 assignment for me was a funny comment that simply wasn't worth getting a "5" rating. The individual moderation was correct... but I was really wishing for M1 so I could put a "Overrated" on it. Not the mod's fault, though.

Final tally: 10 M2s, 9 "fair", 1 "unfair". Not bad!

Interestingly, I seem to have received M2 earlier than theorized. The FAQ says that I need to be in the oldest 90% of Slashdotters, but the newest member, kc4iai, has a user number of 679480. That puts me only at 92% -- and I don't know how long M2 has been waiting on my plate! There must be other factors... perhaps the number of months since signup is part of the equation.

It'll be interesting to see how my M2 affects my future M1 chances. If Slashdot is still accumulating new members at a 390-a-day clip (as calculated earlier), I should have about 30 more days before I enter the 90% old-timer mark. Will the July 4 weekend be marked by fireworks and M1 access? Stay tuned!

Metamoderation date

[OldMiner]

Interesting feature request over at SourceForget [sourceforge.net] about this subject. Kinda looks like CmdrTaco is being a little closed minded on that one, or at least short on giving figures.

He says more people gained the ability to moderate "in the last 3 months" (2002 Sep-Nov inclusive) than in the same period the previous year. Well, duh. Even if the rate of account creation remains constant, "90% of all accounts" will continually increase. The amount of those made elligible for M2 will always increase unless t