FortKnox's Journal: A Way to Make Everyone Happy on Editor Moderation

I had an idea to make everyone happy about editor moderation this morning.
You know how you can change all the moderations on your comment page (make offtopic +1, troll -10, etc...)? Well, what if we had the option to "ignore editor moderation"?
Obviously, it wouldn't be on by default, but those of us that would rather not see it, can ignore it.

I put it in sf for consideration. A quick note about that. Please don't troll the message board for this type of bug. It's easier to consider it if it is done in a mature manner. It's easier to close it and ignore it when people start flinging poo.

Whatcha think?

Perhaps one change

[Xaoswolf]

You can decide which editors you want to read stories from, well, why not be able to decide which editors you see moderation from.

That way when micheal is being a boob, you can ignore him. But still get to see the moderation from other editors that might be doing it right.

I dunno

[Otter]

Would you want that option on?

Editor moderation is valuable, for the most part. I know I wouldn't want thousand touch because they're already at -1) to be the price of reading the occasional Michael-abused post.
s of penis birds (that normal mods won't
I think openness and peer-pressure are the best solutions -- editor mods should be labelled as such. Of course, "open" is what the editors preach, not what they generally practice.

Re:I dunno

[Otter]

Geez, what happened to that? I did preview it. Try again...

Would you want that option on?

Editor moderation is valuable, for the most part. I know I wouldn't want thousands of penis birds (that normal mods won't touch because they're already at -1) to be the price of reading the occasional Michael-abused post.

I think openness and peer-pressure are the best solutions -- editor mods should be labelled as such. Of course, "open" is what the editors preach, not what they generally practice.

CT stock reply #452

[gmhowell]

"Editors are users. There is no difference."

Re:CT stock reply #452

[NeMon'ess]

of course they are. special users, with unlimited mod points. I know cmdrtaco has said the editor moderation gets almost the same metamod score as user moderation, but then there should be no problem with us seeing their mods. see my .sig for the nutshell version.

I know of several reasons why this is not done...

[Cliff]

...and the first reason is optimization. Right now, if you look at the Slash codebase, you will note that every comment has its own point score that is established by moderation. Although Slash does keep a log of these scores, we don't actively track them to keep the comment display nice and fast. For Slash to actually determine if an editor has moderated a story would require an extra SQL select for EACH comment displayed.

Now multiply that by some 5000 comments...even more if you add in the journals (exact numbers would be hard to compute for Slashdot mainly because Slash doesn't distinguish what a comment belongs to...also an optimization decision).

Now I don't know how the actual modifier code works, but I would guess that MAYBE a moderator could be applied to "editor moderated comments" that you could use, but the same problem applies. That same query would need to be run for each comment to determine whether or not said comment has been editor moderated.

Needless to say, this would slow down Slashdot's comment display.

This of course, is a bad thing.

Re:I know of several reasons why this is not done.

[FortKnox]

If its the DB hit on the output side that's the issue, it can usually be switched to the input side (as long as there isn't db triggers and stuff happening on the DB side of things).
Add a column on whatever table the score is stored that is "EDITOR_MODERATION" an 'integer' row. Everytime an editor moderates that comment, it'll take an extra update to hit that row, but its not a speed effective action (like read), so the tiny hit will be negligable.
This would mean that the DB schema would need updated, and the change would only happen to stuff moderated after the change, but it wouldn't slow down the 'read' (just pick up an extra row in the original select).

Re:I know of several reasons why this is not done.

[Cliff]

If its the DB hit on the output side that's the issue, it can usually be switched to the input side (as long as there isn't db triggers and stuff happening on the DB side of things). Add a column on whatever table the score is stored that is "EDITOR_MODERATION" an 'integer' row. Everytime an editor moderates that comment, it'll take an extra update to hit that row, but its not a speed effective action (like read), so the tiny hit will be negligable. This would mean that the DB schema would need updated, and the change would only happen to stuff moderated after the change, but it wouldn't slow down the 'read' (just pick up an extra row in the original select).

Quite right, but the people maintaining the code need to be willing or have the time and inclination to make this change in the code. Right now, I think many feature requests fall under the second situation: lack of time.

If you think this would be a good thing for Slashcode, then write it up, test it, and submit a patch (or Plugin).

With regards to Slashdot, CmdrTaco may or may not be interested in such a thing and it is his decision what does and does not go into the site. If you think this would be a good modification to make, drop him a line. If you want to be real evil about it, drop him a line with the afforementioned patch/plugin. =)

Re:I know of several reasons why this is not done.

[sllort]

Back in 2001, I filed a bug report [sourceforge.net] about making Editor moderation visible in the context of Messaging. The gist of this report was that messages delivered to users contained the string "A user has given a ____ moderation to your post" - which is untrue, because no one would confuse a Slashdot Editor and a Slashdot user.

I believe the bug was addressed by CmdrTaco from the context of the OO syntax of Slashcode, rather than the social context of Slashdot.

But the bug is relevant to your discussion, because the Slashteam replies in that post affirm that CmdrTaco does not believe that identifying Editor Moderation as such would be a good thing. I personally believe that "transparent moderation" would be a positive change to Slashdot and to Slashcode.

Anyway, I thought that data point might be useful WRT your discussion.