Slash and Peer Moderation
The administration of the site uses the Slash source code and database, a content management system available under the GNU General Public License. Slashdot's editors are primarily responsible for selecting and editing the primary stories daily from submitters like Roland Piquepaille; they provide a one-paragraph summary for each and a link to an external site where the story originated. Each story becomes the topic for a threaded discussion among the site's users. A user-based moderation system is employed to filter out abusive comments. Every comment is initially given a score of -1 to +2, with a default score of +1 for registered users, 0 for anonymous users (Anonymous Coward), +2 for users with high "karma", or −1 for users with low "karma". As moderators read comments attached to articles, they click to moderate the comment, either up (+1) or down (−1). Moderators may choose to attach a particular descriptor to the comments as well, such as normal, offtopic, flamebait, troll, redundant, insightful, interesting, informative, funny, overrated, or underrated, with each corresponding to a -1 or +1 rating. So a comment may be seen to have a rating of "+1 insightful" or "-1 troll".
Moderation points add to a user's karma, and users with high "karma" are eligible to become moderators themselves. The system does not promote regular users as "moderators" and instead assigns five moderation points at a time to users based on the number of comments they have entered in the system – once a user's moderation points are used up, they can no longer moderate articles (though they can be assigned more moderation points at a later date). Paid staff editors have an unlimited number of moderation points.
A given comment can have any integer score from -1 to +5, and registered users of Slashdot can set a personal threshold so that no comments with a lesser score are displayed. For instance, a user reading Slashdot at level +5 will only see the highest rated comments, while a user reading at level -1 will see a more "unfiltered, anarchic version".
A meta-moderation system was implemented on September 7, 1999, to moderate the moderators and help contain abuses in the moderation system. Meta-moderators are presented with a set of moderations that they may rate as either fair or unfair. For each moderation, the meta-moderator sees the original comment and the reason assigned by the moderator (e.g. troll, funny), and the meta-moderator can click to see the context of comments surrounding the one that was moderated.
Read more about this topic: Slashdot Trolling Phenomena, Administration
Famous quotes containing the words peer and/or moderation:
“Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy,
Till Cherry-ripe themselves do cry.”
—Thomas Campion (15671620)
“Moderation has been called golden by all the sages, which is to say precious, praised by all, and everywhere laudable. Go through the Bible: you will discover that those who requested moderation never had their prayers rejected.”
—François Rabelais (14941553)