In busy forums, moderation can be a useful tool for gently enforcing good behavior. Drupal is pretty flexible in its support for moderation, but it could go farther to make moderation more effective.
Plastic.com, to take one example, uses moderation in ways that are different from Drupal's in some major and minor ways. The two most important differences are: 1. Limited pool of mod points, and 2. Karma points accumulate.
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1. On Plastic, there is a limited pool of mod points--that is, you can only moderate others when you have mod points to expend. These are handed out randomly, in batches of 12, to users with a certain karma level (10 pt, I think). Unused karma points expire after 4 days, so users cannot horde them. This discourages users from moderating frivolously--they take their mod points as a responsibility.
There is not a 1:1 correlation between mod points and karma points: downmodding costs 2 mod points; upmodding costs 1 (all moderation on Plastic changes the recipient's karma in half-point steps, which strikes me as needlessly fussy).
2. When a user is upmodded or downmodded, those ratings are added into a cumulative karma rating that includes karma accrued (or lost) through forum comments, submitting news stories that make it through the submission queue (different kinds of stories are scored differently, to encourage more traffic in underpopulated forums), or even at the whim of an admin, say, if the user makes a helpful comment to a story in the subQ.
Karma points are always visible: the points assigned to a comment are always shown by the comment title; a user's cumulative karma points are shown in the user profile.
People like the approval of their peers, and this visibility of karma is a factor in encouraging forum civility (IMHO).
Plastic's system, much as I like it, could be taken farther. In addition to showing accumulated karma, it could show indices of average karma and volatility. A high karma total isn't necessarily evidence of greatness--it might only be evidence of frequent postings with occasional hits. An average karma/posts would be more useful.
Likewise, there are some people who are very controversial--they attract a lot of upmodding *and* downmodding. For these people, it might be helpful to admins to have a volatility index, which could perhaps be calculated this way:
volatility = (positive points earned + negative points earned)/positive points
Comments
More on karma
Some more random thoughts on using karma points:
1. One way to improve the signal:noise ratio on a forum would be to require the spending of karma points to ask a question (www.experts-exchange.com has an auction system using play-money for questions and answers).
2. This may be somewhat draconian, so it would also be helpful to designate a free-for-all forum where no karma can be gained or lost (call it the "flame room").
Adam Rice
A commercial system
would let people BUY karma points to spend.
I suggested something like this to a Venture Capitalist a few years ago. He didn't get it.
Personalized view community view
One assumption that underlies those systems is that if a guy called X has a lot of karma, the whole community will like him. This is not necessarily true.
Instead, X's karma should change whether I am viewing X's profile or somebody else is viewing his profile. i.e: X's karma should change depending on MY opinion of X.
It that a wanted feature? Is it feasible?
-Kyvinh
Kyvinh
I think I seewhat you are getting at, but I am not defining it as a reflection of your opinion, I am defining it as a gestalt reward by the community for service to that community.
My interest in Drupal is for running a forum for professional colleagues. Personalities shouldn't enter into it--the quality of answers to questions is what matters. People who make high-quality posts get rewarded, even if you don't like the person as an individual.
On epinions, they do let you flag other users as untrustworthy, so that you will not be exposed to their reviews. This gets closer to your idea.
I suppose there's validity to both approaches (for that matter, epinions also lets you rate the helpfulness of individual writeups, and you get cash rewards based on the number of people who give you a positive rating). Speaking of epinions, I've seen people gaming the system there, where a circle of friends give each other positive ratings for each others' reviews. That's a weakness to any system like this.
Adam Rice
Similarity to...
Hi, I posted a similar "draconian" issue a while back to the list, but for some reason I can not find it in the archives, but I did find my orginal post, which read as follows:
Although we're not talking about the exact same thing here, I think there are some issues here that overlap. A feature like this could come in very handy indeed.
People rating versus comments rating
For people interested in different ways of moderation I would recommend looking at the http://advogato.org/proj/mod_virgule/ module for Apache. It is used ie. on http://robots.net/ and it allows members to rate others. The final rating for a person is calculated using a maximum flow algorithm which makes it resistant against attacks by a group of people rating each others high (if interested read more about the algo). The site goes as far as to actually give more permissions to people with high rating.
same in drupal avail?
is there something simular in drupal available right now?
not anymore
there used to be a rating.module in drupal which enabled ranking of users based on the value/rating of their submissions. as it was not being used much and had a known bug, it was removed from core cvs and put into contrib cvs.
feel free to fix and improve it if you want it to go into the core distro again