personally i like MI the way it is.. sure pretty much every thread goes off topic after like the 10th post and about 10% of posts seems to get deleted but honestly MI is really interesting. The mods are doing a pretty good job and there are a lot of random topics popping up here and there but hell i say we keep it the way it is . honestly its a lot better reading these threads then some textbook you need to read to pass the course. only thing i dislike is the fact sometimes a thread seems to get stuck on one page you cant go past.

Thanks for the great comments and suggestions so far. A points system for infractions definitely seems fair. Can you share which forum you moderate on SilentWalker? Do they use vBulletin? If so, do they use VB's built in infraction/rep system or their own? I'm looking at possibly getting something similar set up.

I'm not sure if I've shared my policy on modding before but here:
I edit posts which contain derogatory personal attacks such "Maybe if you weren't such a whore..." "That's gay" "That's retarded" etc. If somebody really doesn't understand why these things are a problem, email me and we can have a discussion. But most of us are academics who can figure this out for ourselves. If it's still not clear, just watch all the episodes of Glee. They touch on all this stuff and it may be in a more easily digested format than a random mod emailing you on MI.

I delete posts that are chock full of these because well...I'm not going to play "Insert the Black Bar HERE". As Andrew said, salvageable content is necessary to preserve a post.

I also delete posts or edit posts that you guys complain are personal attacks or insults. Believe it or not, most of my deletes are in response to user complaints. Many are justified - we all have our boundaries and people push them. But I'm just saying that it's rarely my own unprovoked decision to delete something. As a mod, I provide a service, when you request it because you feel it's appropriate, I carry it out.

My program, my job and my extracurriculars do not leave me enough time to read through all his posts to see if Souldier really offended Alchemist11 and OMGOMGOMGOMGBANHIMFOR EVERKTHNX. No, that's just silly. But if you keep reporting the problem, I'll keep addressing it because that's what the position entails.

Originally Posted by goodnews.inc

I'm not sure if I've shared my policy on modding before but here:
I edit posts which contain derogatory personal attacks such "Maybe if you weren't such a whore..." "That's gay" "That's retarded" etc. If somebody really doesn't understand why these things are a problem, email me and we can have a discussion. But most of us are academics who can figure this out for ourselves. If it's still not clear, just watch all the episodes of Glee. They touch on all this stuff and it may be in a more easily digested format than a random mod emailing you on MI.

I delete posts that are chock full of these because well...I'm not going to play "Insert the Black Bar HERE". As Andrew said, salvageable content is necessary to preserve a post.

I also delete posts or edit posts that you guys complain are personal attacks or insults. Believe it or not, most of my deletes are in response to user complaints. Many are justified - we all have our boundaries and people push them. But I'm just saying that it's rarely my own unprovoked decision to delete something. As a mod, I provide a service, when you request it because you feel it's appropriate, I carry it out.

My program, my job and my extracurriculars do not leave me enough time to read through all his posts to see if Souldier really offended Alchemist11 and OMGOMGOMGOMGBANHIMFOR EVERKTHNX. No, that's just silly. But if you keep reporting the problem, I'll keep addressing it because that's what the position entails.

Your post makes it seem like I was the one asking you to ban Souldier >_________>

THANKS.

Any other feedback.. suggestions?

Which of the following do you like best or want to see implemented?

(quoted from above)

Moderation
- Vote up/down on posts..
- "Reputation" system that lets you see visually how well respected the user is on the site, either through their number of 'likes' and 'thanks', posts, threads, etc. Vote downs negatively impact their reputation as well as reported posts
- Stricter Code Of Conduct, with more temporary bans handed out to those who post useless garbage posts that have no value - not even entertaining value, while allowing trolling posts to slide if they are voted up or seen as being 'harmless' (to the moderators digression)
- Lighter Code Of Conduct that basically allows a free-for-all (minus anything illegal and swearing) with no moderation youtube-style, posts that are reported just stay collapsed
- Inviting more moderators on board (respected, established members in the MI community)
- Closing threads that get out of hand right away, no deletion of posts, just closed thread so no one can post anymore at all, but can see how the thread was derailed.

Discussion
- More/less general discussion sub-forums
- Promotion of the forums more... break out that forums menu at the top into icons or larger buttons along the header to make forums one-click away
- Heavily promote off-topic discussion on the homepage somehow
- Open up a 'Q & A' answers system on the site that is strictly for questions and answers, (like yahoo answers) and leaving the forums completely for discussions and opinion-related topics rather than questions that can be answered quickly and easily over and over again. Q&A would then be archived and searchable so questions don't need to be repeated or answered over and over
- Having a global chat room on MI that is open to all members. The chatroom would be a free-for-all with no moderation except for spamming/ads/swearing. The chatroom could deflect posts in the forum that seem to happen between users that are short in character count and seem to be more of a chat or discussion about off-topic things than what the OP posted about. Those users can instead chat off-topic in the chatroom instead of in threads. Negative impact of this would be less threads/posts if everyone starts to ask questions and get help purely in the chatroom than posting in the forum (which is searchable and archived to help others in the future vs. a chat which has it's history deleted on a regular basis)

Hey all,

I am about to implement a new 'post ranking' system. You should see the ranking buttons on the posts in this thread. Simply click the green UP arrow to rate the post up, and the red down arrow to give it a negative rating. At the moment, if 4 or more users rate down a post it will collapse it from view and determine it 'unworthy'. This collapsing is done automatically and requires no work by moderators.

Posts that are rated up high enough will become identified as the 'best post' in that thread and a notification will appear at the top of the thread saying that the MI Community has rated a certain post as being the best and has a link to click and skip to that post. This should work really well in threads that have questions since the MI community can rank up their favourite answer.

Reputation: The post ranking system will now also affect the user's reputation score in the forum. Thus, negatively rating a user's post not only will eventually collapse it, but it will hurt the user's reputation level score which will soon appear on all their posts as well as in their profile. User's with bad reputations will be scrutinized more by moderators. This will hopefully help in assisting with the 'trolls'.

Feedback appreciated. Also, I'm going to post a reply below that I would like for all of you to rate down so you can see the feature in action.

This is a post rating test. Feel free to rate down.

Originally Posted by Chad

This is a post rating test. Feel free to rate down.

Just rated it down. The rating section got replaced by the word 'billy'

I uprated it twice!

Originally Posted by Chad

Hey all,

I am about to implement a new 'post ranking' system. You should see the ranking buttons on the posts in this thread. Simply click the green UP arrow to rate the post up, and the red down arrow to give it a negative rating. At the moment, if 4 or more users rate down a post it will collapse it from view and determine it 'unworthy'. This collapsing is done automatically and requires no work by moderators.

Posts that are rated up high enough will become identified as the 'best post' in that thread and a notification will appear at the top of the thread saying that the MI Community has rated a certain post as being the best and has a link to click and skip to that post. This should work really well in threads that have questions since the MI community can rank up their favourite answer.

Reputation: The post ranking system will now also affect the user's reputation score in the forum. Thus, negatively rating a user's post not only will eventually collapse it, but it will hurt the user's reputation level score which will soon appear on all their posts as well as in their profile. User's with bad reputations will be scrutinized more by moderators. This will hopefully help in assisting with the 'trolls'.

Feedback appreciated. Also, I'm going to post a reply below that I would like for all of you to rate down so you can see the feature in action.

Lol, it says "billy" after I rated your post down.

Here's my two cents: I'm already not liking this rating posts... People are just using it as another "like" feature (ie: people are rating things up if they thought it was funny, etc).

Kind of annoying when it's supposed to be a "helpful" feature and when I click the bar at the yellow saying which is the most helpful post, it brings me to something ridiculous.

Just saying. Think it's a good idea in theory, not so much in application...

Furthermore, you're basically giving us a dislike button. People are gonna abuse this, posts are gonna get collapsed automatically because someone disagrees/"offends" highly sensitive people/etc.

I really don't think this will last.




Edit: The "# People Have Rated THis Helpful/Do you think this post is helpful" runs over the post border... (Don't really know how to explain it lol)

Formatting should be fixed. Keep testing it out. Works for me on Firefox/Safari. Could be a glitch with IE.

Likes show your name as someone who liked the post while ratings are 'anonymous', not showing who voted as it currently stands. Likes currently don't affect reputation nor have any effect on the post itself. If the rating system is preferred over the like system, then the like button might be replaced by the positive 'vote up' button and the two combined, but that will be up to the community to decide what works best.

Having the ability to collapse and rate down posts is on a lot of sites and works very well including Digg.com, and a whole bunch of blogs that use a similar feature in their comments section. Giving the community the power to rate up/down posts gives more control to the community.

Abuse will be dealt with. You have a limit on how much you can vote each day.

Originally Posted by Chad

Formatting should be fixed. Keep testing it out. Works for me on Firefox/Safari. Could be a glitch with IE.

Likes show your name as someone who liked the post while ratings are 'anonymous', not showing who voted as it currently stands. Likes currently don't affect reputation nor have any effect on the post itself. If the rating system is preferred over the like system, then the like button might be replaced by the positive 'vote up' button and the two combined, but that will be up to the community to decide what works best.

Having the ability to collapse and rate down posts is on a lot of sites and works very well including Digg.com, and a whole bunch of blogs that use a similar feature in their comments section. Giving the community the power to rate up/down posts allows for community policing of trolls, etc. If your posts aren't highly offensive then you shouldn't have a problem.

Abuse will be dealt with. You have a limit on how much you can vote each day.

I really don't think you can compare this site to big sites like Digg... I really don't think this site has a normal distribution when it comes to users.

The fact is, you're saying this is to determine helpful posts and those that are just irrelevant/unbelievably against the CoC when that's not what it's gonna be used for. You're giving people a dislike button. People will use it as such and those with strong/unconventional opinions will get the shit end of the stick
(ie: Capital Punishment thread)

It's not gonna be a "I'm gonna rate down because this person is a troll" it's gonna be "I'm gonna rate down because I disagree with this person and it's way easier to click this instead of posting why." Which would be fine and all, if it didn't eventually lead to good posts being cascaded.



On another note:

"lawleypop, you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:

1. Your user account may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else's post, access administrative features or some other privileged system?
2. If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation."

When I try to upload more pics (my pics were also deleted)



Edit: [email protected] D:<

Photo system is back up and working now, it was disabled for everyone while it was upgraded to a newer version. Your photos were not erased, they should show up in your profile again. Let me know if they aren't.

You do have a point, and the button is not meant to be a 'report a COC breach' button, that's what the report button is for to bring it to the attention of the moderators. If the rating system is implemented into the rest of the MI forums (right now it's just being beta tested in the 'general discussion' forum) it will be seen and treated as a dislike or 'vote down' button, you are correct. Posts that do ultimately get voted down at first will not be collapsed, thus one or two, even three people that are 'sensitive' as you would say, and don't agree with you and vote your post down will not cause your post to get collapsed, it will simply show that 3 users disagreed and voted as such. Only when a larger group of users vote a post down does it collapse itself, and your post is still viewable if the user chooses to view it (it is not deleted).

The main purpose of this system, however, is to promote the best posts in a thread. By having a rating on posts, you will be able to easily skim threads and instead of reading all 100 replies to a large thread, skim down and quickly read over the posts that have high rankings in order to see what the user community has deemed the best posts in that thread. And then having the best rated post being linked to at the top, especially useful as I said for threads with questions and answers (which a lot of threads on MI are). The like system isn't necessarily the same in this sense as sometimes I 'like' threads for being funny or entertaining but don't necessarily think they are the 'best' response to a question or answer or the best post in a particular thread.

If worried about abuse, the rank up/down feature could be made to not have any affect on reputation levels and thus not really affect anything except show user's feelings towards that particular post as positive or negative, collapsing if the community feels strongly negative.

If someone is breaking the Code of Conduct and 'trolling', then the Report button is there to be used and moderators can take care of those situations.

Feedback welcome everyone. This is in beta and completely open to review. Try it out on threads in the general discussion forum.

Sorry Chad, but the admin hasn't replied yet as to which infraction system we use. I'm not acquainted with how these message boards are powered, so I can't tell you from just looking at it. However, you can go to the site and see if you can tell yourself.

And just a suggestion if you guys think it'll help:

I'm wondering if you could implement an automatic image resize feature in the forum rather than the user having to specify a resize threshold and mode. Just a suggestion, rather than having a variable content width, why not fix it (usually to 900 px is best), and then have all content tagged with [IMG] that is wider than the content area to automatically resize to the width content area, illustrated as follows:



Although this is mostly for aesthetic uniformity, it makes some pages that include very wide images to be of uniform size, so the entire page doesn't not become inflated like in this thread. It's very annoying when you have centred your text. I have created this horizontal separator, which I use quite a lot, quite wide to it fits most message boards, but I was betting on the fact that most forums resize images. And, you can see what happens when it doesn't.

Secondly, I was wondering if you could auto cache images on MI servers and perma-link images. When we tag an image in a post, you can append it to the site domain (ex. ww.macinsiders.com/imagecache/#######), and maybe include the original URL within the appendage. A lot of people use web-hosted anonymous uploaders like tinypic, which usually renew their link availability ever so often (or I who privately upload, but dump the image after I link to it). This will prevent a lot of broken image links as all images will be perma-linked to a location on the site's server. Of course this will require a somewhat larger server size, so I don't know how feasible it will be.

These suggestions probably won't benefit many, but will be a great benefit to people like me who actually link to a lot of images.

Also, is there a site-chat forum/folder/thread on MI? I couldn't find one, so I posted this here. I initially assumed this was for moderation/behavioural discussion only though.