Proper scoring for troll postings, per seanadams

[pfarrell]

We seem to be attracting a lot of, er, unfounded and uninformed postings about the audio quality of various SD/Logitech devices, the brains or lack thereof of Logitech management, etc.

The Touch seems to bring out nearly as many as the Audiophile forum does.

I'm a fan of reputation based systems, where the community provides information on the value one should place on a posting's author.

A while back, a well regarded forum member wrote into one of the Audiophile threads:

"2/10
I think we should start scoring the trolls. This post lacks originality - you were doing better earlier with the bath tub business."

The author seemed to know a lot about the legacy Slim Devices products, he uses a handle of "seanadams".

What's not clear to me is how the SeanTrollScore system works. is it like a signal to noise ration, where smaller numbers means worse (more noise, less signal) or does it mean "this posting is only a 2 out of a 1 (no troll) to (10 100% troll food) so that a highly troll score is 10 and a good posting is 1 or 2.

Seems to me that lower is more trollish, like a bad signal to noise ratio. But I'm not sure, and need input from the user community.

Thanks
Pat

[Mark Miksis]

FWIW, these forums have both thread rating and user reputations enabled. They could possibly benefit from some tweaking and publicity, but they are there. Almost no one ever uses them.

[erland]

FWIW, these forums have both thread rating and user reputations enabled. They could possibly benefit from some tweaking and publicity, but they are there. Almost no one ever uses them.

Where is the user reputations seen ?
To make it useful it feels like it at least needs to be indicated somehow in the heading of each forum post.

Still, I suspect in most cases the post count or registration date of the user will give you a better indication unless we get people to actually start adding points to the reputations of different users. The trolls often have a low post count or have just registered. Another problem is that many senior members uses the mailing list and not the forum.

If we like to get rid of pointless posts, it might be a better way to do more moderation. Although, this is a tricky road as it can easily backfire and give a lot of negative critique creating even more pointless posts.

[Mark Miksis]

Where is the user reputations seen ?
To make it useful it feels like it at least needs to be indicated somehow in the heading of each forum post.

Heh, this is less than obvious at best...

In the upper right hand corner of each post is a block of info with a small colored square at the bottom. If you hover your mouse over that square, it will display an alt-text such as "erland is on a distinguished path". To make matters worse, that particular phrase means you are somewhere between +10 and +30, but there's no way for users to know that.

AFAIK, the text descriptions can be changed, but we are stuck with the tiny "traffic light" icons instead of just text.

[Mark Miksis]

I'm also not sure how to give another user negative reputation points.

[Siduhe]

Ok, I've been searching for the last ten minutes - can someone point me to the Sean Adams response'o'matic multiple choice auto response post? Sounds like we could update and resurrect it...

[bobkoure]

Heh, this is less than obvious at best...

OK - this is the first time I've ever noticed those.
Can the forum software change that graphic based on the score?

That said, I don't think we have a problem. Spam posts are very much under control and "trolling"... well one readers "troll" may be some writer's honest rant. I haven't seen any that I would regard as "trolling" (post written to specifically be so "off the wall" that it gets at least some forum members riled up, and generates a long stream of responses). As at least some of us remember, this was a real problem with usenet discussion groups. There was even trolling in the .lang groups, and I hear that it got downright malicious in some of the .pets groups.

And, frankly, that "honest rant", although it's sometimes a bit of a pain to deal with, might serve as some sort of "early warning system" for any Logitech folks reading the forum. OK, well, knowing that some folks are getting antsy about the Touch delay probably isn't news... On the other hand, knowing that there's a strong constituency for funding 3rd party developer support and a stable API, might be good. There's likely a bit of a fight over where development dollars go, and those posts might give the folks on "our" side a bit of ammunition.

Sorry to be so long-winded...

[fragfutter]

and in usegroups i had my very own scorefile, could ignore users, or threads, could highlight other users, or subjects, or ...

usenet was superior to any forum i've seen.

[gregklanderman]

>>>>> On March 18, 2010 fragfutter <fragfutter.480r1b1268914441 (AT) no-mx (DOT) forums.slimdevices.com> wrote:

> and in usegroups i had my very own scorefile, could ignore users, or
> threads, could highlight other users, or subjects, or ...

> usenet was superior to any forum i've seen.

You can subscribe to the mailing list and use a newsreader
to read the mail. That's what I do, works great!

greg

[fragfutter]

getting off-topic, but i need to ask...

how would i read a mailinglist with slrn?