About Big Brother...

[OrOS]

Keeping in the generally open-source and peer-to-peer nature of OSDev, a post ranking system would likely be frowned upon far less. Peer review, rather then the opinion of whatever moderator is currently cleaning the moderation queue, I think everyone can go with.

[whowhatwhere]

Keeping in the generally open-source and peer-to-peer nature of OSDev, a post ranking system would likely be frowned upon far less. Peer review, rather then the opinion of whatever moderator is currently cleaning the moderation queue, I think everyone can go with.

Topic Cement <-- Best choice, IMO.
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Prime Subject Check
Prime Link to Reported Post
Prime Trash Bin
Prime Topic Move
Restrict Functions

[NickJohnson]

A bunch of people can vote each other up. A bunch of people can vote one person down. And they'll cheer and sneer about karma ratings.

You could set it so only people with a minimum karma rating could vote - that would stop a pair of newbies from bootstrapping into high karma.

I think a better system would be to combine a karma system and a post count system. Your posts can be voted on positively and negatively, but can only end up being positive (including 0). (Optionally, mods could make them negative). You just sum up all of the values of a user's posts. That value is used instead of the post count to give them a rating (i.e. determine how many stars they have), as well as determine if their posts are moderated and if they can vote.

A karma system only gives you an average helpfulness of a user, and a post count system only gives you a rough participation value for a user, but a combination would give a very good idea of a user's sum "worth" on the forums. Plus you could convert the existing post count system 1:1 (or 1:2, etc.) without much trouble and it would be fair to existing high-post-count members, who obviously should have high values to begin with.

Additionally, you could sort threads by the sum of their post values in searches or in a special list, so people can find good threads on a topic quickly.

How about that?

[earlz]

I think a forum should be a forum. Not stack overflow(its a great site, but how easy is it to discuss general things indepth? because if there isn't a definite answer, then you just have one side voting down the other side and vice versa)

So I say voting should be out.

I like the idea of a noob forum.
We definitely must decide on the philosophy of this forum though. Do we welcome new people that maybe aren't experts at programming nor learning on their own. Or do we basically make this forum an invite only place(having auditions or something similar) [not literally, but practice and much reading would be required before a first post else get banned or RTFM'd]

I personally am in favor of welcoming the noobs, though if we decide on this philosophy, a noob forum must be created and possible post moderation on noobs for there first 30 days or so...

[Creature]

Judging from the posts I've seen, I do understand why this happened. It must make you (the moderators, admins) so tired to keep locking, splitting, deleting, ... threads of people that do not follow the guidelines. And somehow they just keep coming, even though you already put a banner on top of the site.

About the rating idea: I like it, I've seen it on other forums before and liked it there too. The only disadvantage is that people might start 'repspamming' (reputation spamming), giving eachother good ratings all the time. Making it so that you need to rate 2 other people before rating the same person again doesn't really help, they will just rate some random person and then rate the target person again. Overall, I still think it's a good idea and repspamming might be avoided if the members of this forum are of good will (and will just not do it) and moderators can also perhaps have some sort of overview of reputation changes (so they can see, if they want to, if the reason for the rating was 'valid'). This way people that are always happy to help have a high rating (if they actually helped someone) and others will have lower ratings. The good thing about this is that newcomers know if they're being helped by someone that apparently knows a lot or has a lot of experience, or someone who's either new (but might know a great deal about OSDev) or doesn't know too much about OSDev yet.

Another idea would be (like suggested before) for newcomers to only have access to a specific forum (like a newcomers forum) and access to the other forums (OS Design & Theory and announcements and such) will automatically be granted whenever they have a certain amount of posts (if they spam or are utter newbies, mods will know about it [thank you, reporting system ], otherwise, they will have access like regular members).

[Troy Martin]

We'd likely just have to take your usual karma MOD and play with the .php files before setting up the final product.

And again: I'm going vote that we have a "Newbie forum". It would cause newcomers to isolate themselves to one area, and therefore filter out a bit of the static. I think it would be fun, and a bit more friendly in the end ...

QFT. Maybe we should also have a "what not to do" forum, with examples of previous posts that have been locked and have caused warnings and/or bans to be handed out, as well. That way it's sort of a reminder that "if you act like an arrogant smart-alec, don't expect to be around for too long..."

Other than that, all I can think of is a <h1> to the right of the logo that says "READ THE <bleep>ING WIKI!!!"

[OrOS]

Actually, creatures idea probably makes the most practical path. Its very easy using groups to restrict permissions for forums.

Why not have a 'Newbie' forum, with read access to all forums, and write access based on another factor (karma, mod, ect...)

[whowhatwhere]

Judging from the posts I've seen, I do understand why this happened. It must make you (the moderators, admins) so tired to keep locking, splitting, deleting, ... threads of people that do not follow the guidelines. And somehow they just keep coming, even though you already put a banner on top of the site.

About the rating idea: I like it, I've seen it on other forums before and liked it there too. The only disadvantage is that people might start 'repspamming' (reputation spamming), giving eachother good ratings all the time. Making it so that you need to rate 2 other people before rating the same person again doesn't really help, they will just rate some random person and then rate the target person again. Overall, I still think it's a good idea and repspamming might be avoided if the members of this forum are of good will (and will just not do it) and moderators can also perhaps have some sort of overview of reputation changes (so they can see, if they want to, if the reason for the rating was 'valid'). This way people that are always happy to help have a high rating (if they actually helped someone) and others will have lower ratings. The good thing about this is that newcomers know if they're being helped by someone that apparently knows a lot or has a lot of experience, or someone who's either new (but might know a great deal about OSDev) or doesn't know too much about OSDev yet.

Another idea would be (like suggested before) for newcomers to only have access to a specific forum (like a newcomers forum) and access to the other forums (OS Design & Theory and announcements and such) will automatically be granted whenever they have a certain amount of posts (if they spam or are utter newbies, mods will know about it [thank you, reporting system ], otherwise, they will have access like regular members).

This is why I think post ratings are better than username ratings. (Posts over karma.) That way stupid flames don't mark every post of a user as a bad reply. It also means that ones marked in the negative (say -10, as ten 'bad' votes) can be moved to the autodelete forum.

[Creature]

That's a good idea. The only better thing about user-based rating is that it inspires people to try and help other people (good global rating goes up). You could try to have best of both worlds and have the post-based rating and give every user profile a page that lists all of his/her good-and bad-rated posts or something similar.

[Troy Martin]

Let's see if we can put together a compromise:

You vote on insightful posts, can mark posts as answers, topics with insightful posts can be seen near the top, and to top it all off, we add a subdomain called "offtopic.osdev.org" and install phpbb3 there...

[AndrewAPrice]

If your karma is >1 (not 0 or lower) your post requires moderator approval.

This is a great idea. So people with positive karma will require approvals and people with negative karma can post all they want. I vote we implement this system.

Sorry, that's a typo. It should read:

If your karma is >1 (not 0 or lower) your post does not require moderator approval.

[Cognition]

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see what all the fuss has been about lately. I've been lurking around these forums for a while and there's always been a certain number of people will periodically post without putting much effort or thinking into it. Usually these posts were just ignored and moderated. It seems to me what's happening lately is the overall volume on the forums has increased and the community has apparently become more annoyed by such postings. Moderation reacted quickly to the complaints and the god mode came on, I agree that this was probably an over reaction in a certain sense, but it was prompted by complaints on the part of the community.

Without being too apathetic, I'd like to point out that this site has an active Google bot on it and every 13 year old who just downloaded their first distro of Linux and feels they've got what it takes to beat Microsoft will likely be directed to this site. There's going to be a constant and steady flow of posters who are not ready to take up a topic as complicated as OS dev for various reasons. Generally the only effective ways I've seen of dealing with this are to limit what new members can do and essentially put them through some vetting process (I.e no thread creation until they've made x number of comments) and to have a good moderator team. Personally I feel moderation here has been great. I'm not really in favor of a mob driven voting post voting system, youtube has one and I wouldn't consider it well moderated to say the least. We have good moderation here, I suggest the focus should be put on structural problems and initial membership requirements.

Likewise I agree with what Solar said on the forum split thread, if you don't like newbie questions why make 8 posts in response to it? A lot of it honestly strikes me as posturing and the greater irony is such posts often have little to contribute themselves. If you want to improve this forum help contribute to the wiki and other resources. This thread itself is already starting to mirror topics being discussed in the forum split thread.

All that said, it also occurs to me that perhaps any thread which has been "moderated" should probably automatically be moved to the auto-delete forum instead of occupying front page space in one of the other forums.

[Colonel Kernel]

All the discussion about implementing a Karma system is pointless IMO... Stack Overflow has a voting system that is being constantly tuned to ensure a good signal-to-noise ratio. The site is for programming questions, OS dev is a form of programming, therefore IMO the best place for "How do I do XYZ?" OSDev questions is Stack Overflow, period. Leave the more general discussions and opinionated rants for this site.

[Combuster]

Call this a hijack if you want.

After this bit of martial law, and especially the resulting discussion with some of the moderators, I decided to resign my position as moderator. I hope that as part of the process, I can regain some sleep by not having to lurk every waking moment for Bad Things to happen in order to prevent them into escalation.