Idea: flagging comments/posts

DschingisKhan said:
Ten characters is just the apparent default on vBulletin. It's an arbitrary number and can be changed easily. In fact, it's seventeen characters now. There, done; I changed it.

My point wasn't that 10 wouldn't work. It was that any number that would allow us to conduct business as usual wouldn't work on anyone who spent 3 minutes trying to push their garbage through.

I mean 17 "LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL XD!" or 25 "OooEmmGee! DAT ASS!!!!1!111!!" And with that 25 limit it would make informing someone what episode a screencap was from go from, "Episode 5" to, "This is from the 5th episode." And that's assuming they didn't forget/knew in the first place. In which case they might try the former, get blocked, then not feel like waiting for the cooldown.

Like I said though, in combination with a cooldown it would likely curb more than a few people who just roll in here, make some stupid "LOL XD"esque comment, and then roll out. That's why it might be worth Albert's time.

I find this to be a good idea. Simply downvoting a comment doesn't give any info as to why it was done(although it's usually obvious), but flagging it with a valid reason can let the commenter know exactly what he's doing wrong, and let newer members know what kind of comments are frowned upon. And vice-versa for upvoting good comments.

If someone is up for it then I would like this option better, as down voting is really annoying for a number of reasons, one of those is someone having an opinion and some random person downvoting it. Even when something was a compliment (from my view) somebody on this site found it to be stupid and decided to remove it from site, I personally open up comments each time I view an image just to see what was so bad that the comment isn't publicly visible.

Shinjidude said:
(snip)
or when the 3 day probationary period ends, the post is automatically re-approved or deleted based on the number of positive vs negative flags

The rest of those ideas I either like or could go either way on, but this is not good, as it has the potential to defeat the purpose of the mod queue. I see Janitors+ being forced to delete flagged items outright on a regular basis, so that substandard or violating material cannot be brute-forced into automatic re-approval by such a system.

sgcdonmai said:
The rest of those ideas I either like or could go either way on, but this is not good, as it has the potential to defeat the purpose of the mod queue. I see Janitors+ being forced to delete flagged items outright on a regular basis, so that substandard or violating material cannot be brute-forced into automatic re-approval by such a system.

I think the answer here is weighting flags by the flagger's rank. That way, a mod's negative flag will override a lower ranked member's positive one, or vice versa.

As for things that go beyond the pale and obviously should have no possibility of surviving a flag, I don't see why outright deletion would be a problem. One would hope that in that case, the number of positive flags wouldn't come close to approaching the negative flags anyway (multiple mods can add their weight to a negative flag).

What would the alternative be? To have overwhelmingly positively flagged images deleted automatically despite the apparent consensus?

Shinjidude said:
What would the alternative be? To have overwhelmingly positively flagged images deleted automatically despite the apparent consensus?

To be frank, yes. I think that part of the system, such as it is now, is superior to what you've suggested here.

At the very least, there's less pretense involved. With the current system, it's forthright and honest about some users' opinions having overriding importance. Trying to be democratic about it will just lead to the general Member-level userbase getting even more frustrated when they spent their time casting their votes, trying to convince a Janitor that post #nnnnnn was good enough to stay (despite the post's blatant violation of ToS, and the opinion of said Janitor that it isn't good enough to stay), and ultimately not getting their way. After which, the following:

1. Frustrated user says "Screw this, I'm gone" and scarpers off to Gelbooru
2. Frustrated user whines to other mods or Albert
3. Frustrated user does something stupid to get himself banned, annoying the rest of us in the process

Those are generally the kind of user the site can do without.

Now, I'm with you on the comment-flagging thing, but for the most part, I'm in favor of leaving the post-flagging system alone. It works, don't fix it.

Hargh, we're running in circles again. No simple "X or more votes means it stays" tool will ever work. Neither will going back to flagging individual comments without making that system much better.

I have already sketched out a pretty detailed proposal of how the whole thing could be tackled on a technical level in a way that's backed up by prior experience. I'd like y'all to take a look at forum #33210, page 5, before inventing yet another pie-in-the-sky scheme.

I agree with Hazuki's plan.

With whatever system we go with, I suggest there should be a way to highlight or denote high quality comments. It'll help spot worthwhile comments while offering incentive to users to make better comments.

Looking over it, I do as well.

Would it be unreasonable, in such a system, to tack on the requirement of typing in a reason for up/down-voting?

If I remembered Hazuki's proposal correctly (just read over it again), the up/down voting in this case is on the user, not the comment, and the reason would be the same as for any user record given today.

葉月 said:
Hargh, we're running in circles again. No simple "X or more votes means it stays" tool will ever work.

I was refering to flagging rather than voting, though yeah, that's mostly semantics. In any case it's basically just a two-tailed extension of what we already have, so I don't see how it could be that much worse.

I don't like karma systems in general. Most of my favorite discussion sites don't use karma systems. They award comments on the merit of the comment alone, not who posted it.

I also don't think it would work very well on Danbooru just because there are so many people commenting in so many different areas. The hierarchy is very flat. Outside the forum, there's very little sense of community at all.

And the purpose of flagging isn't to make /comment readable. Given the nature of the site I think it's hard to completely stamp out "lol" comments. But I think it's useful to give moderators tools to isolate spoiler/racist comments. The ultimate goal is you shouldn't have to read every new comment posted to do your job.

sgcdonmai said:
Would it be unreasonable, in such a system, to tack on the requirement of typing in a reason for up/down-voting?

Yes, it would, because it would make the act of voting about 20x as bothersome, so nobody every would do it.

Shinjidude said:
If I remembered Hazuki's proposal correctly (just read over it again), the up/down voting in this case is on the user, not the comment, and the reason would be the same as for any user record given today.

Actually, it was more meant for general activity (such as individual comments), which'd then accumulate into overall user karma.

albert said:
I don't like karma systems in general. Most of my favorite discussion sites don't use karma systems. They award comments on the merit of the comment alone, not who posted it.

I also don't think it would work very well on Danbooru just because there are so many people commenting in so many different areas. The hierarchy is very flat. Outside the forum, there's very little sense of community at all.

The beauty of mod_virgule is that it isn't just karma (I dislike pure karma systems myself). It's based on explicit actions (voting / certification) which are then weighted by the karma which itself is the result of previously received votes. It's self-regulating, much like pagerank is for web search results, so it naturally clusters "overall good" and "overall bad" members into groups, and then gives the latter much less prominence. It doesn't need to know much about particular areas either, because it allows expressing things such as "I like reading what this person posts" or "this guy is getting on my nerves".

So what you get is the ability to rank individual items, but people whose items have been high-ranked before get more influence.

And the purpose of flagging isn't to make /comment readable. Given the nature of the site I think it's hard to completely stamp out "lol" comments. But I think it's useful to give moderators tools to isolate spoiler/racist comments. The ultimate goal is you shouldn't have to read every new comment posted to do your job.

I have my doubts about the overall utility of /comment if we don't even try to make it readable anymore. What's the point if nobody can keep up with it?