A "terminators' club" for clp

[Alf P. Steinbach]

* gil_johnson:
> On Nov 13, 5:29 pm, kj <no.em... at please.post> wrote:
> [...]
>> Or it could be set up so that at least n > 1 "delete" votes and no
>> "keep" votes are required to get something nixed.  Etc.
>>
>> This seems simpler than all-out moderation.
>>
>> ("all-out moderation"? now, there's an oxymoron for ya!)
>>
> 
> How about using a "rank this post" feature? Anybody could rank a post
> as spam, and a sufficiently large number of negatives would quickly
> draw the attention of someone with the power to kill the message. I
> suppose even this is subject to abuse, allowing harassment of a
> legitimate poster., but my guess is that the votes against counterfeit
> Nike shoes, etc., would outnumber the most energetic "vote troll."

The problem with moderation isn't getting rid of spam and trolls etc., but 
turnaround time.

In some cases trivial questions cause a flood of essentially identical trivial 
responses to pile up before the mods can get at them. And then there's the 
dilemma of whether to approve all that or make judgements based on /content/. 
The latter leads to a very slippery slope, you really don't want the mods to do 
that, plus that in some cases what might appear trivial leads to very fruitful 
discussion of not-so-trivial aspects.

But it's not either/or: it's possible to have both an unmoderated group (fast 
turnaround, much spam, some heated discussion) and a corresponding moderated 
group (slow turnaround, no spam, far less heat, presence of more experts), e.g. 
as [comp.lang.c++] and [oomp.lang.c++.moderated]. :-)


Cheers & hth.,

- Alf