The comment moderation system is a vote based system for filtering comments. Using a community voting mechanism which is outlined later, all comments are rated on a scale of -1 to 3. The voting system is oriented such that the rates loosely correspond to the following kind of comments:
- -1 - Spam comments, or repetitions of other comments.
- 1 - Somewhat useful comments which don't really stand out.
- 2 - Comments which are humorous or have informative value.
- 3 - Insightful/Interesting comments.
Users have a choice to select their thresholds for the comments that they want to see. Only comments having a score higher than the individual user threshold are shown. The current thresholds are as follows:
- -1 - Everything.
- 1 - Everything except crap.
- 2 - Readable comments.
- 3 - Good comments.
The voting system is powered by users who have moderations rights. Based upon the user points system combined with a subjective analysis of the quality of his/her posts, a user is conferred moderation rights. A user having moderation rights can choose to rate comments using a predefined set of scores. These scores are as follows:
- Interesting: 3
- Insightful: 3
- Informative: 2
- Humor: 2
- Useful: 1
- Repetition: -1
- Offtopic: -1
- Trash: -1
- Spam: -1
A user having moderation rights is presented with a drop-down containing the above values on browsing through the comments section. Selecting a value and hitting on the Moderate button adds the corresponding value to the vote total to the corresponding comment, which is then divided by the number of users who have voted and rounded off to the nearest integer.
