Mods: Why not use slashcode?

[pancho]

Going through the myriad of useless, crappy posts in these forums lately, it's hard to find people who actually have something valuable to contribute to the community.

Not that there aren't any intelligent halflife2 people out there; mind you, I still come back and wade through pages and pages of posts and I usually find some intelligent posts embedded between crap. Those posts make it worthwile. However, it's getting to the point where it's ridiculous trying to sort out the crap from posts that are worth your time and bring something of interest to someone who just wants to know what the hell is going on these days with Half Life 2.

This site is poised to be the center of HL2 community, and with many more people becoming members all the time, it might be useful to incorporate a system like Slashcode (http://slashcode.com). Maybe not even across all forums, but certainly on the ones that attract all those meaningless posts.

Slashdot has been doing this successfully (to an extent) for years, where you can view the highest raking, community-moderated posts only, or all of them if you wish (There are 5 levels).

True, you'd have to change the way you operate, by accepting user-submitted "stories" (in this case, topics), and have people comment on them. But IMHO I think it can be done. Oh, it's open source, btw.

 

[theGreenBunny]

Slashcode is a system for big newssites. This is a discussion forum.

The whole rating thing is fine, but it's not worth a switch to a system not meant to be used as a discussion forum.

 

[pancho]

Point taken. However, this site is also a news site. The system could be used to discuss news stories (like the leaked code). The forums could be used to discuss other less-meaningful topics. To be honest with you, Slashdot ran a story on the leak, and I found out more useful information there (from people who may not even be HL2 fans!) than what I got wading through endless posts of "Yeah, let's get that ****er!!".


Anyway, it would take some more thinking it through. I just wanted to get some feedback to the mods, and let them make a decision, if there's a decision to make.

 

[pancho]

Point taken. However, this site is also a news site. The system could be used to discuss news stories (like the leaked code). The forums could be used to discuss other less-meaningful topics. To be honest with you, Slashdot ran a story on the leak, and I found out more useful information there (from people who may not even be HL2 fans!) than what I got wading through endless posts of "Yeah, let's get that ****er!!".


Anyway, it would take some more thinking it through. I just wanted to get some feedback to the mods, and let them make a decision, if there's a decision to make.

 

[pancho]

Sorry about the above double-post. It happened when the site was having its bandwidth problems.

BTW, I did a little bit more research on slashcode, and found that it is quite easy to adapt it to a message-board style app.

From the Slashcode FAQ:

"Slash is a database-driven news and message board, using Perl, Apache and MySQL. It uses persistence through mod_perl for a good speed and efficiency. Slash has all the features and more that you'd ever want in a bulletin-board/message-board system. You can customize it to anything you want, give it any appearance that you want. This can mostly be done via data in the database. Slash is a database beast in the true sense."

I haven't heard any opinions from the mods on my idea. People are still complaining about the absurd number of crappy posts. I stopped checking the forums for information because of this. And I think a lot of people feel like this as well.

Even if you don't use Slashcode, it doesn't matter. Any BB with topic/post ranking feature will do...

 

[No Limit]

Actually something like this might work. Why not make a new sub board and call it "approved posts" (I'm horrible with names so think of something better). Set that forum up as a moderated forum (so mods have to approve each post) and it would contain lots of useful information. Only problem is it would take a long time to work on as there would be many submissions.

 

[pancho]

The thing I like about slashcode is that it's self-moderated. The community itself can moderate the posts, so it means no overhead for the official "Mods". They keep the power to rank posts as they wish, of course. But the community would be able to say "This post rocks", or "This post is absolute crap". Each user gets a certain amount mod points, and only after certaing rules are met, so not everyone "moderates". It's a pretty nifty system which seems to work with sites that have a lot of traffic.

 

[Bo Selecta]

Not a bad idea, I can feel my braincells die when I read some.. well most posts. This might help me keep my sanity :x