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Voting Mechanism for Threads/Messages

I have received complaints about the quality of some of the threads and messages posted to the forum these days.

If I see a thread that is out of control, I can and do mark it as Read-Only. This effectively shuts down the thread. However, I just don't see a majority of the rogue threads.

So, my question is, should we try to inhibit the noise and improve the quality of the responses in some way? For example,

  • We could institute a weighted voting system of some kind to limit the noise. Threads with too many negative votes would be closed (read-only). Messages with too many negative votes would be removed.
  • We could require forum users to login to reply to message threads. I would only want to do this if we can make it painless for legitimate users.

Let me know your thoughts and feelings on this.

Jon

Parents
  • Jon,
    First, I must agree with you. The last couple of days have been very bad - so many weirdos, on the brink of eccentric really. I do agree that something should be done - but I would not like to see a registration system. That should be the last resort, I think. The other proposal (voting based) sounds better. Some of the fiercest discussions here (between very capable people) that have descended into personal attacks would not have been filtered out by such a system (I think), which is good. I would not want to see threads containing the word "smoked sardine" or "read the C standard" being set to read only. But it really is time to plug the flow of crazed, homework sick students into the forum, that behave as if they own the place, and as if we are the members of a harem...

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  • Jon,
    First, I must agree with you. The last couple of days have been very bad - so many weirdos, on the brink of eccentric really. I do agree that something should be done - but I would not like to see a registration system. That should be the last resort, I think. The other proposal (voting based) sounds better. Some of the fiercest discussions here (between very capable people) that have descended into personal attacks would not have been filtered out by such a system (I think), which is good. I would not want to see threads containing the word "smoked sardine" or "read the C standard" being set to read only. But it really is time to plug the flow of crazed, homework sick students into the forum, that behave as if they own the place, and as if we are the members of a harem...

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