Oz Politics Blog

Comrades,

For those of you who find the new blue theme too conservative, you can return to the comfort and security of the red theme.

At the bottom of the right hand column on the main blog page is a theme changer.

You have probably noticed the new blue look and feel.

What do you think?

I have disabled the Akismet spam plugin. Akismet appeared to be killing more real posts than spam. I will leave it disabled as long as no spam is getting through,

I have left the bad behaviour plugin active (because it appears to be stopping around 2000 spam hits a week).

Let me know if there are any problems.

I have upgraded the blog to WordPress version 2.2.

Please let me know if anything is broken as a result.

I am considering whther to introduce a comment rating system that would inform comment auto-moderation and daily comment limits.

My proposal is that any reader would be able to rate a comment between 1 and 5, on a categorical scale from ‘poor’ to ‘excellent’. These ratings (and the number of raters) would be displayed beside each comment. I have uploaded a very clunky version of the rating system — as a proof on concept. I will work on a more beautiful rating system over the weekend.

Once posters had received ten or more ratings across their comments, an average rating would also appear beside their name.

Auto-moderation

The proposed system would ‘auto-moderate’ any comment with ten or more ratings, and an average rating less than 1.5. Auto-moderated comments would not be visible - nor would further ratings on the comment be possible. The tribe has spoken.

Daily comment limits

I want to reward the better rated commentators with the capacity to post more comments. My proposal is to set a variable daily comment limits based on the average rating of each author. It could be something like that set out in the next table.

Safeguards

The system would not allow people to rate their own comments. They would not be able to rate a comment more than once. And they would not be able to rate older comments, (say) those older than seven days.

People who advocate grotting an individual with a series of low ratings will have their effective score set to zero, and as a consequence a limit of two comments a day.

Feedback

Anyway, it is just a proposal at the moment. Comments on the proposal and other suggestions welcome.

Update - 15 April 2007

Okay. So the auto-moderation idea was crap.

I have taken down the comment rating plugin. It was generating a bimodal distribution around 1 (poor) and 5 (excellent). While this distribution confirmed the disagreeable nature of politics, it was not particularly useful for assessing the quality of comments. It was an interesting experiment.

I have also taken down the current one-size-fits-all daily comment limit. I am working on a new yellow card system. Once a yellow card has been issued it heralds daily comment limits for the author of the yellow carded comment for the next 7 days. Three yellow cards and then a red card, with no capacity to comment for 7 days. I am working with comment limits of 8, 4 and 2 for the yellow cards. A second or third yellow card is only deemed to have been issued if a yellow card is currently in force.