Oz Politics Blog

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.

Remember the movie Ground Hog Day, where the lead character wakes every day in the same small town to live the same day over and over again.

Well, this blog is beginning to feel like Ground Hog Day. It has the same boring commentators repeating the same boring assertions, engaged in the same boring conflict with the same boring people who hold the equally boring opposing points of view.

If you don’t get it, I am sick of reading the mindless partisan bickering. The funny thing is that I suspect half of you are sitting in Parliament House or party Headquarters engaged in viral marketing techniques for the next election against the other half. [Given his propensity for spelling errors, I am sure Glen is behind the Liberal Party's new web site].

In an effort to bring back some value into your comments (or at least limit the number of repetitive comments you can post), I have introduced a daily limit of 6 (update: 5) comments per person. In the future, I may apply even tighter rations on those who are abusive or extra boring. I can relax the restriction on others who demonstrate a commitment to scintillating narrative and insightful analysis. Indeed, I might introduce a rating system that automates the task for me.

In the mean time, and because I cobbled together the daily limits plugin in a fit of pique in a hour or so before going to bed, there is no guarantee that it is working properly. Contact me if you spot a glitch, or if you want to make the case for extra daily posts.

Update At the suggestion of a number of commentators, I have reduced the daily comment limit to 5.

You can see the top daily commentators on the site stats page.

Download: the latest version of the plugin from here. It is version 0.0.3, released on 11 April 2007.

I have uploaded an election calculator for predicting the number of seats a party will win at the 2007 Federal Election for any given national two-party (TPP) preferred vote share.

It is built on the Mackerras Electoral Pendulum, which can be found here.

Interestingly, the Coalition loses majority government at 49.8 per cent of the national TPP vote share. However, because of the two continuing independents, and the distribution of votes, Labor does not win majority government until it wins 52.1 per cent of the national TPP vote share. Labor has a disproportionate share of its vote locked up in safe seats.

For the record, I have treated the seat of Calare in a cavalier manner, given the redistribution and the impending resignation of independent member Peter Andren. It is probably a much saffer Coalition seat than I have it on this system.

As is the way with these sorts of projects, there is always the chance that I have made a mistake in the underlying arithmetic and algorithms. If you see such a mistake, please drop me a line and I will fix it.

My temporary home at Ozpolitics.biz is no longer needed! Ozpolitics.info is back online. I have redirected Ozpolitics.biz back to Ozpolitics.info (but to be fair, both are now hosted on the same physical server, one over the top of the other).

I think I have restored everything from the old ozpolitics.info site, with the exception of the Senate calculator (for the above the line vote) that I wrote in perl for the 2004 election. I have restructured the Ozpolitics Guide, so the old links will fall over. I will write a replacement Senate calculator in PHP before the next election.

I have added a list of the top 15 commentators on the site stats page. No surprises on who heads the list. I have reinstalled the site hits plugin — but I suspect it needs some work.

Over the weekend I have recovered most of the old ozpolitics.info site and placed it into WordPress, which I am now using as a content management system. All that remains to be uploaded is the topics section and the 2004 Election material. I need to reload the WordPress plugins I have written so that they can be retrieved. These should be completed in the next week.

When I regain access to the ozpolitics.info domain (hopefully by Wednesday this week), I will set up a script that will redirect most of the old references to the .htm files to references into the WordPress content management system. I will also redirect ozpolitics.biz back to ozpolitics.info.

I have increased from one to three the number of links you can place in a comment before it is sent off for moderation.

My next big project will be a guide to the 2007 Federal Election.