Reporting a story. Ideas needed. *reprint*

[Rousehouse]

This thread was initially started by Ash. This is a reprint resurrected from the dead... I wasn't able to get the whole thing, but I got most of it.

From Ash:

When you "vote" for a story, a +10 is put into the "votes" table. One real vote = 10 database votes. When you report a story, it gets - (minus) votes. The doesn't actually effect anything at the moment.

There is a "discard.php" file that we've not yet implemented that is supposed to be put into a cron so it runs every X minutes. This file will look at the negative votes and decide if action should be taken. Right now, 2 negative reports will "discard" a story and remove it from the pages, IF you have the cron running the "discard.php" file.

I don't believe the original author is going to leave it like this, it's just a "proof of concept" I suppose.

We have not yet discussed how we're going to handle this.

How does the community feel? What are your ideas on this?

Thanks!

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From Rousehouse:

Thanks for asking the community to contribute on this point. I have a few errant thoughts on the topic:

• The formula should be customizable by the site admin.
• The votes to remove an item should be in some way proportionate to the votes for it. For a default, I'd say a report should remove 5 database votes.
• If the database votes is < 0, then the story probably should go dark. For example, if 5 people voted for it, but 11 people voted against, it's a goner.
• Votes against could be weighted by severity. An "old news" vote may be worth 3, a "lame" vote may be worth 2, a "duplicate" vote worth 5, etc. By default, I would make them all 5.
• We want to give these stories a chance to live, so I'd advise that the site admin keep that in mind when setting up the cron job. I wouldn't run it every minute, because a gang of people could have a knee-jerk reaction and cancel a brand new story without knowing the facts. That said, we wouldn't want a bad story to live too long either. I would advise that the suggested default interval for the cron job be 30 minutes.

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From dnouche:

I would add one thing.. There's a site called spikedhumor that I visit often, and they have a weighted voting system.. So positive and negative votes are weighted depending on that user's contribution (# comments & submitted stories).. This gives more credence to longtime contributors than newbies. This would also stop spammy visitors.

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