Community Moderation 1.3

This extension is intended to help create self-moderating forum communities. The idea is simple: Users receive points for positive contributions to the community, lose points for negative contributions, are permitted to vote whether comments are positive or negative contributions a number of times proportionate to their current number of points, and are not allowed to contribute to the community at all if they lose too many points.

The process works as follows. Please note that every number is configurable through Vanilla's settings page, and the defaults are used in this description for the sake of an easy presentation.

When a user accesses the forum for the first time, he receives 10 points to start with. Each subsequent day the user logs in, he gets 2 points as a bonus for visiting. For each intervening day the user has not logged in, he is penalized 1 point for absence from the forum, up to a maximum penalty of 10 points. This penalty is also limited to the positive points that the user has received for non-moderation actions, specifically to the net sum of the user's sign-up bonus, login bonuses, and absence penalties on record. This prevents a user from having a negative score unless he has actually received negative moderation votes.

Users cannot have more than 25 points, without the appropriate permission assigned to their role.

If a user has a negative points score, he will not be permitted to post or edit comments until his score rises out of the negative range again.

In any 24-hour period, a user is permitted to enter 1 vote per point he has. A user can vote 'up' or 'down' on a comment. Each 'up' vote increases that comment's scores by one point. Each 'down' vote decreases the score by one point. For every 10 positive moderation votes received for comments posted by a given user within the past 30 days, that user gets a 1-point bonus. This bonus is temporary and simply calculated based on moderation activity in the past 30 days.

If a particular comment reaches a net score of 10, then the user who posted it will receive a permanent 1-point bonus. If a comment reaches a net score of -10, then the user who posted it will receive a permanent 1-point penalty. The comment bonus or penalty will be revoked if the comment's score crosses the relevant threshold again.

Each discussion has a score, calculated as the sum of the scores of all comments in that discussion. If a particular discussion reaches a score of 10, then the user who initiated the discussion receives a 2-point bonus. If a discussion reaches a score of -10, then the user who initiated it receives a 2-point penalty. The discussion bonus or penalty will be revoked if the discussion's score crosses the relevant threshold again.

When a comment has a score of 10 or more, or a score of -10 or less, then users will be able to vote that its moderation was 'unfair.' If 10 unfair votes are recorded, then the moderation actions that caused it to reach such a high or such a low score are revoked and each user who moderated the comment in that direction receives a 1-point penalty.

If a comment reaches a score of -15, it will automatically be hidden. If a discussion reaches a score of 10 or higher, then a 'good discussion' marker will be added by way of adding a CSS class to the discussion's HTML representation. If a discussion reaches a score of -20 or lower, it will automatically be closed to further comments being posted.