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Suggestion: Self-Policing Vanilla Add-on

blowfishblowfish
edited July 2006 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
I'm anticipating the task of moderating a forum on my website, and I remembered that when ebay started out, the inventor was besieged with feedback until he realized self-policing feedback, posted properly could handle most of the situations. Can we explore the idea of building an interface to allow users of the forum to possibly "elect" a team of folks they trust (users who contribute to the forum) who would be the "forum police". It seems to me that an errant user, properly warned, and then sanctioned by the duly-elected forum police would have little to grumble about. It seems to me this would take a huge burden off the shoulders of anyone who installs forum software in order to benefit from the community offered by a forum. I appreciate your thoughts and coding. :)

Comments

  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    Well, right now that is sort of freeform. You can create roles that have permission to do things like approve applicants or manage discussions and comments. They have powers and a title (role) and they decide how to use them.

    What I'm more interested in is creating an engine to recognize certain behaviors. An engine that can do things like autoban people or auto warn them. Or even learn to auto approve people based on certain things in the "discovery" input on the reg form. etc...
  • garymardellgarymardell ✭
    i like the idea of an elected government type thing for the forum. So members can lik propose categories to other board members and have members that have postedmore than 6 times to vote on it or sometihng etc..

    that would be cool.
  • blowfishblowfish
    I think if you need a certain number of posts to vote, it would provoke folks to quickly shotgun out some posts so they would qualify to vote. Maybe, "we vote on 2nd tuesday in may and whoever is registered on the site as of 30 days prior can vote". Mark, I love the idea of an engine to do the policing. There's a group that applies an engine to a forum to determine if the community is happy (I sort of imagine what they are counting). If they can do that, an engine is possible. But I'm very much in favor of peer pressure. I believe if an engine spots me, I might try to get around it. If my peers tell me to "shape up because we'd like to keep you on board", I think I'd take it better. And I'm strongly in favor of the community electing their moderators rather than they being appointed. Again, it allows them ownership of their "cops". Just my thoughts and thanks for the feedback. I'm starting to get a good feel about this forum and the forum software. All the best till I check in again.
  • blowfishblowfish
    Mark, if there is a way to vote on something, I could use that to let them vote. The rest wouldn't need to be automated. Is there a voting mechanism?
  • imathisimathis
    How about instead of "appointment" admins get a recommendation notification based on this engine. Then, you can either grant them a higher status, or you can can ask the users to vote on whether they should be promoted. This way you can still have control, and avoid the possibility that someone gets a band of sock puppets together to take over your board, but you can still achieve that member trust you're looking for.

    I don't know how these things work, but it seems like a nice compromise.
  • blowfishblowfish
    AssProphet, I like your idea. A little bit of input from the users and I keep an eye peeled for the sock puppets....
This discussion has been closed.