| Rob Malda (a.k.a. CmdrTaco,
founder and head honcho of Slashdot)
had a dilemma. His homegrown Web site, Slashdot, was taking off fast. Every
day brought more posts, more page hits, more press coverage, more enthusiastic
members signing up. Everything was going great—except that Rob was being
lobbied by two distinct special interest groups, with diametrically opposed
needs. Many loyal Slashdot readers were longtime Usenet geeks, who viewed
the comments associated with each Slashdot story as a newsgroup and thus
felt obligated to read every post. But Slashdot was also attracting an
increasing number of busy and influential people who wanted to skim the
cream and read only the best comments. And Slashdot was growing bigger
and busier, so the good stuff was becoming increasingly hard to find.
 Rob
racked his brains, trying to come up with a solution that would satisfy
both groups. He needed a fair and impartial way to weed out the dross and
highlight the best posts, and he wanted a system that could grow along
with the site. He'd already hand-picked a few loyal Slashdot members to
mark the best and worst comments, but the volume of activity was fast outstripping
the abilities of his volunteer editorial team. And he didn't want to get
into the endless cycle of finding, training, and managing new moderators
for a rapidly growing site.
So one night, after downing a few whiskey shots, Rob sat
down at his laptop, and wrote a program that gave moderator access to 400
Slashdot members who'd posted good comments. Some people ignored their
new powers - but about half of the newly minted moderators began rating
posts. When people (inevitably) abused the system, Rob removed them from
the pool of potential moderators.
Over the next few weeks and months, Rob continually tweaked
the system, trying to balance power with responsibility. Today, Slashdot's
"just-in-time" moderator system is still being tweaked, but it's settled
into a groove. Here's how it works:
-
· Every thousand posts triggers a program that randomly
selects a group of moderators from a qualified subset of the member database,
which excludes newbies and known troublemakers and represents a broad cross-section
of Slashdot readers and posters.
-
· Someone discovers that they're a moderator by logging
in and seeing some extra controls on their screen, along with some instructions.
Each newly-minted moderator is allotted five "tokens," each of which represents
the chance to rate one post. The ratings are accumulated by the system
database, which attaches an evolving score to each comment within the system.
After they've rated five posts (or after three days), they're no longer
a moderator; but if they didn't abuse their powers, the system can choose
them again from the pool of potential moderators. So a regular reader of
Slashdot might be given moderator access every few weeks or months, while
a regular poster might become a moderator every few days or weeks.
-
· Slashdot members can set their preferences to view
only those posts that rise above a certain score. So using this system,
the Usenet geeks can set their preference to -1, which allows them to read
every post—flames and all. And the busy people who want to skim the cream
can set their cutoff level at 5, which will show them only the best posts.
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