The team at NRKbeta attributes the civil tenor of its comments to a feature it introduced last month. On some stories, potential commenters are now required to answer three basic multiple-choice questions about the article before they’re allowed to post a comment.
Source: This site is “taking the edge off rant mode” by making readers pass a quiz before commenting
The goal is to ensure that the commenters have actually read the story before they discuss it.
So are comments on news websites still useful, or have they had their day? Trending asked The Daily Dot editor Nicholas White and Marie Lyn Bernard, aka Riese, of the LGBT website Autostraddle for their, um, comments on the issue.
Source: Is it the beginning of the end for online comments? – BBC News
Thus, according to the ECtHR, a news website should anticipate types of stories that might attract defamatory or insulting comments and be prepared to remove them promptly – or even before the comment has been reported, which might mean websites will be forced to pre-moderate any comment it publishes. One only has to look at the type and volume of comment posted below the line on websites from the FT’s to the Daily Mail’s to see the implications of this ruling. And, as any moderator will tell you, controversial comments can appear in the unlikeliest of places.
The truth is more likely that it’s less to do with his site and more to do with Google seeing a pattern of what it considers to be unnatural linking by the publishers it is contacting. As Haughey guesses, it’s more likely that MetaFilter is “collateral damage,” with the damage being the annoying link removal requests rather than any real distrust of the site. That’s especially since its ranking drop seems to well predate these requests.
But it is worrisome, especially when Haughey writes about how much care apparently goes into trying to ensure all links are relevant:
via On MetaFilter Being Penalized By Google: An Explainer.
Earn respect. That’s your best defense if things go south with Google. It’s also your best offense for doing well in Google
The evidence is that a contributor who is down-voted produces lower quality content in future that is valued even less by others on the network. What’s more, people are more likely to down-vote others after they have been down voted themselves. The result is a vicious spiral of increasingly negative behaviour that is exactly the opposite of the intended effect.
PROBLEM: You are a web programmer. You have users. Your users rate stuff on your site. You want to put the highest-rated stuff at the top and lowest-rated at the bottom. You need some sort of “score” to sort by.
via How Not To Sort By Average Rating.
CORRECT SOLUTION: Score = Lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter
Say what: We need to balance the proportion of positive ratings with the uncertainty of a small number of observations. Fortunately, the math for this was worked out in 1927 by Edwin B. Wilson. What we want to ask is: Given the ratings I have, there is a 95% chance that the “real” fraction of positive ratings is at least what? Wilson gives the answer. Considering only positive and negative ratings (i.e. not a 5-star scale), the lower bound on the proportion of positive ratings is given by:
These instructions will guide you through the process of setting up a reddit clone for the first time. We also have an automated install script for Ubuntu Linux 12.04.
Reddit has a very intuitive comment system. They release their source code so anyone can build upon what they have already built.
With a few quick steps, you can turn your old comment system into a new way to engage your visitors.
From small blogs to massive websites, Disqus is the easiest way to build active communities. It’s free to use and works with virtually any type of website.