Topic: Reducing miscateogrized posts - page 2. (Read 3696 times)

This is for newbie's I suppose, I mean im not going to unlock every single subforum just for the sake of being able to post there, you know.

Just because somebody has been very active in the Marketplace sections, for example, does not automatically mean they are knowledgeable about the Mining hierarchy.

In order to post to forum sections which you haven't "unlocked" yet, you go through the series of questions in the FSM to make sure your post ends up being placed in the right area.

After some number of successful posts in a section, presumably you know what kinds of threads are supposed to go in that section.

If I post to a section accurately I can unlock it? Yet others remain locked and bothersome for a period of time until they unlock? Am I understanding this correctly? As my forum status changes over time by this model all sections unlock? Or is it section by section as I begin to use them?
 

 

If you read the proposal's penultimate paragraph you'll see that users earn the ability to skip the FSM for certain sections after they have a track record of properly posting in that section.

I could not find a better place to post this,

I spend alot of time in the altcoins subs and like to go back 10-20 pages to see if there is something I might have missed, starting even to go a little further, I find repeated and almost worthless post's covering the same topic's (not saying they are worthless to who posted them), in the new forum  could it be possible that when typing into the subject line while someone is creating a new topic that a feature like googles search prediction work in a drop down and have it bring up very similar subjects that are already posted to the forum? This could help to consolidate the same questions in the same thread and would even assist user's cause they would be able to see how their question or topic was resolved at an earlier date, it could even help with clutter when a new user might be discouraged from posting more of the same after they see that their question has somewhat been asked before.


This is something I dislike about craigslist when I post ads there, although it is a good idea to keep things from being miscategorized often, could it be that this is a tool that could be imposed on new user's for a time period? and then reinstated for another period of time if Mods move a topic of a user that miscategorizes topics 2 or 3 times?

Maybe it can lead to a discussion about the best way to handle old threads that fins themselves miscategorized after a new sub-forum has been added.

I think the process of reporting miscategorized threads should be as streamlined as possible, because in the case of countering spammers and trolls the defenders are always outnumbered.

So maybe every thread has a javascript link for reporting a miscategorized post. When clicked, this list could show the path the poster took through the FSM, and the reporter can click on the erroneous decision.

Then they answer the classification questions from that point on and when they arrive at a new end point the report is queued for moderator review and approval.

This process works both for maliciously and retroactively miscategorized posts, but the algorithm should not penalize a miscategorization if the new forum area is newer than the original post.

That would make this post about miscategorised posts a miscategorised post.

I like the idea.  wangbus had ideas that might enable things like this, although we haven't thought much about automated categorization yet.

I think this would fit better in New Forum Software section.

If 'it' can analyse the text, perhaps it could stop threads that ask the same questions again and again.

That sounds like a neat feature, hopefully something interesting like that could be implemented with the new forum software?

If someone was designing new forum software from scratch, one of the things they should do is rethink categorization of posts.

Clearly, many users don't know or are not willing to post topics in the correct section of the forum. This can be caused by simple ignorance or malice. Either way, it greatly distracts from the usability of the forum and sucks up moderator time and attention.

Letting posters the category first and them cleaning up after them later is suboptimal, so why not reverse the process?

A user composes an new thread, but does not get to choose the category up front. When they are ready to submit their post, the forum chooses the category for them by having the poster interact with a finite state machine via a series of questions similar to the following:



The FSM end state is the section where the thread is posted.

Optionally, the forum software could do simple text analysis of the post and thread title to find possible duplicate threads, and ask the user to affirm their thread is new and not a dup.

Lying during the submission process in order to deliberately miscategorize a thread is a bannable offense.

The forum tracks member status (brand new, newbie, full member, hero member, etc) on a per-section basis taking into account how many of their threads get moved to other sections. If a user maintains a sufficiently high accuracy rating they "unlock" that section and can post to it directly without going through the FSM.

This would be a lot of work to implement up front, but I suspect it would greatly reduce the ongoing moderation burden, especially because it removes most or all plausible deniability for trolls.