Karma and Rating Comments

LondonCommons.net has a new system to help with moderating discussions. The new system is called Karma, which is designed to allow discussions to be moderated by regular users. In other words: all LondonCommons.net users can now take part in moderating discussion, decreasing the need for formal moderators.

The basics

The whole Karma system is based on user participation. Every user contributed commentit now has a Karma drop-down menu. The options on this menu let any signed in user choose a sort of "neighbourliness rating" on a scale of zero to five for the comment in question.

• 0: Hostile neighbour
• 1: Worse neighbour
• 2: Bad neighbour
• 3: Just a neighbour
• 4: Good neighbour
• 5: Great neighbour

How the ratings are used

Karma keeps track of the average ratings of every user on the
site. The Karma system gets its name from this average, which is
displayed under the Karma section on user information pages. Hopefully
people will want to have high karmas, and try to write comments that
will get high ratings. Karma also lets users decide whether they want to see comments with low-ratings. Signed in users can choose to show or hide low-rated comments in the comment viewing options which are alway directly above the start of any comments section and are displayed below. If you don't want to see comments that other users have rated low, the site will hide them for you automatically. <picture goes here>

Protection against constant flamers

Every new comment starts out with the user's current karma as its initial rating. This means a new comment from a user who has consisently been rated as a hostile neighbour will be hidden until the comment is rated higher by another user. Low rated comments are only hidden when the option has been set in the comment viewing options pictured above. Choose "Show low-rated comments" to see all comments no matter the rating. Once a comment has been rated, a link is available to to see individual ratings. This is to keep users accountable for the ratings they've made on other people's comments. If an individual is abusing the karma system other users will be able to detect it.

For keeping it civil, not for censorship

It should be said that the new comment rating system is designed for moderating discussions based on civility or good neighbourliness. Comments should be rated low if they are inflammatory, insulting or disrespectful. Comments should not be rated low because they contain opinions or arguments that you disagree with. Likewise, comments should be rated high because they are helpful, written in a respectful tone, or otherwise contribute to the participatory nature of this website and not simply because you agree with them. The goal of the Karma system is for discussion areas on the site to be self moderating. It is meant to be a tool to help users deal with bad internet behaviour. It is not meant to be used for hiding comments you are opposed to. There are no limits to how many comments a user is allowed to rate, and users should feel free to participate as much as they like. Two final notes: focus more on rating high than rating low, and help welcome new users to the site by rating them as good neighbours.