Please [LWN.net]

Please

Posted Feb 26, 2021 4:07 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: Please by corbet
Parent article: Fedora and fallback DNS servers

Jon, it has been 20 years. Time to look around for some mechanism to get comments under control. Simply treating comments as a tree in the order that they were submitted as if they are ordinary articles might have been acceptable two decades ago, but it is way too easy for discussion to be derailed, especially if the very first comment is trollish. There are some topics that just can't be discussed because of the problems with the comment system, and your occasional requests for civility just aren't effective.

I like Ars Technica's system, it seems to produce high quality discussions most of the time. There are other good ones.

to post comments

Please

Posted Feb 26, 2021 23:58 UTC (Fri) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link] (1 responses)

For what it's worth, I appreciate Jon's comments when he intervenes. They are tasteful and help set the tone for everyone else — they make it clear what kind of engagement is expected in *other* threads.

It may be that additional moderation features are also needed (though I've been coping okay with the killfile equivalent) but I don't want to see this other tool for good go away.

Please

Posted Mar 5, 2021 22:40 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I just want to post a “me too” to this. Having a human tell me when I've done something to elicit a reaction - good or bad - carries infinitely more weight than passive-aggressive externalities codified in software. The moderation style on this site, sadly unusual as it is in this day and age, works better than anything else I've seen.

We don't have an endemic unchecked plague of trolls here partly because it doesn't present a UI up front that sets expectations that they're part of the system. I can guarantee the second something with countable numbers were to be added, there'd be crowds trying to gamify it in all directions — it's already bad enough when I see a large user ID or reply count and brace for the worst.

(Here's where I'd apologise for veering so far off topic, but I think arguing over software-political DNS hijacking is a horse that's already been flogged into dust.)