CmdrTaco's Journal: HDTV Tivo, 720p, Moderation

I continue to obsess over my lack of HD Tivo with little hope of any change. In fact, the plot thickened recently. I pre-ordered a Tivo from Solid Signal... their FAQ says they won't charge my credit card until they are ready to ship. Well, the credit card charge cleared on tuesday, but no shipping number was emailed. My emails to them are ignored. I'm pretty suspicious of this behavior. I mean, I'd like to try to get one from a few other sources, but my CC is already in for the cost of this one. Ideally they've shipped it and its en route via next day shipping today. But I'm pretty wary of this. I know that technically it's illegal for a vendor to charge without shipping something. But I've also found that quite a number of vendors like to ignore that pesky little law. And of course they may just have forgotten to mail me a tracking number. But that doesn't seem very likely.

They are going now for around $1500 on eBay. It's just not worth paying $500 over retail for the things. I'd pay a small premium to get it in time to enjoy the last few episodes of the Sopranos in HDTV, but not $500.

While I'm still thinking about HDTV, I configured my xbox to work in HDTV 720p mode now. Since I primarily use my xbox to run XBMC and play anime fansubs, this works really great since the menus are quite legible at 720p, and enjoy the extra pixels for longer lists of files to scroll through. Organizing my fansub collection is something of a chore. I have like 15 gigs of unwatched stuff, and perhaps 50 gigs of stuff I hang on to for no particular reason even tho I've either seen it, or probably won't ever bother. But it's a really great setup. The only down side is that I'm still on the shallow end of the bandwidth pool, so I have to download files at the office and carry them home on a hard drive. Not the end of the world, but hey whatcha gonna do. If you're into fansubs, look for Gantz. Man that is some crazy stuff.

I have a yellow legal pad that I've mostly gone through now working and reworking how the moderation system needs to store data. Every time I get close, I realize something fundamental is screwy with how I'm doing it. I keep trying to abstract ALL Penalties and Rewards into just a few simple tables, but that just doesn't seem to work. I'm gonna need far more data types because Penalties and Rewards have many sources and modifiers Like, a Poster gets a reward for getting modded up, and a Moderator gets a reward for that same mod, but not until meta moderation time. Likewise, the meta moderator gets rewarded at M2 resolution too. Each of these actions has a corrosponding punishment too. But I want other information to affect punishments and rewards as well. A user with terrible karma needs a different penalties than one with excellent.

My hope is that each of these people: Poster, Moderator, Meta Moderator has a list of modifiers that can be applied to them. For example, poster modifiers might be 'Excellent Karma' or 'Posting From Large Proxy Server' 'Subscriber' 'Long Comment' 'Bayesian Filtering Says Troll'. Whatever modifiers I could think of that might apply. But each of this filters could ultimately affect the rewards and penalties associated with the post. Moderators have a similiar list... some are security related, but some are more obvious. Remember my 'Rock Star' moderator comments from a previous journal... a Rock Star would be a moderator modifier. The penalty for some actions for a Rock Star would be reduced. Others might be increased. Its all up in the air.

I think I have a pretty good list of these modifiers, but I guess the point is really to abstract this enough so that new ones can be added really easily. I mentioned the Bayesian Filter above... this could be a really useful filter, and relatively trivial to implement. Just user the worst 5% of comments as spam and the best 5% as ham or something. Certain words are bound to occur frequently in troll comments. Jamie has been wanting to do this forever. But if we design the new mod system correctly, the Bayesian filter is just a couple dozen lines somewhere to add, and it becomes a behind-the-scenes modifier attached to the post, with perhaps a slight affect on the penalty/rewards for the poster.

My 2 cents on comment moderation

[molo]

Taco,

In my opinion, the moderation system needs just one tweak: the ability to have different settings for stories not posted to the front page. That is all. Then people can cusomize your way into your different profiles ("show me some high rated unfunny comments", etc), and can keep their wacky settings if they want.

Jusy my 2 cents.

-molo