Moderation Suggestion

[Xavygravy]

I'm thinking a good way to increase moderation would be for you to make 'Moderation' a separate tab along the top - I don't think many people are aware of it when it's listed under 'Home'.

I think the "only allowing users with x mod points to add new albums" idea would work wonders. You could have an error message appear if a user tries to add a new album without the required mod points. A link could then be made to the 'Moderation' page, where it would give a very basic tutorial on how to moderate.

I think the best way to determine how many mod points should be required to add x many new albums, and also create another incentive to moderate would be a member ranking system.

This ranking system would be based upon the points you have when you look at the 'Top Members' leaderboard. At certain milestones you'd achieve a new rank, which would allow you to add more new albums and give you a visual reputation on the forums, on your profile, and maybe even on your comments (e.g. some kind of rank icon next to your name).

These are just some ideas I'm throwing out, but I think they'd all work very well. With more people moderating, there won't be any need for you to waste time on doing basic things like that, and you can instead keep working on the roadmap.

[19loveless91]

I'm not really sure about "only allowing users with x mod points to add new albums".. Doesn't seem fair to the new guys submitting their charts. But as I said in the other thread I do think it would be nice if members would be in a way encouraged to moderate new submissions. And I think what Jhereko said would be alright - I would go for the option that after creating a chart, a link to the moderation page (for the newer albums) is given, and the users decide if they want to do it theirselves or wait for an "indefinite time" for the moderation to be done. If nothing else at least they are aware they can edit it instead of having to wait, as I'm not really sure most people know that.
Which is why I like the idea to make a separate tab ("Moderation" or "Newly added") at the top of a page, so it would be easier to find

[GARY]

Sounds great to me, I'm at #6 on the top members list


A rank of Demigod has a nice ring to it


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I owe $100,000 and wasted 4 years of my life.

And all I got was this silly hat



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[Xavygravy]

The ranking system could probably be made consistent with the current forum ranks (Superstar, Legend, etc.), but rely on the Top Members leaderboard points, rather than just points. That very same forum rank icon could be used next to your name around the site.

[Wombi]

don't think the top members leaderboard is a very consistent method if you're going to rank members in terms of moderation privileges I mean some people are just ranked high because they have rated thousands of things it doesn't neccesarily mean much more than that.

[GARY]

[GARY]

My rank

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

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_________________
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I owe $100,000 and wasted 4 years of my life.

And all I got was this silly hat



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[Bork]

I see your time problem better now Albummaster. I added the tracks to a couple of albums and it made me realize just how time consuming it is with the vast number of new entries being added.

Albummaster needs help updating all this info if we don't want him to burn out completely, so I would urge everyone who hangs around these forums to spend a few moments a week checking the newly added albums and newly added bands, look it up at a reliable source (wikipedia normally works well for this purpose), and make sure the info is correct and complete. 15 minutes a week by 50 members saves Albummaster almost two hours a day that could be used for things that we can't help with.

And thanks again for all your immense efforts oh mighty creator.

[albummaster]

Thanks for all the feedback and to summarise and add my own comments to what people are saying:

Make the moderation area more obvious and put a link into the main navigation
The reason it is hidden at the moment is to make the site a bit more streamlined for new users (a first time user doesn't need to be aware of moderaton and I don't want those pages crawled by the search engines as they are quite expensive in terms of performance). Perhaps we could just show this tab for logged-in members.

At the moment, I accept some people probably aren't aware they can edit data etc. I could update the 'how it works' page to include a section on moderation, and maybe make the admin links more prominent across the site (e.g. suggested on another thread to add mod icons to the 'my chart' page).

I could also add filters to the 'newly added albums/bands' pages so that you can filter to see albums with no artwork, missing year of release etc and allow you to click straight through to the admin page without going to the album page first.

During the add chart process, highlight more obviously the moderation process for new albums/artists
I don't want to make it overly burdensome, while a user is adding a chart to fill in loads of missing data. The prompts need to be subtle and should not be in the way. I think adding something more obvious within the chart confirmation page to link through to the moderation area is needed (there is something already, but maybe this needs to be reworded).

Limit the amount of new albums some people can add
Perhaps new users could be limited to a smaller chart (say, 50 entries) and gain access to a bigger chart once they have reached a certain points threshold.

I think we should only allow users x 'new' albums within their chart. Then, once the chart is submitted, they should not be able to edit their chart to include *another batch* of new albums within a certain time period (say 7 days). (I think some people do this already to build up the database here, but it's completely unnecessary.) I'm not suggesting people can't edit their chart within that time period, just that they can't add any more new albums if they have reached a certain threshold.

I think some kind of throttling is also necessary to prevent 'flooding' of the system (e.g. a user today who added about 50 new albums within their chart which took about four hours to sort out and still isn't finished) (why any of the current 20,000 albums isn't enough to choose from, I don't know )

Encourage/incentivise more people to edit
I thought originally awarding 'mod points' for successful edits might be a way of incentivising people. So, if member ranks were based on total points (as per the scores on the top-members pages) instead of being based solely on forum posts, perhaps it creates an incentive for people to build up their score (I know it's a very artificial mechanism, and I don't take it totally seriously, but it does provide a good degree of insight into how active somebody is).

There are quite a few members here who don't post on the forums, but are otherwise active on the rest of the site, so I quite like the idea of altering the ranking system to be based on points awarded rather than purely on forum posts

I don't think doing that would adversely affect too many people, as the people that are active on the forum are generally active on the rest of the site as well, but it would boost a few people that are not on the forums and those people should also be entitled to any extra features that might be gained through having a higher rank.

(I'd also like to change the names of the ranks and the icons to bring them up-to-date - but that's a side issue!)

Summary
I don't think we should prevent users adding the albums that they want, as this might artificially affect the albums people select for their charts. I think we just need to put some controls around the process (per above), so that it is not abused and the site becomes easier to look after. For selfish reasons, if I spend all my time on data admin, it means there is less time to do proper development of the features on the the roadmap and that affects the general progress of the site.

I'd like to get the moderation right and spend time on this before continuing with the development of the roadmap. If we have a sound base to build from, then the site will scale really well.

albummaster

[albummaster]