Running Weblogs with Slash

Chapter 6. Comments, Filters, and Content Moderation

The comment and moderation systems make Slash a tool for community discussion instead of simply a content management system. This chapter discusses how the processes of posting and viewing comments works for users, how to forbid certain types of comments with filters, and how the moderation system encourages a self-policing user community.

A Slash comment can be attached to a Story, to another comment (its parent, in Slash terminology), or to a specially created discussion SID. Parented comments lead to a branching discussion tree similar to those that occur in Usenet newsgroups or mailing lists. Slash regularly distributes a passel of moderation points to its users. These can be used to raise or lower the moderation score of comments posted by other users. Each user has an individual karma score. Moderation performed on a user comment affects that user’s karma. Users can also earn karma by submitting a Story that gets published. High karma grants other user privileges, such as posting comments at a higher initial score.

Comments that meet with the approval of a significant cross-section of the site’s users will acquire high scores.^[16] Users can choose to filter and rank the comments on a particular Story. Slash provides a minimum threshold score; comments below this value will be suppressed unless specifically requested. The remaining comments can be sorted by their score or age and can be threaded to retain the branching ...