A module to democratically reduce verbosity of forum discussions
-
As far as I can tell, still, after the 27 years (?) that the World Wide Web (www) has been in existence, there is still no way for an administrator to easily set up a forum discussion on any contentious topic that can be comprehensively debated amongst all interested parties.
Given that there are many hundreds of millions of Internet users worldwide, if even just a sizable proportion of interested people – particularly amongst English speakers – are motivated to contribute to a discussion, then, on any web-site, on which contributions are not unfairly restricted, the discussion can quickly become verbose with much repetition.
Such over-sized discussions tend to be of little use to many people who would wish to understand the topic but only have a limited amount of time in which to read the forum discussion.
One possible solution would be to create a module which allows anyone reading the discussion to vote, NOT whether or not he/she agrees with any given post, but whether or not that post ADDS TO THE DISCUSSION.
As the size of the discussion increases, those contributions with higher positive votes would tend to still be displayed in full, whilst those with less positive votes would only have teasers displayed on the forum page. The fewer the votes, the smaller the size of the teaser would be. The teaser would still be linked to the full post elsewhere. So no-one would be prevented from reading that post in full for himself/herself.
Whether such a post would be stored in full on the forum site or whether the contributor would be required to store the post elsewhere would be for the site administrator to decide.
To make it difficult to rig a vote on such a system, I propose that a database table be used to store:
1. the vote as to whether or not the contribution adds to the discussion;
2. the time (in epoch seconds) in which each vote was cast; and
3. the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the host from which the vote was cast.
It would be fairly obvious where any individual attempted to unfairly cast multiple votes one way or the other in a short period of time. Such an attempt would be given away by having time stamps close to each other or the same IP host address or network address.
Such votes could be grouped together and deemed to be each worth, perhaps, one tenth, one one hundredth or less than votes with more spread out time stamps and from a wider range of IP addresses.
While unfair voting practices on a smaller scale by any individual might not be so easily detected, it would require a considerable amount of coordination amongst a sizable group of people for such a vote-rigging attempt to succeed.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
-
I apologize but I cannot identify exactly what your wordpress.COM issue is. If you need Staff assistance see here for what to do https://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-help-in-the-forums/#how-do-i-get-a-moderatorstaff-reply-for-my-question.
-
Note also that Staff review all requests made in the Ideas Forum and will contact those making the request at https://wordpress.com/me/account if they choose to accommodate the request.
- The topic ‘A module to democratically reduce verbosity of forum discussions’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 