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Information about Moderation System

On Internet websites which invite users to post comments, a moderation system is the method the webmaster chooses to sort contributions which are irrelevant, obscene, illegal or insulting from contributions which are useful or informative.

Various types of Internet sites permit user comments, for example Internet forums, blogs, and news sites powered by scripts such as phpBB, a Wiki or PHP-Nuke. Depending on the site's content and intended audience, the webmaster will decide what kinds of user comments are appropriate, then delegate the responsibility of sifting through comments to their moderators. Most often webmasters will attempt to eliminate trolling, spamming, or flaming, although this varies widely from site to site.

Anarchy

Anarchy is the oldest of moderation strategies and dates back to a time when the Internet was a smaller place and people who were misbehaving could more easily be traced. This system can be seen today in Usenet newsgroups - where no message is ever censored or deleted. Unfortunately with the advent of electronic commerce the newsgroups have largely become overrun with spam and many groups are not suitable for children. Some argue that Usenet is no longer a useful communication medium although client-side solutions in modern newsreader software such as bayesian filtering techniques offer some hope. Various websites still prefer to avoid censorship entirely, mainly for freedom of speech reasons.

Supervisor moderation

This kind of moderation system is often seen in Internet forums. A group of people are chosen by the webmaster (usually on a long term basis) to act as his delegates, enforcing the community rules chosen by him on his behalf. These moderators are given special powers to delete or edit contributions of others and/or exclude people based on their e-mail address or IP address and attempt to "keep the peace" within the community.

User moderation

This system allows any user to moderate any other user's contributions. On a large site with a sufficiently large active population, this usually works well since relatively small numbers of troublemakers are screened out by the votes of the rest of the community. Strictly speaking, wikis such as Wikipedia are the ultimate in user moderation, but in the context of Internet forums, the definitive example of a user moderation system is Slashdot.

On Slashdot, each moderator is given a limited number of "mod points", and they can use each one to moderate an individual comment up or down by one point. Comments thus accumulate a score. The score is additionally bounded to the range -1 to 5 points. When viewing the site, a threshold can be chosen from the same scale, and only posts meeting or exceeding that threshold will be displayed. The Slashdot system is further refined by the concept of karma - the ratings assigned to a users' previous contributions can bias the initial rating of contributions he or she makes.

Moderator powers are assigned for short times based on various factors including Karma, and a meta-moderation system (whereby users moderate the moderators) to ensure moderators are doing a good job.

On sufficiently specialized websites (Slashdot being the classic example), user moderation will often lead to Groupthink, where any opinion that is in disagreement with the website's established principles (no matter how sound or well-phrased) will very likely be "modded down" and censored, leading to the perpetuation of the groupthink mentality. This is often confused with trolling.

External links

Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It is a "network of networks" that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government
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A website (alternatively, Web site or web site) is a collection of Web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that is hosted on one or several Web server(s), usually accessible via the Internet, cell phone or a LAN.
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The webmaster (feminine: webmistress), also called the system administrator, the author, or the website administrator, is the person responsible for designing, developing, marketing, or maintaining a website.
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Internet forum is a web application for holding discussions and posting user generated content. Internet forums are also commonly referred to as web forums, message boards, discussion boards, (electronic) discussion groups, discussion forums,
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blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
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Maintainer: The phpBB Group

Use: Internet forum
License: GNU General Public License
Website: [1]

phpBB is a popular Internet forum package written in the PHP programming language.
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PHP-Nuke
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The webmaster (feminine: webmistress), also called the system administrator, the author, or the website administrator, is the person responsible for designing, developing, marketing, or maintaining a website.
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The webmaster (feminine: webmistress), also called the system administrator, the author, or the website administrator, is the person responsible for designing, developing, marketing, or maintaining a website.
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Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search
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Flaming may refer to:
  • Anything set aflame or on fire
  • Flaming (Internet), the act of posting deliberately hostile messages on the Internet
  • Fläming, a region in Germany
  • Flaming, flamer and flamboyant

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Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979.
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Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks.
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Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search
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Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979.
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A news client is an application software that reads articles on Usenet (generally known as newsgroup), either directly from the news server's disks or via the Network News Transfer Protocol.
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Depending on the context this term means:
  • Bayesian spam filtering, a method to detect spam.
  • Sequential bayesian filtering, a method to estimate the state of a system evolving in time.

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Censorship is defined as the removal and/or withholding of information from the public by a controlling group or body.

Typically censorship is done by governments, religious groups, corporations, or the mass media, although other forms of censorship exist.
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Freedom
By concept
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Internet forum is a web application for holding discussions and posting user generated content. Internet forums are also commonly referred to as web forums, message boards, discussion boards, (electronic) discussion groups, discussion forums,
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The webmaster (feminine: webmistress), also called the system administrator, the author, or the website administrator, is the person responsible for designing, developing, marketing, or maintaining a website.
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This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.
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e-mail address identifies a location to which e-mail messages can be delivered. The term "e-mail address" is also used as the formal pre-registered authoritative electronic mailing delivery site for an individual (example: an attorney's e-mail address registered for delivery of
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An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique address that certain electronic devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard (IP)—in simpler terms, a computer address.
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Internet forum is a web application for holding discussions and posting user generated content. Internet forums are also commonly referred to as web forums, message boards, discussion boards, (electronic) discussion groups, discussion forums,
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Some of the information in this article or section may not be verified by . It should be checked for inaccuracies and modified to cite reliable sources.

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A meta-moderation system is an arrangement used on some Internet websites (such as Internet forums, blogs and news websites) which invite user comments.

Users rate how good a job moderators are doing. The most famous site with such a feature is Slashdot.
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This article is copied from an article on Wikipedia.org - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. The text was not checked or edited by anyone on our staff. Although the vast majority of the wikipedia encyclopedia articles provide accurate and timely information please do not assume the accuracy of any particular article. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License.
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