Lambda the Ultimate

LtU uses Drupal, right? I'm used to http://br-linux.org, which also uses Drupal with a very effective moderation system. Let LtU readers themselves moderate bashers and other annoying posters.

Banning users is likely to just make them come back to haunt us under other nicks...

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

"The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases."

I think it would be a bad idea to allow only contributing editors to set the agenda, especialy with your (Ehud's) idea that contributing editors should be prolific.

It leaves only two options:
1. Don't contribute stories.
2. Contribute all the time.

I think there's a middle ground between these that is very valuable.

"If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion. --Lazarus Long"


Talk is cheap. Claims that include links to executable code are worth investigating.
That and E-Prime usually make computer science discussions easier to deal with.


The rules for #haskell are "Be nice. (or else)" When people fall outside of nice the first time, I privately explain carefully to them what the community expects and how the person's actions fell outside of those expectations. The second time I say the same thing publically. The third time, I remove the person from the channel.

I don't have time to waste on difficult people, there's so much cool stuff to learn!



Also, I've removed my signature. I'll keep that sort of information on my user information page in the future.

If you mainly worry about the website getting filled up with troll comments, maybe running a usenet server at LtU could help. Usenet is the ideal medium for discussions with trolls ;)

If you mainly worry about the quality of discussions, maybe some aristocratic system would be good: users have ratings, and users can moderate users (not comments) up and down. So after a while I think that the regulars that post "good" comments would have a good rating, while trolls don't. By marking every comment with a color (shades of green or yellow, maybe?) or with a numbers of little stars next to it users could quickly skim comments for the good ones (or set a level they want to browse at, like on Slashdot).

Well, I certainly LtU stays as good at it has been for the last years...

I know this site uses Drupal, but perhaps a queue system the one used on Kuro5hin.org could be implemented for the forums.

Kuro5hin uses the Scoop engine. The basic idea is that all registered members can vote on new topics before they are allowed to bubble up to the main forum.

They initially exist in an editors queue where people can comment on style, content and grammar, etc.

When enough votes are cast in the editors queue to allow the publishing of a topic the post finally achieves public viewing.

Kuro5hin allows for this queue to work for even front page stories, there's no reason that you couldn't eliminate that feature.

Since all registered users are allowed input to this queue, it is only discriminatory to anonymous users.

I think it would provide a good balance. The Editors drive the front page and the day to day content of LtU. The users manage the forums, preventing the Editors from burning out moderating every little topic that arises.

I have tried to be nice and productive, but I fear that I have also posted questions and ideas to the forum that aren't in the spirit of what this site's community would like to see... could you post some guidelines for what is appropriate for LtU forums, and what I should try to take elsewhere? This is a great place with thoughful and intelligent readers and contributors... I don't want to abuse it.

Let's not overgeneralize from what is (as I take it) a problem with one notorious troll. Would a specialized solution work best?

It's surely not sufficient, but I'd guess it would be helpful to eliminate threads, which always seem to be an invitation for discussions to wander off topic. If new topics arise that would best be discussed in a new space, one can always start a forum topic.

Having a detailed FAQ that links to expectations of user conduct and itemises issues where we have agreed to differ is likely helpful: perhaps it would best be a wiki? We could discourage wiki-sprawl by restricting the ability to create new pages, or some such.

Having recently finished a study on trust & reputation systems, this topic is very timely.

I've been a reader for some months now, but this is my first post. Go easy on me :-)

It has been shown [1,2] that the optimal strategy for enforcing best behavior among a community with cheap pseudonyms is the "Pay Your Dues" strategy. Essentially, this means newcomers must 'pay' something: time, money, 'work', in the context of the community before becoming full members.

Trolls can't be trolls if they have to pay to create each new pseudonym - assuming existing troll pseudonyms are blocked.

Several techniques have stemmed from this strategy [1,2,3,+]:
- Pay $$ for membership.
- First X messages are moderated.
- New members must wait X days/weeks before posting.
- Messages from members newer than you are subdued/hidden (as are any replies to them).
- New members are restricted to X replies per day/week/etc.

Some other interesting findings in my research [2,3]:
- Binary (good/bad) ratings are optimal.
- When feedback is missing, "good" is the optimal default choice.
- When cheap pseudonyms are available, all unknown (ie: new) members should be treated as a single, anonymous entity. All ratings of an unknown member (until they have paid their dues) also rate the anonymous identity. This causes trolls to reduce their own effectiveness over time.

Back to the options presented, I think option 5 is a good one to get started. Option 4 to some degree (for the worst offenders). Then some form of "pay your dues" for new members before their replies and forum posts become publicly visible.

Partial Bibliography:
[1] The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms
[2] Sanctioning Reputation Mechanisms in Online Trading Environments with Moral Hazard
[3] Robust Incentive Techniques for Peer-to-Peer Networks

To the degree that the tone of a site that takes submissions from the public does and must reflect editorial policy, I don't think it makes sense to devolve power away from the editors. To this end, I would allow the editors to delete any reply or freeze any forum thread. Sure, there can be abuses: editors who are quick on the trigger should get a lecture and told to take a vacation, and those abuse power should no longer be editors, and there may be the occasional gripe about it. On the other extreme, there's little value in letting the inmates run the asylum just to guard against the bogeyman of an "editorial cabal". I value the content of this forum more than some abstract egalitarian ideal, and I'm perfectly fine with this forum belonging to a select group of editors, and not to all of us.

If the feeling is that the problem is restricted to a couple of users, it seems to me we should handle that directly and not change the entire way LtU works. No?

Over time I have watched many nice communities crumbling under their own weight. I don't want this fate for LtU.

You could give editors the right to cast negative and positive votes for comments. They are not required to vote every comment; but if they notice a comment that is particularly bad or good then they can cast their opinion. Whenever someone's negative count exceeds the positive count by a certain ammount that person is not allowed to post for some time, say one month.

I have no idea if that is feasible in Drupal.

I'd ask that the forum be kept and that anyone should be allowed to start a new thread. There are few (if any) other forums that I know of that has the kind of readership that LtU has. Just because some people abuse it doesn't mean that everyone should suffer.

I'm not sure if this has been tried by other forums before, but perhaps each user could select *not* to see posts by certain users. Posts made by any user under a 'banished' user's post (i.e. within that sub-thread) would also be hidden. There should be no way for a user who had been considered undesirable to find out. This should make it harder for trolls to simply change nicknames, as they would not know for sure that they had been banished (an alternative hypothesis may be that nobody had taken the bait or was interested in replying to them).

Perhaps this way, we can choose for ourselves how the forum should look.

On the signature front, I'd get rid of them. They don't add anything to the discussion and make the page longer and more cluttered.

I find LtU refreshing flame- and troll-free. Of course, I hang out on Slashdot and DailyKos on a regular basis, so I may have different standards.

I would like to comment that there is a danger in going the other direction (too much moderation) as well. I've seen online communities get to the point where any topic more controversial than "my cat Fluffy" stories got shut down out of a fear of flame wars. I'm not saying that LtU is anywhere near there (because it isn't)- I'm commenting that there is such a thing as too much moderation, just as there is such a thing as too little. There are people, and I've met them, who feel saying to them "No, you're wrong, and here's why" is a personal attack. Letting these people set the standards for moderation is as bad as letting the trolls set the standards.

Another comment I will make is that while compile time vr.s run time type checking, or ocaml vr.s haskell vr.s python vr.s lisp arguments are boring and repetitive to the old timers, they aren't to the newbies. I myself have learned a hell of a lot in the go-arounds I've seen on this site. Perhaps instead of banning them, they should be "ghetto-ized"- create semi-permanent "advocacy" groups (like the comp.lang.*.advocacy goups of usenet of yore) where these arguments can go on to the participants heart's delight, and those who don't want to read them don't have to.

Just my two cents.

What do the rest of you want to see here that we don't have lately?

How about giving new members a maximum of 5 comments for the first year, and not until they have read at least twenty posts so they get a better feel for the tone of the forums?

In addition, there are newbie questions which may be quite appropriate. We can't be everything to everybody, so perhaps moderation of new topics is warranted. Any suitable alternative outlets?

On one hand, there are a couple of users I've noticed recently (I can think of two of them) who have engaged in what I might consider to be trollish behavior.

OTOH, often times a "troll" is a label put upon anyone who persists in advocating unpopular opinions (even if offered in "good faith"), rather than someone who seeks only to disrupt the site by seeding controversy. It's often hard to tell the difference. A person who were to post messages like "Haskell sucks" (but said more elegantly) would likely be labelled a troll; but someone who posts "C++ sucks" often gets a pat on the back.

Maybe the solution to the problem isn't to identify (and punish) trolls or problem users, but instead to identify problem content (or better yet, promote quality content). The following things, I think, ought to be discouraged in that spirit (feel free to agree or disagree, obviously).

* Personal attacks of any sort. Complaints about a user's behavior should perhaps go in an admin channel, not in the main discussion forums. Telling a person he's an idiot should go to /dev/null. In particular, accusations of trolling and such are fodder for the admin channel.

* Posts that just say "I agree", "I disagree", etc. If we go to a rating system, these become redundant anyway.

* Drive-by technology flames--including ones which are likely to be agreed upon by the participants. No matter how strongly you may think C++ is crap (or Microsoft or Java or whatever), simple declarations of such contain little useful content, and can easily venture into unprofessionalism. Reasoned critiques of legitimate LtU subjects should remain welcome--I'm only referring to the one-liners.

* Material which is scientifically discredited or just plain wrong. If this is the result of obvious error or newbie mistake, just correct it. Intentional and repeated posting of such may be considered abuse. This category should be limited to things which are demonstrated fact or dogma, not opinion--posts like "Java is the best language out there!" do not fall under this category (regardless of how wrong-headed you may think the claim is).

In addition, the following behaviors/posts always raise red flags. I wouldn't go so far as to ban these, but users should keep in mind that these make for weak arguments:

* Observations which are little more than personal opinion or experience--many comments on "intuitivity", "expressiveness" and such are of this sort. Likewise, proclaimations of superiority of some technology or technique, especially outside of a specific context.

* Anti-scientific and anti-academic remarks; disrespect of experts on mere "that's his opinion" grounds. (Substantial disagreement with scientific authority is another matter). Haven't seen to many of these on LtU, but topmind is notorious for this behavior on c2, where he has consumed much space on Ward's hard drive advancing his own version of "type theory".

* A strong desire to "protect the newbies" from material you disagree with, by placing objections on the record. People who read this forum are generally knowledgeable on the topic, and more than capable of making up their own minds.

In addition, I'd propose the following guideline:

* If you want to express a something which is largely a matter of opinion--such posts should always be professional, and should contain a new (and useful) reason why. (In addition, the reason why shouldn't also be mere opinion).

Quite a bunch of the noise is created when one person posts an opinion which is reasonable to him but anathema to someone else; who then posts a contrary opinion. Even when the argument remains friendly, such debates often degenerate into "is not"/"is too" affairs, which quickly lose any focus and value they may have had.

Finally--the purpose of this entire forum should be re-emphasized. If I understand it correctly, the main purpose is the sharing of knowledge and ideas, not to be a debating society. Some debate is often pedagogically useful, and debates which result in the sharing of knowledge and ideas ought to be encouraged. But debates which don't result in the sharing of knowledge (and often which are not intended to) ought to be discourage on those grounds.

Upon arriving, I discovered the signature capability. I also noticed that nobody else uses them. Figuring well, if it's available then it's allowed, I created one. I hope I am not ill regarded for doing so, as my actions were innocent.

My 1st one consumed 4 lines of text - fine by Usenet standards, but it looked awkward here. So I shortened it to 2 lines. I would have preferred 1 line, but I wanted people to be able to see my name at a glance, and I had too much text for 1 line. I suppose the underlying problem is the posting attribution identifies me as bvanevery rather than Brandon J. Van Every. I'll see if I can fix that.

My point is, I tried to reduce the noise, while still providing the signal I wanted to send. Many forums think it's ok to provide short bits of personal info in .sigs. Apparently that's not the culture here. If you decide to formally enshrine this culture, and make it a rule, then it would be best to remove the signature capability.

I include a sample signature so that we see what we're discussing. Otherwise I'll refrain from using signatures until people decide whether they should be allowed or not.

Cheers, Brandon J. Van Every
(cruise (director (of SeaFunc) '(Seattle Functional Programmers)))

I would note that none of these are the same thing. For instance, announcing a FP conference, or another FP forum, is much more topical than advertizing a bootleg copy of Visual C++ on sale for $99.95. Lists, as they grow, always have to make decisions on these things - if for no other reason than to stop people from screaming "you're evil! you're evil!" just because someone tried to hire someone or some such. Oftentimes in forums, people regard as evil, bad, nasty, unsufferable, horrendous, etc., anything that is not expressly condoned. For instance, once upon a time I had to take a firm hand about job posting policies, because Usenet folks tend to regard headhunters as Evil [TM] and usually have nasty, snippy words for them. I didn't want that kind of poisonous anti-job culture in my forum, so I put a stop to it.

I hope you create a clear list policy for what's accepted in the forum, rather than relying on "unwritten rules." Also I hope you temper the severity of your moderator responses in accord with the offender's relevance to FP. "Will not be tolerated, deleted without warning" sounds a bit scary, and may lead you to unnecessary animosity.

I don't see much true trolling here, but must admit I don't read all threads. But I've seen people called "troll" here.

For example tkatchev has been called a troll, but I don't think he is a troll at all. I think tkatchev has a different (but interesting and usually correct) way of thinking about things. [I also think he's brighter than I am.]

Tkatchev catches me off guard. He'll sometimes make a statement but not explain it in detail. I become puzzled and sometimes get it but usually don't. Several posts later he explains and I realize he was correct all along and I have learned something. It's a form of Socratic dialogue.

I've greatly enjoyed LtU and would willingly do my part to help it continue to succeed. Something that I think COULD help, and has been discussed before is a good collection of introductory material in a dictionary or encyclopedia like form that newcomers are greatly encouraged to read.

Not that that would solve all these problems, but certainly, I think it could help with some. A wikipedia for programming languages would be a valuable resource in its own right. Links to the right intro papers and books would help(especially since older members could point the newbies at specific entries local to the site).

I'll help in any way that I can Ehud, just send me marching orders :).

1. Closing commenting entirely. Agree. This is too harsh

2. Eliminating the option to create new threads in the forum I'm not a fan of this either

3. Establishing some sort of comment moderation. I'd prefer this, but don't know how much work it would be for the administrators. I like the idea of readers flagging messages 'unsuitable' and having them hidden when some threshold of readers have tagged them like Craigslist works (e.g. posts X percent of readers tag as unsuitable with at least 15 reads are not shown).

4. Banning users who use LtU to advertise, post trolls etc. I haven't seen much advertising on LtU, but the trolls have been much much worse in the last 2 months and the quality of good posts has declined. After a few warnings about trolling, I would not feel guilt for banning an abuser. Another problem is cutting down on tiny 3 sentence posts without content.

5. Eliminating user signatures (which are appended to all their posts), since they seem to mostly add noise.This seems like a good idea. I also don't like aliases, people seem to put more thought into posts when their name is associated with it.

I like Bryan Turners suggested limiting posting the number of posts new members can make per day. Its pretty hard to make more that 5 LtU quality posts a day.

I have contributed little to LtU, but I've read and learned much by lurking over the last few years. Thank you.

I'm sorry that the lack of respect and courtesy that characterises our modern age is causing problems here. My advice is this:

Those who make a real contribution - the editors and so on - should react to these problems as they see fit. They have earned the right to do so by their efforts. The rest of us should gratefully and quietly support them. I do.

To add to the growing list of ideas in this thread.

A possible improvement would be the ability to move (sub)threads to a different topic where it would form it's own thread, leaving only a link with the new topic name in the originating thread. Would make sure discussion remained topical while allowing the discussion to continue, fighting the tendency for it to form new subthreads to replace deleted ones.

The "static vs dynamic typing" topic would probably grow endlessly, and so would the new "personal insults" topic. Getting your discussion moved to either could possibly function as a remainder that you've strayed off-topic.

Hello. I've been reading along with you for over 2 years now, and I feel almost like I know some of you, so when I saw this topic, I had to post.

1. Closing commenting entirely. I think we'd lose the main value of the site this way, because often a comment from another user will provide enough mind-jiggling context to allow someone to see something they didn't before. Agree.

2. Eliminating the option to create new threads in the forum, thus only allowing contributing editors to set the agenda, so to speak. Well, maybe have normal users submit it to contributing editors for it to be submitted? No, I think this would stagnate us somewhat, unless there were a lot of contributing editors. Plus, it increases the burden on them. I like the idea of giving the more trusted members (editors) the power to intervene if they see fit, but forcing them to be the only driving force would take some of the steam out of the discussions, I think.

3. Establishing some sort of comment moderation. I don't think that this is worthwhile if each user votes a comment up/down with the same weight; the more trusted members should have more weight. If we do moderate, I think that the person who started the thread should be trusted to moderate it. That would distribute workload (more submitters than editors), but also keep responsibility for the thread with whoever started it. A slightly higher burden, but if a troll abused this power, it would be aplified immediately for all to see. If we did something like that, there should be guidelines: "brain-damaged language" -- borderline; "you're a dummy" -- right out. Hopefully a gentle "maybe you could word that less abrasively" from one of the old timers will be enough to quell flames (assuming editors have meta-moderate).

4. Banning users who use LtU to advertise, post trolls etc. I think SPAM should automatically get you booted, but rmalafaia has a good point about the nature of difficult people. I like the idea of "Pay your dues", but balancing the amount of effort required, and supression caused is key. As a new member, I'd support many of the pay-your-dues techniques, with the right parameters (waiting n weeks before/between posts, etc). I still think you'll eventually need to give the editors some power over editing threads and/or chastising users; cutting down religious wars, (company-name) bashing,and trolling can only be done with human intervention. Somebody has to call them on it.

5. Eliminating user signatures While I don't think this is essential the the (more important) trolling/flaming issue, I agree that this is mostly lost space (perhaps limit to one line?)

This is a tough topic in general, but I'm really not worried that much, because:

1. The number of people interested in this area is not likely to be a significant fraction of the population anytime soon.

2. Your content quality is much better than other technical discussion sites. A few shakey threads are okay, as long as they aren't growing in proportion to the site's volume.

Sorry that this is kinda long and incoherent, I just had a sudden urge to write, because I hope LtU keeps it's high quality.

P.S.
As the site is growing, perhaps it would be helpful to add a simple way to slap category/department tags from a pre-defined group (e.g. in the form of a bunch of checkboxes in the New Topic page). That way people can more easily find/avoid topics. That way you can avoid multiple inheritance :-) (I know the site volume isn't quite this big yet, though)

Let the scientific part work on invitation only, so scientists can present their papers there and discuss programming languages on a higher level. Newcomers in this area should have to present a paper or provide some piece of work that will enable them entrance. Participation to the scientific part will be limited either by time period of by topic.

Let the rest of us who are interested in programming languages but are not 'scientists' or academics battle it out in another part of the site.

It would be too bad for social reasons to ban people who say "Haskell sucks" or "C++ sucks". People say these things because they had bad experiences with language X or Y, or they had very good experiences with those languages and they blindly follow them. From a sociological point of view, these flamewars say more about programming languages than any calculus paper. Let the community expose them. If I say that Haskell is the best there is, then I would have to back up my claims. If I don't, then other posters could come up and say to me that I suck. It's the right thing to do, even if it is quite a darwinian process, because the good will be sorted out from the bad quite easily.

Please keep in mind that programming languages are for everybody, and not for the academic elite only. Many people will not understand many concepts, and good ideas can not be easily spread to the programming public if those that hold the knowledge have an elitist attitude.

Although I don't make comments here, I visit LtU everyday and enjoy reading the posts. Sometimes I read a post many times. Thanks to all of you! Qrczak's comments on another site is actually how I found LtU (some there probably considered his comments trollish but I found them rather informative). I would prefer no change and just ignore trolls.

I wrote a Greasemonkey script that can provide some relief for Mozilla/Firefox users if anyone's interested: Lambda the Ultimate Killfile.

I've been lurking here for a little while and recently I've posted a little. I have to say, if you're not satisfied with the content or quality of posts, why not as a first step make explicit somewhere on the site what is expected? I was kind of baffled to read this post; everything seemed just fine to me. Now I'm not quite sure what to make of the site or what's expected here. Do user signatures really bother you that much?

I didn't see it mentioned anywhere above, but Clay Shirkey wrote a great essay on the subject awhile ago, "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy". His basic thesis is that this sort of thing has been happening for a long time over and over again -- because people are people. He admits it isn't a solved problem but does offer some tips. At the very least, its a fantastic read.

Troll? What is a “troll”? The first time I heard this term was only recently and I have grown more and more curious about what it might mean. A troll is some sort of web log poster who for some reason may be metaphorically related to the dictionary definition of the word “troll”. Now the dictionary definition has nothing to do with web logs. Basically there are two definitions. The one I am most familiar with is fishing. To troll is to slowly drag a fishing line behind a boat hopping for a bite. The other definition is a mythological creature, usually very short, that pops out of nowhere to pose some unexpected problem for the innocent person who is simply going about their business.

Both definitions seem to work. Trolling could mean “fishing for information”. This usually means posing some problem or difficulty that the some other reader is willing to respond to. Simply saying something that everyone agrees to doesn’t get you any new information. The internet is uniquely suited for this and really what it is all about. But I fear that one persons troll can be another persons pain in the neck.