Or: why moderation systems are trickier than they look.

Understanding the dynamics of online communities is one of my pet interests, so as a regular reader of Hacker News, I took notice when Paul Graham started experimenting recently in an attempt to stave off the gradual but unmistakable decline (AKA redditization) of what used to be my favorite online community after TurnKey.

The discussion inspired me to write a blog post about an experiment I tried a while back at my other geek haunt - Slashdot. Just to throw in my two cents.

In theory comment moderation systems are democratic and promote a high signal to noise ratio. But I've long suspected them of promoting group-think and being easy to game once you understand a little bit about the dynamics at play.

Do you find yourself occasionally wishing you could freeze a misbehaving program at an arbitrary point in time and then examining what was going on interactively?

That's exactly what the debugger is for, but sometimes it's just too much of a bother to run your program inside it, you have to set breakpoints, etc.

Well there's a really simple alternative: call the debugger from an arbitrary point in your program, like this...

When we first announced the TurnKey Hub private beta about 9 months ago, we had limited capacity (invitation only) and a modest feature set. Since then we tested, bugfixed, removed bottlenecks and added features, constantly improving the Hub with the help and feedback from our excellent beta users. Thank you so much!

First, a little background

Django has an excellent messages framework which provides support for cookie and session-based messaging, for both anonymous and authenticated users.

The messages framework allows you to temporarily store messages in one request, and retrieve them for display in a subsequent request (usually the next one). Every message is tagged with a specific level determining its priority (e.g. success, info, error).

For example, in a view you can send a message: