We have made some adjustments to the bubble system based on the data we have collected since we launched the new N4G. We have reduced the voting power from users with normal and low trust rank and increased the voting power from users with high trust rank. You cannot see your own trust rank and a low trust rank will not prevent you from using the site. Trust rank only decides how the system will use a vote (Trust rank is not directly related to number of bubbles).
Many of you took the user survey we posted a while ago and the results were clear. A more news focused front page and stricter comment moderation was what the majority voted for. This is the first step in that direction and we are working on some bigger changes that should go live at the end of next month that we believe will greatly improve the quality of the content featured on the front page. I will talk more about this in another blog post.
Most of you have now also been reset to 5 bubbles. The bubbles used to be decided almost entirely by user votes, but now mods and admins will step in and speed up the process where needed. So I suggest that everybody takes a look at the posting guidelines for N4G again as moderators do have the right to moderate all comments not following these rules. The argument that “he started it” or “there are comments far worse than mine” will not get you anywhere. There are over 6000 news comments posted each day, so it is not possible for us to monitor everything that is being said. Stay within the posting guidelines and this will never be a problem anyway.
This is a small first step in a long term plan to improve both the quality of the content as well as user comments here on N4G. So don’t expect any miracles right away but I am confident that when the rest of the updates we are working on are rolled out later this year we will see some great improvements.
Dusty,
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will sites that post pure flamebait bullshit be banned from N4G? It make n4g look like crap when you see pure bullshit at the top of the pages
It's step in the right direction :)
"There are over 6000 news comments posted each day..."
lol more like 1 news article and 5999 flame bait blog posts :P not the mods fault though the community has to take responsibility of what we approve.
@redempteur how is improved moderation and bubble management not a step in the right direction? Gamescom only happens once a year and articles are bound to get lost in the landslide of information.
you rock
Thanks for the heads up Dusty. I'm assuming that those who were reset to 5 bubbles are those within a specific back-end score range and not those who previously had one or two bubbles already?
Question, one of the comments I made was the current design model of hiding all comments under a person who is marked as being ignored/trolling/spamm/etc. Are there any plans to change this so that it only hides the person who is flagged as such and not all of the responses to said comment and so forth?
And, I know this has never been discussed, but are there any plans to improve the blogging capabilities here? Perhaps some bbcode for adding structure/formatting to our articles. The limitations of blogging here have made me stop posting sometimes. It's just not easy for me to throw out a few paragraphs without really being able to control structure. With some enhanced abilities, I'd find it easier to express myself and my thoughts coherently rather than one long stream of text.
Awesome. I look forward to this new direction.