Re: Proposal: Nuke negative comments

    To this, I do object, actually.  And not because I don't think the
idea is a good one, but because the user notes as-is give us fodder to
test a better solution.  Perhaps a cron-based script that gathers
anything below $threshold could run nightly, and do some janitorial
work.  Having those notes available for some trial-and-error testing
for the first run would, in my opinion, be rather useful.

    However, it also raises questions of abuse.  And while
up-/down-voting may not seem like much of a concern, it would still be
irresponsible to enact such a system without revisiting how we handle
said voting.  Because, as it stands now, it's easily exploitable.
And, as you mentioned, we've always been ad-hoc in our moderation.

    In the meantime, though, if you log into Master, under the "Notes"
section are several helpful things we've added over the years.  And if
you have commit access to Master, feel free to improve upon it, as
well.  If not, drop in a request to systems@.  It would be helpful to
have more people to have commit access, if they've been around long
enough.


On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 2:22 PM Larry Garfield <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hello, Docsians.
>
> There are currently tens of thousands of comments in the docs.  Most are of dubious value, but occasionally some are useful to fold into the doc page before deleting.  I and others do so periodically, but it's all ad hoc and not especially efficient.  One of the issues is that determining if a comment is of any use is a subjective human task.
>
> However, doc comments do have up/down votes on them.  While they are also of dubious value, I think it's a reasonable assumption to make that any comments that have negative totals are worthless and we can safely get rid of them without human intervention.  That would remove many thousands of comments from the docs, and give us a better sense of what pages have the highest number of potentially-useful comments worth trying to manually review, merge, prune, etc.
>
> This could be done manually through the admin UI, but as I said, "many thousands."  Would someone with server access be able to just nuke any negative-score comments from orbit?
>
> Anyone object, before we track down someone with the nuclear codes?
>
> --
>   Larry Garfield
>   [email protected]