The one person I argue the most with is my Wife. But we have been together now for nearly 20 years. We argue because we care. God help the day when we go to silence.

Mike C

Yes, but if she started babbling incoherently for days on end, you might start to feel differently.

You mean some of them don't??

I'm with Quim here, the "noise" really isn't exactly unexpected, and if you avoid the (obviously) noisy threads, you find that most of the forum remains civilised.

Honestly, if I was waiting for an N900 like the most of the "noisy" posters, I'd probably be a lot noisier too, or I'd just be avoiding the forums completely.

Just a little point on the "delayed again" comment. There has been only one official delay -- the N900 was coming out in October, and now it is coming out in November. All the rest is pure speculation by bored and frustrated posters hassling people who really have no idea about any of this stuff and taking the random things they say like gospel.

Kathy,

its been a month since this post.
Have you got anything to add in what you have seen, would there be anything you want to bring up in Barcelona and perhaps have a real brainstorming session over beers etc whilst there?

i'm up for a drink if it helps improve the experience for all.

one additional thing.
I just spoke about this in irc
we have currently posts throughout the forum with Thanks attributed to them
now of course, some might just be w000t yeah calls and silly things, but what if we did something like slashdot.
the normal view of tmo forums was in a moderated mode and only showed thanked postings in the threads.

nice and simple (theoretically) it should just be changing the sql from all posts to all posts with thanks.

it would be a really easy way to see if the forum would work with moderation and could be done without ny new data structures being added (initially) or changes to the normal way we work.

Slashdot balances it with "negative thanks" too, and normal browsing shows the articles with 0 moderation.

If you show only those with +1 or greater moderation, a dilemma arises: How do new posts ever get thanked, if most don't see them?

jjx, i'm only considering it an easy test.
to see if it can work or looks right etc.
can deal with the -ve stuff later
and just like slashdot, logged in users can show all/show default
in this place it can be as simple as a single toggle

Indeed, it might be worth a try. The impression I got from when Slashdot were introducing, refining and talking about their system was that there are subtleties in making it create the community / discussion environment that you want.

In particular, most people browse with filtering on and the highest ratings first, to cut out the noise, but that means people tend to give +1 ratings to posts which already have high ratings, creating a sort of bandwagon effect, and additional insightful posts to a thread tend to get missed if they aren't early on.

Slashdot recommends (or at least they used to - I haven't been there for ages) that people browse with filtering off from time to time for that reason - to make sure that good posts are found and picked up. I don't know if people bother, though.

I've no objection to trying things out and seeing how it goes.

I for one would love to see the Slashdot comment system here. I would love to have complex, branching, threaded replies, where you can only pay attention to sub-threads that interest you, and a fine-grained democratic "crowdsourced" moderation system.

But I don't see how we can make that work for the reason that jjx mentioned (I've got to stop agreeing with jjx, people might start to wonder), and also we're not set up to moderate comments properly here ("Thanks" is much too blunt an instrument).