How good are our Fluther moderators (technical administrators) when it comes to answering statistics questions?

I’m not sure if they even keep a history of this… I mean it would make sense to have a table dedicated to keeping track of what moderator moderated what comment, and using that you could generate a complex SQL statement to find all users above 2000 lurve who haven’t had a comment moderated. But it really depends on whether they have that table or not. And I doubt the moderators have access to the raw tables, so you’d need to ask Bendrew for sure.

My guess is no jellies with over 2000 lurve have escaped a removal (based on site problems where duplicate posts were being systematically removed, unless those types of removals could be identified for exception). See ya.,...Gary aka wtf

I actually wonder if there’s a way we can find out if any of our comments have been moderated…. as I can not think of any comment of mine that had been subsequently deleted, and none of my (few) questions have been sent back for moderation.

@dynamicduo – A less elegant solution would be to simply grep all the HTML code and apply some regexp calculation. I’m not sure if the entire history is archived and searchable. I tried Google

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=site:www.fluther.com+"removed+by+Fluther+moderators"

and there seem to be more than 1800 question with comments that got removed.

Yes, theoretically you could do that. But the answer would never be 100% certain, because of the questions that have been moderated and the potential for comments in those threads to have been moderated as well. Since we can’t access moderated questions, there will always be a percentage of unknown. I would guess that perusing the available HTML would probably give you a 90–95% confidence rate.

I’m a fan of 100% not to mention a fan of one SQL statement versus all the work in downloading and processing the pages… now that I’m thinking, even if there wasn’t a moderation table, you could find all the comments with ”<i>Removed by Fluther moderators</i>” and that would be your count… but I do believe there’s some type of table because modded comments have a different footer (without the GA and flags), so there must be a flag in the DB to recognize if that comment was modded….

With all due respect I think our Mods do enough just keeping the site moderated.

Expecting them to keep statistics on each member seems over the top.
It may be a built-in automated feature but if not it seems like it would be very time consuming for each Mod to have to enter a report on each moderation.

I do know there are members with significant lurve ratings who have never needed to be moderated as they mentioned it in a prior thread. However I cannot specifically remember any names.

@Dog, I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the moderators have to manually keep statistics. It is a simple fact that if I had built Fluther, I would be keeping track of what moderator moderated what comment in case of a moderator going wild or an account that was hacked, or if someone wanted to make a graph of the amount of moderation over time or by moderator. It’s a crumb trail, totally automated by the database, requiring no more work by the mods at all.

Honestly, I don’t see a need for this system unless you wanna track trolls and spammers, in which case it would be unnecessary as the mods and the collective does a fine enough job of kicking those out. Another possible reason would be to see just how ‘controversial’ Flutherites are. And I’m against that too, as that’s placing labels on users and would simply provide a false picture of what type of user a Flutherite is.

@Dog And lucky idiots they are too

API please?

I asked this a long time ago. They are working on a API (I think, or they are gathering ideas). Andrew asked what we wanted in a API in the chatroom a few weeks ago.

I’m just tempted to scrape the entire site for data and release it as a XML file that can be parsed. But that seems dickish.

@Dog – No, it’s not about keeping statistics on each member.

I can tell you (because of prior threads that discussed this issue and my memory) that I, astrochuck, gailcalled and johnpowell have all had answers removed by moderation.

At the 10k level and above, I know that blondesjon, evelynspetzebra, daloon, eponymoushipster, asmonet, shilolo, uberbatman, robmandu, kevbo

At the 5K and above level the infamous jackadams, peedub, La_Chica_Gomela, Sueanne_Tremendous, breedmitch, Mr_M, The_Compassionate_Heretic, eambos, Dog, Simone_de_Beauvior, bodyhead,

and so on.

Nowadays, getting more than 2000 points is a quick achievement. I am not sure even having the statistic you suggest would have much meaning. SInce 2000 points can be achiev ed in a matter of weeks, there would be a good chance such a user had not had a comment removed in that time.

I’m not sure why you want this data since I do not see what it would demonstrate taken simply on the face of it as you have described.

What would your goal be? Then it might be easier to determine what statistic or statistics might supply the answer.

http://www.fluther.com/users/ryanpowell/
(517points)
# last visit: July 18th, 2009
# member since: July 12th, 2009
# questions asked: 1
# responses written: 58

That was my account when I left and realized I couldn’t. 2K is easy.

@Marina – I’m just being curious. I love numbers and statistics. They might improve our understanding of how online forums are being used, in this case Fluther in particular. In the corporate world this is called Business Intelligence (BI). What do the numbers mean? Do we have a good strategy? And so forth.

Here’s another example: Suppose Fluther statistics show that 90% of registered user never get beyond, say 300 lurve points. Could this mean that veteran users should pay more attention to new users? Or maybe it’s just the opposite. More than 90% of all new registered users stay for at least, say 1 year, accumulating on average 600 lurve point. Welcoming new folks does work. Let’s keep at it. So we know what works well and what doesn’t.

Back to the “removed by Fluther moderators”: Whenever harsh criticism appears we could point out that for example less than 1% of all questions do not get accepted the first time. Or only 0.5% of all comments get removed.

I just wanted to get a feeling how important statistics are to the Fluther management. That’s all.

Ah, thanks for the explanation.

@All Gotcha- I misunderstood. My bad.

Of the 740,712 responses so far, 0.736% have been moderated. If we remove the CIA discussion from that data, the number drops to 0.582%—so one out of about every 172 responses gets moderated.

Of the 262 users with scores above 2000, 61.450% have had a discussion moderated.

And it’s always good to welcome high quality users. It’s something I’ve been doing since the site started.

@andrew Thanks for the real and updated data. Is an API still in the works?

Oh yes.

Thanks @andrew – The numbers speak for themselves!