This site has a moderation system, too, but it's not implemented yet. You might look at example policies for other sites. http://www.postnuke.com maintains a list of sites using postnuke at the bottom of their left hand menu; http://slashcode.com has some listed on their FAQ's page (go down below all the file links--it's not too far down). Maybe it would be interesting to survey some of these communities and see what, if any, policies they have implemented/posting concerning moderation.

Yep. The problem with these sites is that they all share a fairly similar model of rating and evaluation. I'm up to my eyeballs in thinking about it, right now. Life is Complicated. ;)

Are you on any of the postnuke mailing lists? I'm curious as to how active their development community is.

One more thing - I don't like how postnuke handles hard-returns in its comment boxes. it interprets a carriage return as a paragraph tag. so if i do hard return, para tag, hard return, the site sees it as a three-space break rather than the single break of a paragraph tag. silly thing, i know, but took me a minute to figure it out.

have you considered the automatice rating/evaluation features.? for example, postnuke has a comment filter system (which i turned off) which will replace any words in a list with a predefined alternative. thus, if i say "shit," it could be set to replace it with "oh my goodness." in other words, the program itself is "rating" the submission and editing all on it's own.

haven't joined any postnuke mailing lists yet. i was on slashcodes's until earlier this week when i decided to go with postnuke.

and yes, the formatting is a little funky.

back to figuring out how to implement rss feeds.

charlie

Cam Barrett has an interesting short essay on community management systems. I've also recently been reading Derek Powazek's Design for Community (website: designforcommunity.com). Though it doesn't mention pedagogy with a single word, a lot of the discussions of communities and the case studies would be great for someone interested in education. There's a bit about the rating systems in there.

I wrote a short rant about the perception of objectivity in these systems a few months back. I've just written a short paper for Hypertext 2002 that I'm going to extend which is a bit about this, well, not really, it's more about how Google uses PageRank to rate websites and what that does to our use of and interpretation of links, but the extended version's going to be. I'd be happy to send you a copy if you're interested.

And you might want to consider Blogdex's Social Network Explorer, which maps community among individual weblogs and in effect works as a sort of rating system (links to a site are interpreted as value and popularity). I wrote the URL for the Social Network Explorer to start with Kairosnews: it mightn't work if Kairosnews isn't yet in their directory. If so, put another weblog's URL into the ego= bit at the end of the URL. Try scripting.com or kottke.com for lots of action.