Trolling and moderation
As one of the largest forums on the Internet, trolling and spamming on Slashdot is a highly evolved phenomenon (see Slashdot trolling phenomena). It is an offbeat and complex subculture involving sometimes repetitive and sometimes obscene comments featuring an admixture of Slashdot celebrities and other unusual juvenilia. Probably the most famous personalities to have come from Slashdot's "old school" trolling community are Craig McPherson, OSM, Trollaxor, SpiralX, Streetlawyer, Dumb Marketing Guy, 70%, and 80md. They are well-known for their creative writing.
Slashdot allows anonymous posting, and this is where a significant portion of lowbrow trolling comes from. All anonymous posts are automatically attributed to the username Anonymous Coward.
A newer breed of "blue collar" trolls set up Geekizoid — a site devoted to exploring and fostering "crapflooding," while at the more upmarket end of the scale Adequacy.org experimented with other trolling techniques.
Since trolling is prevalent, a moderation system was implemented, whereby every comment posted (including those posted anonymously) can be "moderated" up or down by randomly chosen moderators, changing its score likewise. A given comment can have any integer score between -1 and 5 inclusive, and Slashdot users can set a personal threshold where no comments with a lesser score are displayed. (For example, a person with a score threshold of 1 will not see comments with a score of -1 or 0 but will see all others.) Moderators have been known to abuse the ability to increase or decrease the score of comments, and in some cases entire threads of comments have been marked down to -1. Subsequently, a meta-moderation system was implemented to moderate the moderators and help contain abuses.
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