The topic of this post is not re: potential popularity of below demo hack.
The term “self-service moderation” is intended as a supplement to administrative moderation.
Questions:
(1) Is it technically possible to program the below demo hack? Intended goal: The final appearance can differ from that displayed in the demo, yet should still achieve the effect of conspicuously “tagging antaggonists”
(2) If it is possible to program the below demo hack, can it be done in a way that would not hinder the speed of any message board?
Over at the vBulletin page, there is a message board with an entire forum devoted to hacks. I’d suggest looking through it for an example of what has been done, how it is done, etc.
Here is their message board: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/index.php
I’d imagine that you will find more experts on writing hacks for vBulletin there. For other message board software, such as UBB, you’d have to look for their webpages (I think http://www.infopop.com is for UBB, but don’t quote me on that).
The easiest way I could see doing this would be to severly change the edit feature to set posts to be able to be edited by the OP, then provide a form that constructs the edit in html rather then providing full editability. Of course, the OP could work around that to edit posts however he/she wanted, but that would be difficult. Assuming there is a way to allow the OP to access the edit feature, this should then make the OP rating a part of the post, causing the minimal possible slowdown (just the added time to retrieve a slightly larger post), which would be faster than retrieving a new post from the OP.
Of course, all that said, this message board has a “no hacks” policy.
I use Ikonboard for (cough) my board, and I’ve found it to be relatively speedy and easy to hack. It’s a bit unstable (ie, it has a tendancy to lose an occasional thread or two at peak use times), but with miniaml maintenence, most of the problems are easily solved. Plus, it’s free, and full featured.
Check out the iB support forums for a hack like you’re looking for. In fact, I’d bet that one is already archived at http://ibhackers.com.
Waterj, from what you said (using the term “severly”) I would assume that it’s a difficult hack. Though I wonder if it’s more difficult than a numerical rating system hack such as DCscripts has.
Black, I clicked the ibhackers link, but couldn’t figure out how to get to the archive (nor would I even know what key word to enter to search for such a hack). I’d be very surprised if such a hack exists because I’ve never seen it before. The above site was born of my frustration.
Naw, shouldn’t be too hard (I’m really guessing here, but do have a bit of programming experience). It would basically be using a form with the check boxes, then taking the result of that and sending a pre-defined command to the edit function. The “severely” referred to the extent of the changes, not the difficulty of programming them.
I would think the easiest way to do it would be to have it create a table inside the post, with the top cell being a predefined size, and containing the OP’s rating, and the bottom cell containing the text of the post. The advantage of this would be that you’d simply be inserting html at the beginning and end of each post. And html is pretty simple, even if Netscape (at least 4.7 and earlier) doesn’t handle tables right all the time.