Each posted comment has a current score, from –1 to +5. Initial scores range from -1 to +2, with the default set at +1. Posts from Anonymous Cowards start at 0. Users achieve reputation, or “karma”, though a number of activities, including moderating comments, reading comments and posting comments that get high or low scores. Comments from users with especially high karma can start with a score of +2, and comments from users with especially low karma can start at 0 or –1. A moderator reads as he or she normally would but can click to moderate any comment up or down from its current score.

A moderator chooses from a list of descriptors for the comments, such as “Offtopic”, “Troll”, “Insightful”,“Funny”, or “Overrated”, each corresponding to a -1 or +1 moderation. The official guidelines encourage moderators to “concentrate more on promoting, rather than on demoting.” Slashdot users achieve moderator eligibility by having high karma. A moderator is given five moderation points at atime, to be used within three days. Slashdot assignsmoderation points based on the number of comments in thesystem, so there is some scarcity of moderation points available and not all comments can end up with +5 scores. Paid staff editors have an unlimited number of moderation points.To “remove bad moderators from the M1 (moderator)eligibility pool and reward good moderators with more delicious mod points”, Slashdot developed a meta-moderation system.

Meta-moderators are presented with aset of moderations that they then rate as either “fair” or“unfair”. For each moderation, the meta-moderator sees the original comment and the reason assigned by the moderator (“Troll”, “Funny”, etc.), and the meta-moderator can click to see the context of comments surrounding the one that was moderated. Readers can use the scores associated with comments to guide their reading in several ways, including sorting and filtering. Slashdot’s default presentation of content is as a threaded list, showing all top-level comments rated +1 orabove and response comments lower in threads being displayed if they are rated +4 or above. Users may change these defaults in their preferences, change them dynamically for a single session, or click to see responses to particular comments even if they are below the threshold. - Reproduced from the Pdf File