Quality control

jokullsolberg

I'm doing a sort of student council website that has a "notes" section where you submit essays and notes you take in class. Now i want to add a quality control system that takes care of deleting bad notes and sort of raises the status of the ones that submit a lot of good notes.
My question is: do any of you know of some system like this where i could maybe learn a little from. Someone pointed out wiki....where do i start?

feldon23

Sounds like a voting system.

Simply store the results of each vote and keep one set of votes for each posted note and display an average of all the votes.

You'll also have to figure out how to deal with troublemakers who might try to inflate the rating of their message by clicking over-and-over.

jokullsolberg

yeah that's sort of what i want to do, your definately on the right track but i want to take the idea to the next level by distinguishing the "good" users from the "bad" users. The "good" users have weightier voting then the others. See?

feldon23

Ah. Well that makes things difficult. How are you storing your users now, MySQL?

jokullsolberg

yeah everything basically is in mysql.

feldon23

Well, if you want to do this the "right" way, you're about to get hip-deep in relational databases!

Forgive me complete lack of knowledge about how to actually do MySQL. I will learn soon!

The first thing you do is add another element to the user database which would be karma. Not sure how MySQL works here, but I guess your two choices here are either to go ahead and add an empty karma element for each user, or to add a karma element to each user as it is needed.

Then in your article system, here's the fun part. If you want your users' karma to control how strongly a "rating" or vote is expressed, then you would really want to join the user table with the article table.

Let's say article 28 has votes from 3 users with userids of 8, 14, and 17. So article 28's rating would be linked to the user table like...

article[28][rating] =
article[28][rating][vote][8] / 5 user[8][karma]
article[28][rating][vote][14] / 5 user[14][karma]
article[28][rating][vote][17] / 5 * user[17][karma]

The reason why I do this is, what happens if one of your users karma rating is increased? Well unless you are keeping a paper trail like the above, that karma increase will not affect their votes on earlier articles. The way I've written it above, if 2 years from now, user 14's karma rating is increased from 2 to 3, then all their votes in your system will be now have more influence.

Hopefully someone more experiened with MySQL can fill in the gaps here. I'm great at pseudocode. 🙂