What we see here is the 'Holier than though' quality police men also moving the same way. See some of the latest posts.No Harm as long as it is cherished by the enlightened readers, for without them we make zeros.

Xomba used to have a points rating system... posts could be rated with a number from 1 to 5. The posts with the highest average ranking were listed in a "top-rated' column ( a post needed a minimum of 5 votes to be listed there). The problem with that is that people would give high marks to post expressing political or social points they agreed with, or authors they liked, etc., and low marks to those they didn't like. And people would change their votes to make posts move up or down in the rankings. This of course was when Xomba was much smaller and not viewed so much by people coming from search engines. But maybe that system was better than the one in place now, which only has one option: a positive vote of +1. Most people aren't bothering to vote at all, or are voting mostly for their own posts. The idea of the current system was to be like Digg.com, but Digg has many thousand of members who view lots of content on the site so they can rate it for other users; they are really passionate about voting on submissions. But every system has its good points and drawbacks;it just a matter of which tradeoffs to accept.

Rigt next to the little + button under the points box, I would love a - (negative button) to downrate some of the crap on the site. Maybe a negative 10 could get it tagged for review. ~While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about~

It seems that some of these issues such as plagiarism and copyright violations could be dealt with by changes in the flag post option. Either a check list of common problems or a comment box where a reason could be given for flagging the post by the person flagging it or both..... a checklist for common issues and a comment box for elaboration or noting something less common. The system could also be used for positive observations.... like nominating writers for peer recognition awards, etc. We could also flag posts with poor spelling, grammar or garbled language. Xomba could perhaps suspend them until corrections were made as an alternative to simply deleting them. I have moderated large forums, and it is very time consuming if one has to go through and read all the posts to check them. Even if you get a list of posts that have been flagged... without an explanation... what do you do with them? Xomba is growing at an exponential rate... They need more tools to help them get the work done.... Even the new servers are bogging down almost every day and dumping readers.... Twice today when the user count has been high... over 900 guests, it has been impossible to load a page and the system has dumped readers until it gets down to a number it can handle.... When it is possible to refresh a page or sign back on it has dumped down to 450 or so readers.... This kind of rapid growth is very difficult for an organization to maintain... There is suddenly tons and tons more work that equipment and manpower are not equipped to handle. The organization either grows quickly or collapses under its own weight. Or it gets bought out by some larger entity that has the equipment and manpower to handle the load.... and their own set of rules and guidelines which significantly change the vision of the site. Xomba has a unique vision in the field... that is why it is growing so fast. I would hate to see that lost. As far as the page the bytes and blurbs appear on when hits come in from the search engines... it needs a redesign... and I agree that is terrible frustrating to have a new title knocked off it in minutes... But most hits come in off search engines... and the ones that do come off the search engines click at a much higher rate than those that come off the article page... I have had a couple of bytes and blurbs listed in the most popular... and they get only about 10% of the clicks that hits from the search engines get... and the money is in the clicks..... The reason people post every team and every game date is because that is what people enter into the search engines. If they are not listed and keyworded that way they wont get hits.... and there are huge quantities of them... I wonder if it would be possible to have sports competitions as a separate part of Xomba.... so it had its own article page and link page and most popular lists and did not appear on the regular page. Most people interested in watching the games come in from search engines and if they are not usually interested in recipes or make up techniques and would probably appreciate it if they came to a page with a lot of sports related links instead of all the other stuff.... Just a thought.... Angel