Sirsha.com

Um.. what's a mod point?

Slashdot Moderator Points. After a while, Slashdot will occassionally randomly give you 5 mod points if your rating is okay. You use those 5 points (1 at a time) to rate another user's post up (+1) or down (-1) for various reasons (funny, insightful, interesting, troll, flamebait, etc). Meta-Moderation is used so that users occassionally rate the moderations to say if they were fair or unfair. If someone's mods are called unfair too many times (calling everything pro-MS a "troll" for instance), they won't get mod points anymore.

Sites like /. need this moderation beacause of the incredibly noisy posts that having around 800,000 registered users gets you. It also allows you to set a level you want to view replies at (I set it to only show me +5 posts, +5 is the highest you can get) so you don't waste time on pointless posts. You can also add certain modifiers, like I have -6 for anything marked "funny" so I don't have to waste time seeing funny posts.

It's a pretty good system.