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## 1. Guidelines

This section describes the basic principles and gives some guidelines to ensure proper moderation.

## 1.1 Before you begin: some definitions

- Administrator: the person/group who runs the website. They are omnipotent.
- Moderator: a normal user, who has been given special rights by the administrator. He has the power to determine if a story shall be posted; and to edit stories. There is normally a team of moderators, to balance load and avoid personal bias.
- Scorer: a normal user, who has been given special rights by the administrator. He has the ability to score comments.

Of course, any user may have several of these roles at the same time, perhaps even all of them.

## 1.2 Basic principles of daCode

daCode separates contributions into two categories: news and comments. News headlines appear on the front page, while the comments are viewed by selecting "comments" below the headline on the front page.

All articles are moderated: before they are published, they are read by the team of moderators, who can decide to publish it on the front page, on the section page only, to put it on standby, or even to delete it. The comments, on the other hand, are scored. They are published as soon as they are sublitted, and they cannot be deleted.

The score range is from -1 to 5. 5 is the best comment possible, -1 the worst. A comment scored -1 disapears from the page, and you need to explicitly request it to be able to see it. This is close to deletion. So, use this score with caution, and only for insulting or stupid posts (like "first post" on Slashdot) and for redundant comments. The defaults scores are 0 for anonymous posts and 1 for used who have logged in.

## 1.3 Moderation rules

First and foremost, as a moderator or scorer, you should avoid any bias, and let people have their say. You have the power of censorship but try not to use it!

Before moderating news, always try to verifiy it. Don't hesitate to ask for confirmation in the body of the news if you're unsure. A news should also bring something new to the table. Just delete those that have already been published on the site! For the rest of the guidelines, ask the site's administrator.

As for scoring the comments, you must avoid any bias. A good comment is a comment that relates to the news's subjet, with a clear argumentation, no matter what opinion expressed. Always tell yourself that it is a free discussion space.

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