Make comment privilege more flexible/configurable

Question

Please note that this privilege is geared towards smaller sites. It would not work on SO ;-)

I recently saw Encourage field veterans to participate on SE more by imbuing them with an initial honorary rep starting point? , and it got me thinking.

What are the privileges really required by a field veteran, or any new participant at that, to be able to contribute well in terms of posting? I could only think of one--commenting.

Voting is fine, but one can do without it (and you earn the upvote priv pretty early). The new user restrictions go away fast. Meta participation, flagging, chat, aren't that necessary either.

The only tool that is really helpful to new users is commenting. Commenting lets them get clarification from question authors, and answer posts better. I have seen the rep requirements for this privilege being discussed many times on MSO, and I sometimes find myself agreeing, though not with the particular case. When it's SO, it's easy to get 50 rep. There are enough answerable questions lying around.

On smaller sites, not that easy. There are sometimes very few visible answerable questions on the front page. Also, it really isn't made clear that you need to earn rep to be able to comment. What I visualize is this: User sees post. Users feels like answering. User needs clarification. User has no clue how to get it. User posts it as answer. Moderator converts to comment (I have been doing this quite often on Chem).

The only argument for the comment rep requirement is to prevent spam and forum-y nonsense. But has it ever been tested out on a smaller site? There is no evidence, currently, supporting that this will indeed happen to a problematic degree on smaller sites.

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What I suggest is:

• Allow moderators to adjust the rep requirement for commenting to suit their community size. If it creates any problems, they can always increase it. Only registered users should get the benefit of the loosened rep requirements (unregistered users--the possibility of spamming is just too much)
• Possibly add a simple page to /tools or /admin that lets one see the recent comments made by users with <50 rep. This will help gauge how well it it working.
• Possibly let moderators give users explicit commenting privs, similar to how it works in chat. This partially solves the "field veterans" issue. If the comment threshhold is greater than one, mods can grant the priv to new users who use the answer box for legitimate comments.

Maybe this might not be good as a full-fledged feature, but it might be nice to use it as an experiment--see how reducing the rep requirements (maybe even to 1) affects smaller sites.

Meta, what say?

Answer 1

Clarification needed is a bad question "smell"

If you want to micromanage your budding community like this, focus on getting questions into a state where they can be answered without needing further clarification!

A site full of unanswered, unclear questions is a problem in and of itself, and expanding the ability to comment does little to aid in this.

Comments are a terrible end-goal for a Q&A site

Worse, this strategy sends the wrong message to both askers and answerers, implying that the onus is on those providing information to draw out sufficient detail to answer, and perhaps even discouraging the sort of comprehensive answers that can serve as guides to folks who don't understand the problems they face well enough to know what specific details to look for... A site full of extremely specific, localized questions clogged with troubleshooting back-and-forth in the comments isn't necessarily something to aim for either!

Where everyone waves at you as you walk down the street, and Aunt Bee always has a pie cooling in the window as you pass by on the way to Floyd's for a shave and the latest gossip

Finally, there's already a perfectly good work-around for this: any new user can post an answer, regardless of reputation. If that happens to be nothing more than a request for clarification on an unanswered question, moderators have the option to convert them into comments. This isn't something to encourage mind you, but if it happens once or twice while a new user is figuring out how the site works, well... No harm done.

The big advantage of being part of a "small town" site is that you can afford to relax a bit when it comes to this stuff, take the time to talk to new users and give them an introduction rather than reflex-deleting their slightly out-of-place posts and then suspending them for 10 years. So... make the most of it!

Answer 2

If this is going to be implemented, it should apply to all of the new user restrictions applicable to users with less than 50 reputation. One of the jobs of a moderator on a new site is helping to promote that site, getting an expert on the site and participating is something that should be as easy as possible, especially if the expert has a finite amount of time to give.

Presumably, if a moderator elects to remove these restrictions, she is in direct contact with the user, if not actively assisting them when it comes to using the site and understanding the conventions of its community. It's also assumed that both the moderator and the expert are not tragically spaced out clods. I don't see the need to allow moderators to tweak the default thresholds, or for an additional review queue. If you, as a moderator, lift these restrictions - you become responsible for the user's actions until they acquire 50 rep.

To be clear, I'm speaking only of the < 50 reputation restrictions. Answers posted in an extremely rapid succession by any user is cause to raise an eyebrow. This feature would (as you indicated) mostly just grant access to the comment feature immediately, and not slow someone down when their first few posts contain several citations.

The use case I'm looking at is a pro-tem moderator that is successful in getting a renowned expert to spend a few hours answering questions on their site. Think in the context of someone convincing Noam Chomsky to spend an hour answering questions on Politics SE. I can see how the most basic of the new user restrictions would get in the way more than help. This very unlikely scenario also speaks to the use case of this feature - it should be reserved for only exceptional cases.

It seems like it's worth trying, provided that it doesn't result in yet another discussion about why we can't have nice things.