Slashdot's moderation system was amazingly effective given the complete hands off policy to comments on the site and anonymous posting was allowed without signi

Slashdot's moderation system was amazingly effective given the complete hands off policy to comments on the site and anonymous posting was allowed without signing up. It's features were: * comment scores clamped between +5 and -1 * anonymous user comments started at 0 * comments at -1 were hidden by default (although you could set the threshold to whatever you wanted) * required a reason for moderation (Insightful/Interesting/Funny or Flamebait/Troll IIRC) * only gave out 5 "moderation points" at a time to users on a random basis * mod points expired after a few days, and IIRC not using them lowered your chance of receiving them in future * the pool of users who could receive mod points excluded the 10% most active posters on the site * you couldn't moderate in an article you'd commented in * if you commented in an article you'd moderated in, all those moderations were undone * there was a meta-moderation system where you could rate anonymous moderations as "fair" or "unfair", which would influence the chance of the moderating user receiving future mod points It was a complex system overall, but not really from the user's POV. The big difference was the idea of requiring moderation points in order to up- or down-vote comments, but I think clamping the lower-bound of comment scores would be an improvement even in systems where anyone can vote. They originally showed your total karma but changed it to a descriptive term to address karma whoring, anything over 50 was just "Excellent".