Tutorials need love, too

The new version has brought a slew of changes with it, and the tutorial moderation process is no different. Hopefully this blog post helps give a good recap of how tutorials get rated and moved to the front page for everyone to see.

Everything in moderation

So the problem we face is that we get a lot of tutorials submitted each day. That’s a great problem to have, of course. It means we can be selective and take only the best tutorials for everyone to see. But we still have the problem of figuring out which tutorials are the best. That’s where you come in.

It ends up using a model similar to other sites that face the same challenge, like a digg or a facebook. Basically, you take everyone’s opinion, gather them together, and hopefully at the end of that process you have a pretty good judgement of whether that particular tutorial is good or not.

On Good-Tutorials, everything is done in the upcoming queue. It lets you take a peek at the newest tutorials submitted before they actually make it to the front page. Those of you who like to be “in the know” before everyone else, well, here’s your time to shine. But more importantly, it lets anyone who’s interested help shape which tutorials make it to the front page. The better the rating a tutorial gets, the better chance it has of getting moved to the front page after 24 hours.

Meet the moderators

On the last version of the site, we had a concept of moderators. They did a great job helping approve tutorials and weed out bad links. With everyone helping out with tutorial moderation, moderators take on a slightly changed role. Their primary focus is the same: help figure out which tutorials are good. They tend to do this more frequently than your normal, casual user, and as such the rating they give to a tutorial is weighted higher than a normal user’s rating. Along similar lines, my own rating is weighted a bit higher than a moderator’s rating, too; after seeing somewhere upwards of 60,000-70,000 tutorials, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on things. Everyone’s rating then comes together and helps determine whether a tutorial gets rotated to the front page or not.

Improving the process

I hope this helps clarify some of the process for you. I want to be as open as I can be with these matters, and part of that means I look forward to hearing from you if you have any suggestions to improve tutorial moderation. Post a ticket on the Good-Tutorials Lighthouse if you have any specific suggestions, or just post a comment here for more generalized feedback.

In the coming days and weeks, I’ll be posting some updates to this blog as we continue to improve and scale the tutorial moderation process by adding more dedicated moderators to the site.

LevelDesign 2 months ago

I guess I'm unsure but there are no more moderators and now an open system similar to digg?

zachholman (administrator and creator)2 months ago

I covered the moderator bit in detail under "meet the moderators".

KewL 2 months ago

Looking forward to the updates :)