Sensible Erection
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Sensible Erection (abbreviated SE) describes itself as "an uncensored collaborative weblog", with over 20,000 registered members. Topics of discussion on SE include interesting or odd things from various websites and news sources, with common themes including humour, pornography, and politics. Due to the uncensored nature of the site, anything within legal bounds is considered acceptable. SE has spawned a role-playing game, a card game, and a sister-site, Sensible Election, which focuses exclusively on politics.
The site was originally created by "teh matt " (his username) for his personal blogging and as a community portal for friends. It quickly grew and was eventually sold to "Saint_Marck", who runs the site today.
SE uses a moderation system inspired by Slashdot, but extends its application from discussions alone to include front page articles. Users may post articles directly to the front page, without an intermediate editorial approval process. Registered users of the site may vote for articles either positively or negatively under different labels, (e.g. +1 Interesting or -1 WTF), depending on how interesting, relevant, or tasteful/tasteless they are. Each user may enable filters that remove posts below a certain numerical score from their view of the front page. This opt-in self censorship preserves freedom of speech, while allowing a user the ability to quickly browse through articles. Highly controversial posts often get positive scores with negative labels, such as the occasional +10 Unworthy Self Link. (See #Post scoring.) This scoring system also applies to article comments. Users have a "karma" score they receive for posting well-received articles and comments. If a user's karma score drops below a specific level, they are prevented from posting articles to the front page until they can regain karma by posting insightful comments to other articles. In this manner, the users of SE are allowed to moderate each other by voting which articles and comments are "good" and which are "bad".
[edit] Appendix
[edit] Post scoring
Posts can have a score in the inclusive range [-10, +10]. The score is given by this algorithm:
score = 0
for each moderation M:
score += M
score = max(-10, score)
score = min(+10, score)
end for
The order of the moderations is important. If the SUM of moderations is 15, but the final moderation given is -1, the score will be +9, not +10 as may be expected. The rationale for this method is that when a person moderates "against the grain," there is an emotional need to have instant gratification. If you negatively moderate an entry which appears as +10, you expect it to become +9. You would be surprised if positive mods beyond the cap kept the score from changing as a result of your actions.
The possible moderations are:
- +1 Classy Pr0n
- +1 Funny
- +1 Good
- +1 Hot Pr0n
- +1 Informative
- +1 Insightful
- +1 Interesting
- +1 Laser (retired)
- +1 Original
- +1 Underrated
- +1 WTF
- -1 Bad
- -1 Bad Pr0n
- -1 Boring
- -1 Flamebait
- -1 Illegal Pr0n
- -1 Old
- -1 Overrated
- -1 Repost
- -1 Troll
- -1 Unworthy Self Link
- -1 WTF
- -1 Wrong Category
The score for the post may also include one of the labels listed above. The final label which tags the post score is decided by a simple majority, which makes final scores like “+1 Illegal Pr0n” possible (and, indeed, much sought after).
