For those that don't know, the earlier revisions of FSTDT had a few issues. Not little ones either, effectively one person had gone through and set everything to do with quote approvals and the top 100 and it wasn't the Administrator or the Programmer of the time. This is why public admin is as locked down as it is now, and why it will accuse folks of cheating from time to time, it's also why we have such massive quote archives back in 2008. I've been able to re-work the ranking system and undo the attempts at manipulation of the top 100, but going over just shy of 10,000 quotes to see what does and doesn't suck(and really the rest of the archives) is a rather daunting task.

So I've been working on a solution, one that could more or less integrate into public admin and let us police the quality of quotes actively from this point forward. Simply put, it would be a 'Flag this quote for review' system. I'd take volunteers and set them up with the ability to set quotes up for review and create Issues to detail just what is wrong with the quote. If it would need whole scale deletion or some corrections. Once marked it would enter a separate public admin queue where all flagged quotes are brought to the attention of the volunteers for voting and commentary. Since they would all have noted problems I'd handle final changes myself.

But that's not the part that I've been kicking around lately, right now I'm thinking of changing out the Issues we have(a text box entry that's displayed in public admin) and replacing it with a more detailed change recommendation/tracking system in which the person entering the Issue would be able to make specific alterations to parts of the quotes, and those alterations would be what people vote and comment on rather than the general idea the quote would be reviewed. If someone finds a bad URL, or a wrong attribution, they submit a corrected version for people to review along with any comments. As it cycles through public admin people select which changes they approve of and the approval vote counts as an endorsement of the changes. Which would save me the work of parsing through hundreds if not thousands of comments over time to identify the needed changes. It'd also be more complicated than anything else I'm working on at the moment, but staring at those archive numbers I think it'd be worth it.

As a note on system development, actually being familiar with databases... LINQ isn't worth the ones and zeros it's printed on for DB access. Be nice to leverage that knowledge against in memory objects, but for all the resume polish in the world it's not worth dealing with on the back end of this place. I'm going to be bringing down a local copy of the site to let me re-engineer the database for the new version and will probably make a number of random comments that make little sense to those not familiar. If anyone is interested I can detail a bit of what I'm doing, some is damn useful if you're catapulted into taking care of a database.