Saturday, April 3, 2010

Tagging Handles

Trolls and Heroes adopt many aliases over the course of their on-line existence. To separate them from one another and make searching and analysis easier I'm going to stamp each comment with a tag. No not all umpteen thousands of them - just associate the 15,078 handles (and growing) with a more coherent tag e.g. puddybud for all the versions of puddybud's handle and that will in turn stamp his legacy of over 26 thousand comments.

The tags will live in a separate file, a hash whose key is the tag and whose value is a category:

h - hero
t - troll
ul - a lefty who hurts the cause by getting too much like a righty.
rr - a right winger whose tone is reasonable most of the time. (Very rare at HA.org.)
s - spammer

In other news I'm torn a bit about using Sinatra over Rails for the QA portion of this project. Rails 3 is worth a look because it's new and much more flexible. I'll probably use both for portions of the remainder of this project.

After all most of the motivation and benefit of this project has been from learning and applying all these wonderful ruby-based software development frameworks.

Late update: Do you believe in synchronicity? I just found this out minutes before I published this post. The author of the command/tasking framework that I use to develop my reports on this project is heavily motivated by the concept of machine tagging which is used by Flickr and other projects. For now I'm sticking with the simple tagging implementation I've sketched here but I may have to revisit this more thoroughly later.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey - I am certainly delighted to discover this. Good job!