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Liking the sound of this. Will a kill also cause a down vote? Part of me thinks that might make sense. Another part says a lot more people might use the kill button than the voting buttons.

Really good question, cfoley. I'm not sure what will happen to the down vote (or the up vote for that matter!) At some level the thing that really measures interest is how many people visit and/or comment on the link.

I think a specific kill on a link is more clear than down vote. It says you don't want to see that link, period. Whatever scoring system we use for ranking link popularity will definitely need to consider how many people keep and kill links, but an automated kill because of a previously established rule probably shouldn't have the same impact as a specific kill on a particular link.

What about comments? Nothing would make me happier than being able to ignore a certain user who comments frequently and gets voted down almost as frequently.

Excellent thought @mheath. We will probably need to add a general "ignore" capability to let you filter comments, too.

This is AWESOME. The kill button hehe. Thanks for listen DZone.

The comments after 4 down votes should get banned or kill it too. This way finally it can kill the no sense RawThinkTank comments rofl. Or apply an ignore policy so for example I want to ignore RawThinkTank so when I enable since that moment It does not show me his comments but the problem is I will loose the follow of a discusion so maybe thats why I think is better kill the comment after 4 or even 3 down votes.

I appreciate that DZone and Rick Ross recognize the problem of useless, pointless, junk posts on DZone. These junk posts are noise that detract from the many useful posts on DZone.

The kill button is a good idea. I especially like that I'll be able to eliminate all posts from the idiots who promote junk posts in the first place.

soon you would see a top link that reads "10 cool Dzone kill animations you shouldn't miss!" :)

Btw, interesting move.

I'm sorry to be the dumb one, but I don't get it. What exactlly should happen when somone "kills" a link? Will he alone no longer see it? Will he make it go away for everyone else? If so does it work right from the first kill, or should there be a minimum number of users killing a link in order to make it go away?

The article has the full story: you can ban (==kill) a tag, a domain, a user from your dzone account, so you won't see any more links with that tag, from that domain, by that user.

I would like to know who actually votes up those dumb "Top 10 best" posts. There are 3 on the front page right now.

Funny, when you go to the blogs, most of their other posts are all "Best Top 10" posts...

This is a interesting concept but I don't think it does anything to discourage vote-stuffing and spam votes. One guy with 15 fake accounts will still get to the front page even if tons of people kill his links.Ultimately users will still end up seeing the links because they'll invariably keep creating new accounts to get their top 10 posts to the front page.

You may be right, but if a spammer wants to attract attention for a certain website of his, many accounts won't help. It doesn't matter if crazyjoe63 or madTpete does the upvoting, if myblogiscool.com is killed it won't help.

I guess the most obvious cheap spam is already killed here, as I rarely see that on DZone. TheServerSide had a lot more of that.

This measure isn't aimed at the voting groups, and we'll try to address that problem separately in the future. FWIW, we have always had additional tools that DZ moderators and admins can use to spot the groups and multiple accounts form a single IP address, etc. These tools can be expanded and improved, however, and the community will probably benefit if we place them in the hands of a larger number of trusted contributors. I look forward to this step, but it will come a bit further down the road.

Also, most folks here probably don't have a sense for how much spam is routinely blocked, since the vast majority of it never gets in front of DZone users. We have blocked literally hundreds of thousands of bullshit links and blacklisted thousands and thousands of people who would post them.

Nice idea! Can't wait to see it in action.
I hope it will integrate a little AI, like if you kill many time the same author or the same website, it will ask you to kill definitily that author/website.

Sweet, now if Dzone would work better on my Android phone I'd be even happier :)

Duly noted.

Waiting for the changes Rick and Matt!!! Tablets and mobile friendly changes are most welcome...

It may also be an idea to look at stackoverflow again.

Parallel to the regular upvoting/downvoting of questions, they have a system were users with enough reputation can close a question for all users. This takes 5 special "close" votes and a motivation is required (you can pick one from a list). After the question is closed, users with enough reputation can vote to open it again. Then there are (community chosen) power mods who can take more drastic measures, often in response to a 'flag' action.

So to summarize, articles here could have those 3 actions that have global effects:

upvote/downvote
close vote (reputable users only)
flag

And then the one action that initially only has a local effect for the user:

F**kin Kill it!

This kill action is more akin to a filter, like the one e.g. infoq uses if you don't want to see stuff tagged with 'agile' or 'c#' or so, but instead of just being based on tags it's only based on poster and domain.

Another idea from stackoverflow is to allow reputable users to edit a post's description and tags etc. That way if you add a tag "top 10", people could filter on this. If it was known that a lot of people filter this tag, posters would not tag their posts with this. But if reputable users can edit their posts and add this tag anyway, it would be of little help to omit it.

@henk, your suggestion to weigh user reputation seems right on target. We have had a "zone points" system almost ready to deploy for quite a while, and we expect to deploy it in the near future. This will help us establish who these "reputable users" are, so we can extend trust and privilege to them. Users with enough rep should probably even be able to get moderator privileges.

Good idea; while you're at it, you might as well fix the behavior of the "top links" next-page icon: Whenever I hit this in Chrome, it will go to the third page, sometimes to the fourth page, but almost never to the second page :-(

Oh, and what was wrong with the good ol' comment system? Why is there a Facebook comments panel on this blog entry's page, where I have to register with Facebook to post a comment?

We're just exploring the possible use of Facebook's commenting system on the new blog. It's too early to tell if it is an improvement over the hodgepodge of drupal/wordpress/custom comment systems we presently have at various DZone sites. We'd love to integrate it all to provide a single, common approach. Other suggestions are welcome.

disqus.com would be nice for comments, no FB login is required.

I think this is a step in the right direction.

DZone has managed pretty well for all this time despite the vocal condemnation of the blatant marketers. I mean, have you been to TheServerSide lately? Terrible. I can click on a dozen high quality links on DZone in the time it would take me to find one at TheServerSide.

My one quibble with this plan (I think it is solid and can give you solid metrics to improve the stream as a whole rather than just for individual users -- but it is great for individuals too) is that you are making too big a deal of it. Animations? Really?

People were fired up that day, but I hope you don't take it too personally. People like me just love DZone but don't want to see it degrade. I know you understand that. Just try some different mechanics....we are all devs here, we understand.

Good luck and thanks for working to keep DZone awesome!

Some suggestions...Improve the categories with more subcategories
(eg, .Net to include subcategories like asp.net,windows mobile,azure,silverlight etc).
The user should be able to set his category preferences in his profile page.He should be able to select the users whose links are no longer to be seen.When he comes to dzone, the front page should contain popular links of his preferred categories and not even a single link from the users whose links he does not want to see.

Even a 'top x' category :) so that ones who really want to see those 'top x ...' links can still see the 'top x' type links if he sets 'top x' as his preferred category.

Good to know about the changes to come in DZone. Please also consider that a REST API will also benefit a lot for web/mobile integration. And how about an Android DZone client ?

I personally think DZone does a great job of keeping the crap out. I always find interesting articles and very few (if any) spammy ones.

Just so I'm clear, the kill button would only eliminate an article from my view, but would have no bearing on what anyone else sees? If so, that seems like a good idea.

Why don't you all just go to http://news.ycombinator.com instead of debating over what you'd like to see. Providing a 'kill' button is not a solution to changing the community. If you want better community then make the switch to it

The issue here is that some (presumably beginners) truly enjoy reading those top 10 links. The solution is simple: just let the submitter indicates the level of the link like beginner, intermediate or advanced. Then, readers can indicate their own levels, say, in their own profiles and that will determine what links they will see.

rick while you are addressing this issue, look at this one too. Why does a vote on a comment cause a refresh? It's too annoying and discourages users to vote up comments