About

Model Report is a public forum for sharing and discussing interesting news related to modeling, simulation and systems thinking.

Site Rules

  • Please submit content that you think systems thinkers, modelers and simulators would find interesting. This is a very broad umbrella and can range from highly focused, technical content to work of a more general interest.
  • Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.
  • Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.
  • If the original title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway.
  • Don't use shortened links because it removed the name of the source site.
  • If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
  • Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
  • Please don't post on Model Report to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Model Report, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to systemswiki@gmail.com.
  • Please don't submit so many links at once that the new page is dominated by your submissions.
  • Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
  • When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
  • Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.
  • Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.

Our Transparency Policy
Other link aggregation sites are operated by corporate entities which may have significant financial incentive to censor or artificially promote the links and discussion that relate to those entities, their investments, or their competitors.

All user voting and story ranking on this site uses a universal algorithm and does not artificially penalize or prioritize users, domains, or any other metric.

All moderator actions on this site are visible to everyone and the identities of those moderators are made public. While the individual actions of a moderator may cause debate, there should be no question about who the moderator was or whether they had an ulterior motive for those actions.

Tagging
When links/stories are submitted, they must be tagged by the submitter from a list of predefined tags. Users can choose to filter out all submissions with particular tags, but rather than use rigidly segmented sub-forums that users must each subscribe to, all users see all tagged stories by default.

Invitation Tree
Invitations are used as a mechanism for spam-control and to encourage users to "be nice". New users must be invited by a current user or requested publicly, though there is no vetting process and invitations are not intended to promote exclusivity. Invitations are unlimited unless scaling problems temporarily prevent new accounts. If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed.

The full user tree is made public and each user's profile shows who invited them. This provides some degree of accountability and can act as a tool to help identify voting rings.

Voting
Model Report lets users decide what content is relevant and interesting. If you see a story that is interesting to you, please upvote it by clicking the grey arrow pointing up to the left of the story title. This will cause Model Report to display the story more prominantly and help others to find it. You must have a Model Report account to be able to vote. It is very important that you do vote as doing so improves the site for everyone.

As you use Model Report, you will eventually be granted the ability to downvote in addition to upvoting. Downvoting should only be used for content that is clearly not suitable for Model Report such as SPAM. Do not downvote content simply because you find the content uninteresting or contreversial. Generally, you should upvote many times for every downvote you give.

Karma
As you accumulate upvotes and downvotes, your account will be given a score which is the difference between the two. This difference is known as your "Karma". Karma is a general measure of how much a user has contributed to Model Report and how much other users value their contributions. Karma is shown in several places in Model Report. For instance, you can see a user's karma on their profile pages or in certain places next to a user's name in parentheses (e.g. "johndoe (123)" for a user with a net of 123 upvotes).

Story and Comment Ranking
Stories and comments will listed in order of their "Hotness". Hotness is the combination of a story's votes and its age. The more a story or comment is upvoted, the higher it will be displayed. However, over time old stories will be shown less and less prominently. To see a list of all time most upvoted stories go to /top. You can also see a list of top stories for a given time period such as the past two weeks at /top/2w or past month at /top/1m.

Mailing List Mode
Mailing list mode of this site e-mails all new stories and user comments as threaded discussions. This makes it easy and efficient to read new stories as well as keep track of new comments on old threads or stories.

Each user has a private mailing list address at this domain which allows them to reply to stories or comments directly in their e-mail client. These e-mails are then converted and submitted to the website as comments, just as if the comment was posted through a web browser.

Other Features

  • Private Messaging: Users can send private messages to each other without having to publicly disclose an e-mail address, and can receive e-mail notifications of new instant messages.

  • Integrated responsive design: enhances functionality on smaller screens such as phones and tablets without having to use 3rd party (often read-only) sites or proprietary mobile applications.

  • Fuzzy-matching of submitted story URLs to avoid duplicates based on http/https, trailing slashes, useless analytics parameters, etc.

  • Integrated search covering all submitted stories and comments.

  • Log of your upvotes useful for creating a personal bookmark list. Your submissions are automatically included.

  • Per-tag and site-wide RSS feeds are available to the public and logged-in users have private RSS feeds that filter out each user's filtered tags.

Credits

Model Report uses the Lobsters platform. We are grateful to JCS and the other Lobsters contributors for making this platform freely available.