The first thing we figured out (and quickly!) during the launch of Share is that you all have a lot more ideas than we have people to approve them for voting. So, starting today, we’re turning over the moderation reins to you. Did someone just submit the same idea you suggested months ago? Flag it for us. We’ll keep the original.

It’s a fairly simple procedure, but we wanted to explain a little bit here to eliminate any confusion. All you have to do is identify an idea and its duplicate. Click “Report as Duplicate” on the idea that you believe is the copycat (the one you think should be deleted and/or merged). Make sure to take note of the original idea’s ID number. You’ll need this in the second step.

After you click “Report as Duplicate,” you’ll receive a pop-up window like this one. It is here that you will input the ID number of the original idea that is being duplicated by the idea you’re reporting. Once that number has been inputted, click submit.

Now, to be clear, this process will not remove ideas from the site, rather it will flag the two ideas for our moderators. At this point, it will be up to them to make a judgment call about what to do with them. One of two things will happen: either the two ideas will be merged, combining the votes and comments, or one will be deleted in favor of the other. The former is most likely in the majority of situations.

Self moderation was actually an idea suggested by you readers – you’ll note that it, along with other of our ideas that we’ve acted upon have been sorted into a new category: Ideas in Action. These range from long-time fan requests like the Canadian Video Store, to more simple things like bringing Blog meetups to the East Coast. We’ll continue to keep this area updated as we roll out new requested features, titles, and policies. PS – this was another request.

The next step for Share will hit later this Summer: weekly programming. Instead of just continue to keep the floodgates open for ideas about anything, we’ll be looking for ideas related to specific subjects – things where your feedback could lead to an immediate impact.

In the meantime, please keep those ideas and votes coming – we’re reading!

Unfortunately, this frequently manifests itself as an off-topic comment in an unrelated Blog post.

We know that many readers find such digressions annoying, but we’ve been reluctant to crack down on them as readers didn’t have a good place to formally make requests. Starting today, you do: I’m happy to announce the launch of PlayStation.Blog Share.

Share is a subset of the PlayStation.Blog where readers can submit ideas to us about anything PlayStation-related as well as vote on the ideas of others. Many of you are already making suggestions to us, and we’ve always been listening (that’s the whole idea of the Blog), but now these ideas have an official place to call home. You can find the entrance to Share right at the top of this page.

Share uses a lot of the same Blog features you should already be quite familiar with, with the notable addition of a voting system. If you’ve ever visited Digg (or Reddit, etc.) you already know how this works: if you like an idea, you vote it up. If you hate an idea, vote it down. We’ll be keeping track of the popularity of an idea (the +/-) and also the volume (total number of votes). Authors that submit the most popular ideas will find themselves ranking on our leaderboard (which is really just for fun/bragging rights). It’s also important to note that we’re restricting idea submissions to one per person per day at launch, as we don’t want just a handful of people to “run the site.” We’d like to see ideas from as diverse a group of people as possible, and we think this rule will help.

You’ve probably got a few questions about how this all works, and for that we’ve made a pretty comprehensive FAQ that you’ll want to take a glance at before you get started. One thing I want to point out ahead of time is that yes, we’ll be reading these ideas. That said, we ask for your patience in advance; don’t expect Share to lead to overnight changes or actions. Moreover, if we can’t or don’t plan to enact certain ideas, we may jump in and tell you why not.

One final note – now that we’re providing a forum for suggestions (in addition to our long-established traditional Forums), it’s time to crack down on Blog comments. Starting today, moderation for off-topic comments will be much more strict.

That about does it – the PlayStation Social Media team has been working on Share for some time, and we hope you take the time to explore it. We’re quite excited to see what you have to say.