An open letter to ILX & mods re: an alternative to the current system

and thx sarahel, tho i'm on my third k*ll*ans so things might get a little crazy around here

i was fond of my tribute thread though. some of my finest creative work on ilx.

why are you googleproofing the beer name?

it does it automatically!!!

ok, I could have sworn you've had three! xp to lj

i still dont get the argument gbx is making, but that's because i'm unnecessarily dense obvs, but dude's f'real cool itt.

lj asked for his total lately and it was quite high again and radcge ensued so that might explain it

have had a couple of selfbans for academic reasons + a tombot tempban when shit was gettin heated

what's ur banné take on sb system. feel ur somewhat of a strange case tbh, reform was textbook imo after #1

Beer name is the same as the name of an ilx user who needed his POWERWORD irl name googleproofed for work-related reasons.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

tell him his beer sucks

um...well I was still offending ilxors in their droves until recently! so reform wasn't textbook, was still goin' ape online @ ppl, ultranagl - let them register their disapproval and I will try 2 amend, peace god

could you googleproof my POWERWORD irl name for work-related reasons? The "l" stands for Loko, thanks.

you've had a few episodes lately tbf, but so you know i didnt sb you when you radged me out that time about gf tomfoolery <3 do uc

K8 if you're still reading this thread:

Maybe I'm the only one who feels that you taking a break from ILX via SB or whatever is akin to an alcoholic taking a enforced break from alcohol via rehab or whatever (i.e. a good idea).

But I guess I just can't understand why you keep coming back to the thing that clearly makes you miserable and angry.

yr proposals advocate out and out authoritarianism, no right of reply, and the sort of unfeeling moderation for which ILX is seldom if ever known

― pro EVOO sucker (acoleuthic), Sunday, November 21, 2010 8:41 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

Glib response: why is any of that bad? Honestly, there's a lot of smart and articulate people on here, and I kinda feel like it works against yall sometimes... when an undeniable dickhead like Whiney is given a break from the site, all these otherwise-intelligent people get their hackles up and start writing crazy screeds about the rise of fascism and when is d4n p3rry gonna come for my uncool niece... it has a virus-like effect on the rest of the site and makes people feel like it's okay to sass mods and whine constantly instead of having fruitful, constructive non-meta discussions. Let Whiney make a personal appeal if he wants to, why does there need to be a 2000 post thread about it? Idk if I should out myself like this, but as a former banned user I found it ridiculous when people would give the mods a hard time for any of my perfectly justifiable bannings (tho that happened less as they became more frequent, Lmao)... i mean its nice when people have your back and all, but so much noise gets made over the mods doing their job the same as any of us would... just imho...

oh, ok, that's who I thought you were.

this'll be a good thread to refer to the poster who once wrote "it'd be nice btw if every fucking visible mod didn't post from the same slumber party" -- lot of good civil disagreement up in this thing

between mods, i mean

yeah but ur still in the same room wearing pyjamas how can we trust you

O_o uh oh I am wearing pajamas tho is the thing

ok no, bad images now
xp!

I support a system in which people can respond to Karen D. Tregaskin posts and let her know without any ambiguity that they are suggest banning/post flagging her because she is being unnecessarily aggressive and not because she is a woman who "resists rape culture"

are you Lok'd?

not since last december

I am clean atm

To answer some of the stuff that's been asked:

1. We're totally up for help on the coding, absolutely. It's not public for the taking any longer because we've had posters ambling through it in the past looking for loopholes to exploit. (I'm not talking about security by obscurity here, just areas that if we let hostile eyes loose on will make our lives unnecessarily hard.)
2. That said, it is not simple code. It's a big, big piece of Java. Even things that seem like they would be simple if you were writing straight SQL to the database aren't necessarily, because they'll have to go through one of tbe eight memory caches first, in a thread-safe way. If you've done one programming class a while back, it's going to be a stretch. It's really not tinker-friendly.

3. We looked at a "like" function for posts a good while back -- I was thinking about an auto-excelsior thread -- but scrapped because I saw how it worked on Metafilter -- eg, it turned everyone into favourites-whores, and drove quality of discussion right down.

4. Flag "posts" vs flag "users": ultimately, this comes down to what was a problem for ILX and what wasn't. ILX has, I think, always been pretty good with problem posts. Other users will speak up pretty quickly about them, and it's where self-policing works better than it doesn't. You can wither posters here with nothing more than a well-placed "UH". This means it's often not the friendliest place for a total newcomer, but on the other hand, it kinda keeps the quality up higher than I see it on a ton of boards of similar size.

What wasn't working pre-SB was when you got beyond that post-level issues and had to ban someone. If it was done by mod fiat, there was almost inevitably a cluster fuck of that poster's friends going "this is total shit, this guy is a MVP and amazingly funny unban now". It was making the boards really polarised, and moderate/quieter posts were obviously being driven away because they weren't internet hardman enough to raise their voices. (It's not true either that we should just have had "tougher" mods who could hand out bans with impunity: we had some very tough mods, but their bans would generally be seen as one-sided and without justification.)

SB changed all that. I think it struck some of the people who were SB'd early on that actually it wasn't just one mod with a grudge that had shut them down, but there was a real majority who wanted them to stop behaving like they were. It has definitely changed some posters' styles. That said, there are totally things about it that need to work better. People need to get warnings when they're getting close. They need feedback after a ban to explain what happened. It shouldn't (and doesn't btw) happen automatically; mods should review the SBs.

On a wider point, SBs were automatic at first because when they were introduced there were hardly any mods, certainly few willing to take the huge load of grief dishing out a high-profile ban would get them. I don't want ILX to be 4chan, but the idea that the site should be able to get along with a minimum of mod intervention is the right one, I think. Adding post flagging changes that to there being an expectation of lots of mods always watching and ready to step in. To my eyes, it actually changes a lot -- it makes ILX less a self-policing community with mods to step in where required to a much more actively curated community, with mods watching every post.

SB changed all that. I think it struck some of the people who were SB'd early on that actually it wasn't just one mod with a grudge that had shut them down, but there was a real majority who wanted them to stop behaving like they were. It has definitely changed some posters' styles.

This is worth repeating in bold.

That said, there are totally things about it that need to work better. People need to get warnings when they're getting close. They need feedback after a ban to explain what happened.

fix these two things and this argument is over imo

People need to get warnings when they're getting close.

honestly, this would probably accomplish much of what a flagging system does, inasmuch as you wouldn't need threads for requesting bannage totals. give an auto yellow card or something, and if anyone's completely, utterly shocked to discover they're riding so high, they can ask a mod to explain what it is they've been SBd for.

xp ha, yup

Yeah I agree.

didn't we used to have yellowcards?

or were those specific to me

We still have them. I dunno why theyre only mostly used for lulz.

People have volunteered their time to help keep this board's New Answers page from degenerating into 100 threads about Nicky Wire in a banana suit;

Name names, I want to SB these funwreckers

Princess TamTam had p much annoyed me with 99% of her posts, but now I know who she is, I'm more charmed to have him back. lol @ me, lol @ SB

didn't we used to have yellowcards?

― aerosmith: the acid house years (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, November 21, 2010 9:58 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

take a swing by iltrmb and alllllllllllll your questions shall be answered

man I went over there and got no q's answered, at all

Is there any discussion on this topic going on at the Mods board?

stet otm, that post is a thing of divine beauty

obviously it would be helpful for SB victims to be able to see what posts of theirs are gleaning SBs, and get notified if they collect 5 or 10 for any one post, regardless of whether they’re getting over 40 already or not, a) the code-it-your-damn-self lobby have an unassailable point, all hail Keith again and again; and b) there are some people that won’t or are unable to learn even with this information.

eg: cankles deliberately chose not to, and go out in a blaze of impunity – this led to many good lols as he pushed the envelope in the stand-up mode he adopted near the end, but the post that earned him the firing squad was p much worthy of permaban so;

Tuomas was warned and warned that he would 51-up by constantly questioning 51, and stubbornly ran right through this (maybe twice?) if nothing else than to prove a point? At first he didn’t learn – especially with confusion around the very last straw being a few SBs for posting a link in an unrelated thread, like some people took those 3 Sbs as being what “got” him, not the 43 SB-debating ones – but at least he was making an informed choice not to learn. And eventually got fed up with being told that he’d expressed his opinion, and stopped. Bless him;

LJ definitely came back a reformed man from his first 51, a model case for the efficacity of the SB system – however sometimes he lapses into characteristic prolix TMI*, some people just find him annoying regardless, and his 153 is going to be unavoidable by further behaviour modification;

in 15 years of talking to the same people, Geir has never managed to actually engage in genuine response, so is in no way going to stop posting occasional crypto-racist jawdroppers just bcz he gets SBd for them;

and Kate has many good points about the mystery aggravating users’ paranoia, BUT her own brand of paranoia tends to mean that if she finds out that a swathe of posters find X and Y of her TUVWXYZ posting behaviours annoying, that she will defensively huddle around those two behaviours, insist that it’s everyone ELSE who has the problem with them and therefore why should SHE change them, and basically cankles out obdurately IIRC

anyway, people are different is my helpful point I guess.

Also I didn’t want HI DERE to step down, but am glad DJP gets a holiday from this round of meta-SB-clustery at least.

*nb: my position on LJ is that there can never be enough I, he has built a castle here and deserves to sit in its turrets shouting his 0_o’s to the world

^ apologies for the slaughter of spelling, grammar and other coherence in that post

Is there any discussion on this topic going on at the Mods board?

― http://tinyurl.com/vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv (Pleasant Plains), Sunday, November 21, 2010 10:06 PM (12 minutes ago)

no, it's all happening on this thread. do you think there should be?

It's not public for the taking any longer because we've had posters ambling through it in the past looking for loopholes to exploit.

;]

Just curious, Rock.

On a wider point, SBs were automatic at first because when they were introduced there were hardly any mods, certainly few willing to take the huge load of grief dishing out a high-profile ban would get them. I don't want ILX to be 4chan, but the idea that the site should be able to get along with a minimum of mod intervention is the right one, I think. Adding post flagging changes that to there being an expectation of lots of mods always watching and ready to step in. To my eyes, it actually changes a lot -- it makes ILX less a self-policing community with mods to step in where required to a much more actively curated community, with mods watching every post.

― stet, Monday, 22 November 2010 14:50 (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Copy & paste this entire paragraph into a site FAQ, then call SBs something less gruesome and I think I will be happy. Can't speak for others though.

Better still, add a central news page/blog somewhere in which you explain every change that's made. I remember SBs just appearing out of nowhere, and it sounds like a load of people didn't know SBs were no longer automatic. Communication is 93.7% of appeasement imo.

(please)

PP, sometimes I get heavy vibes of mod mistrust from you when I can't put my finger on anything that's gone down to cause them. And your posts on meta threads are generally vague and oblique enough that I have no idea if mod posts are reassuring to you or if they're just confirming your worst suspicions of the fascist ILX state.

2. That said, it is not simple code. It's a big, big piece of Java. Even things that seem like they would be simple if you were writing straight SQL to the database aren't necessarily, because they'll have to go through one of tbe eight memory caches first, in a thread-safe way. If you've done one programming class a while back, it's going to be a stretch. It's really not tinker-friendly.

yeah, that lines up with my recollection about 5000 posts back. I'm a pretty good script jockey, and have been an SB critic, but anyone without a solid java EE background tinkering around with the current board code is bad news. most folks prolly couldn't even get a dev environment of this thing up and running.

man what a shitshow. there's about 50 things to disagree with one way or another that have been said on this thread but there's probably no point.

the one thing i will disagree with openly is the characterization by KDT, and others, that the primary purpose of the suggested ban is to "teach" the banee to change behavior. and since the banee doesn't know which statement caused the ban, then there's no educational value and doesn't fulfull its purpose.

but that isn't the purpose all. its value is not education for the one being punished but protecting the environment for everyone else. the idea is that if a critical mass of posters -- 51 is the number now, but it could be adjusted -- say they want Poster X gone, then that must represent a popular consensus that the place would be better without them for a month or so. we can argue that that isn't happening either, but that was the reason.

iirc it was meant to make the place less dependent on mods, not more. popular will was seen as more reliable a guide for who had cross the line, instead of endless judgment calls by mods.

over the years i've come to think the SB's are not that great at doing anything at all, but i'm not so sure about a 'flag post' system. i think swift DELETION of rule-breaking posts -- along with a clear message of "you can't talk that way to other posters around here" -- is what's in order to preserve both comity and free exchange. i don't know how to put a system like that in place that's a) fast, b) fair and c) not human-labor intensive.

That'd need more mods, basically.