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

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.

yup

i think SB is "good" conceptually. i think it's as accurate a measure of popular displeasure as anything else you could come up with -- plenty of games, for instance, have a "vote to kick" option in multiplayer settings. those get abused too but in general you can't get a group of non-organized strangers voting the same way without some real offense driving them. and of course, you could argue that 51 is hardly a quorum let alone a passing majority, and that's certainly true on ilx.

i have no problem using "mob rule" in some sense (ie it's called voting), but i still don't know if SBs really work. its weakness, that KDT points out, is the lag time between a given offense and when the ban comes down. there's really no time-relationship at all -- you need the long time-window of a month to make the low number 51 mean something. so i think they are sort of procedurally self-compromised. maybe 5 sbs in single day is a better measure than 51 in a month. or something.

shitty acts need to be counteracted quickly (for everyone else) and some punishment given out to the offender (if need be) equally quickly. and i don't know of a way for that to be done AND keep this place relatively lightly modded.

but yeah in general, i am in favor of a more 'wild west' ilx experience, since that phrase was brought up.

one (possibly impracticable) idea i had is that maybe posters could view a list of the SBs they've dished out and have the option of removing any they've got SBer's remorse about.

or if you hand out 51 then you get a surprise ban yourself

yes, churl banned.

je ne regrette rien

Sorry, when I said anonymous flagging would be a terrible idea, I meant that the mods have to know who's doing the flagging. Obviously the whole community shouldn't find out every time a post is flagged, that would be clusterfuck city and yes discouraging to quieter posters.

so it would be kinda like the suggest ban system?

i've got nothing at all against quiet posters but sometimes the way they get discussed on threads like this makes them sound brooding and resentful and like they sucked on a lemon, and therefore less attractive than their loud cheerful SB victims.

*louis ditches all the lemons in his fridge, and just to be safe, anything he owns that is also yellow*

whoops i forgot i was supposed to be banned from this thread!! my bad

*broods, confirms*

I know the SB conversation has been had a million zillion times, but it seems to me that it's still worth asking, y'know, why every other messageboard in the world goes with a post flagging system and why you can't find any other place that allows literally anyone to anonymously suggest a ban for any user they please, for any reason they please. I would think that the answer is super obvious - it's just not a good moderating solution, and in fact it's a really weird and bad one. On another board I post on - much bigger than this one - you just report individual posts and have to give a reason with your report. Mods review the reports and make moderating decisions about trouble posts and hand out a probation, ban, or permaban based on the seriousness of the offense and on the poster's history. Using the report function frivolously has consequences, again either a probation or ban depending on the poster's history. This is the best way to moderate a big message board, because you're addressing problems as they spring up instead of treating any user who crosses a magical threshold to a weird This Is Your Life tribunal. And because you need a reason to report someone - a reason besides "I don't like this poster" - the function maintains its integrity and doesn't become a passive-aggressive tool for creating board drama. The current system leads to some comical and occasionally merciful results and I wouldn't even say I'm an advocate of change, but there are a million empirically better ways of moderating a message board. I think ultimately anything that leans more towards an automated system than mod discretion (like the auto-escalating temp bans) is A Bad Idea.

otm.

where is the code? i am quite happy to implement this suggestion.

if the mods find it useful/reassuring to have the silent support of SBs before they make a moderation decision they would have hesitated to make on their own, then i'm all for keeping it. and when they make that decision, they can tell the problem poster why.

but 51 = 30 days, 102 = 60 days automated bans seem to be treated like a force of nature by the mods simply because keith wrote the code that way. and in practice they've resulted in a mixture of absurd and uncool popularity contest bans that make ilx a worse place, and perfectly sensible bans/timeouts for bad faith dickishness the mods could have done themselves. just get rid of the autoban, keep the "suggest ban" button as an "fyi this post annoyed me" if the mods fine it useful, and the system is fine.

― caek, Sunday, November 21, 2010 2:19 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

It would be very easy indeed to change 'Suggest Ban' to 'Complain About This Post', right? Without altering any basic functionality...

I mean the link text by every post...

I should point out that there IS no autoban for Suggest Bans, fwiw. The only automated thing is the escalated timeouts for temp bans, which I agree is unnecessary, especially given that tempbans are usually rescinded after a few days.

What, you mean like:

I mean the link text by every post...

― Matt DC, Monday, 22 November 2010 21:10 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Twat Permalink

So here's me, sitting on 9 SB's (apparently).

I can't help but think that anything I've posted here couldn't get regarded as offensive to anybody, but have no idea. Doubtless, I'd assume that the majority of them were "rubbish joke, sb" type lols. And, of course, over the course of "HOW MANY???" ahem, years of posting here since the sb system was incorporated (allowing for the non-expiry of sb's), and my general 'live and let live' style here (have never sb'ed anyone), the day it goes to 51 I will be entirely dependant on a friendly mod going "pssh, that's dumb" and dropping my total back down again.

Of course, I could be wrong about a small number of those sb's, so there's my get-out clause in a way. If so, I apologise to those people and won't do it again (if I only knew what it was, that is)

Regards, M.

It would be very easy indeed to change 'Suggest Ban' to 'Complain About This Post', right? Without altering any basic functionality...

― Matt DC, Monday, November 22, 2010 10:09 AM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

my thoughts. i was going to change the text to "stfu" and the 51 to 7777.

It is easy, Matt, but that doesn't mean it's not a huge change. Flagging up individual posts solves a problem I don't think ILX has -- where are all these unnoticed and ignored horrific posts? -- whereas SB solved a problem I think it really did have, and would again if we turned it off.

(Don't really buy the idea that because other messageboards have flagging on posts we should too, either. They also have avatars and sigs and babysitting mods and pagination and phpBB and a whole tonne of other stuff that might work for them, and could possibly work for us, but would dalso change what ILX is. If you're going to make it as close as possible to other messageboards, what's the point? It's one of the very few boards I like, and I think a lot of that is because it's not the same as the rest.)

Serious q. is there anybody who has any actually-not-clear understanding about how & why any individual poster, including themselves, got sb'd?

at the risk of reviving this thread, thought i'd respond to aero's question since i'm the most recent person to be 51'd -- no idea how many of my 51 were joek sb vs. real sb, but in the weeks leading up to my 51 i was getting annoyed w/ ilx & generally needed a site break, and posted some lame/inflammatory/wtf things just for the hell of it. pretty sure the straw that broke the camel's back was the semi-joek chillwave poll in all caps? yeah... i needed a break. and therefore i think sb works fine in principle. now, has this changed my posting style? prob not much. but already in the past couple days i've rescinded a couple inflammatory posts before hitting submit. just a couple. but maybe those add up over time, and i avoid sb #2, and become a "better" poster as a result, which is kinda the point i guess?

in summary: tl;dr

stet, did you get my email?

I should point out that there IS no autoban for Suggest Bans, fwiw.

― Matt DC, Monday, November 22, 2010 5:12 AM (Yesterday)

you and a couple other mods have made this point, but i just think it's functionally untrue. has there been a time where a poster has accrued 51 SBs and mods have made the decision not to ban them for 30 days?