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

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?

i mean yeah technically it's subject to mod review or whatever but if someone gets 51'd they're getting a ban - it's a given

The point being made is that people are acting like software is booting them off of the site when what is happening is that mods are going back over posts that have accrued suggest bans and going "oh I see what was happening here, see you in 30".

cant believe mods banned all those people

why did you do it mods?

sorry caek, got it now (forwarding had stopped on that a/c). Will sort that out for you.

To clarify that upthread a bit though: while we are totally up for help w/code, it obv doesn't mean we'd take anything that's submitted. So if you change the SB text to stfu or someone goes to huge lengths to write in avatar support that's still no guarantee it'd go into production.

I for one would go all Nth Korea on ilx if it became riddled with avatars.

otm to that

^^

http://i51.tinypic.com/2holgm1.jpg lovin the new avatar functionality

http://i51.tinypic.com/2holgm1.jpg plz dont take it away :-(

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/WilliamCrump63/Rockhardyavatar.jpg...ok

http://i54.tinypic.com/2qwezw2.jpg thanking u

http://images.shaggybevo.com/board/customavatars/avatar610_1.gif You guys are hilar.
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The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

http://images.shaggybevo.com/board/customavatars/avatar610_1.gif Lol.
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The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

ha

:D

LOOOOOOOL

loooooool

loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

ilx would be a zillion times better with avs

Adult Verification Service?