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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 03 2019, @06:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the still-looking dept.

An accusation has been made that a Journal Entry made by a member of the community was deleted.

tl;dr No "smoking gun" has been found so far and no conclusion has been made one way or another. The investigation will continue. I have the next two days (Wed. and Thurs.) off from work and intend to dig further into this, then.

When I first learned of this, I immediately started looking around as I found the accusation to be credible and, if true, unacceptable behavior.

Nothing I found that morning could corroborate the claim. I posted my findings and promised that when I got home from work that I would look into it. And I did exactly that spending several hours looking for data through both the UI tools presented within the site and with ad hoc queries to our DB. I dumped sections of tables of interest and brought them local to my home machine for later investigation.

Of course, as life has a way of doing, I was also in the midst of a crunch period at work and my spare time has been scarce of late (e.g. I had a training class to attend that was over 100 miles away and worked the entire Labor Day weekend). Further, we have two editors who are on a leave of absence and another who is on vacation, leaving a greater burden on the remaining editors to keep stories coming to the community. This has been exacerbated by the Labor Day holiday weekend in the US meaning fewer substantial stories get posted to the web at this time. In a nutshell that left fewer editors having to work even harder to find stories that could be brought to the community.

Do remember, also, that we had a rare site outage a couple weeks ago which necessitated restoring the site DB from backups. This was a manual process. There have been a few hiccups since then that were attributed to an unclean shutdown/restart as well as needing to restart various services besides just the database: the web server, load balancer caches (nginx), slashd (a cron-like daemon which periodically starts still other background processes and services), and ... you get the idea.

Still, in what little free time I had, I continued to look for information that could corroborate or refute the accusation.

It bears mentioning that there may well be no "smoking gun". But whether there is or is not, I firmly believe the community nonetheless deserves an investigation. It is a very different thing to toss one's hands up in the air and not even look as opposed to look deeply and diligently and find nothing.

I have decades' experience testing computer software on a wide range of platforms. I have worked at startups and fortune-100 blue chip companies. I once was brought in to a company to test a compiler when my only prior experience was a single college course. Another place I worked at had an automated test harness written in a language in which my only prior experience was it being one of 4 languages covered in a language-survey course in college. Within a week I had started refactoring the code base and by the time I left 9 months later, had removed and/or isolated hardware-based dependencies and rewritten the test harness to run in parallel. A full test run across several different hardware platforms and OS versions, which used to take 8-9 hours, now completed in just 1 hour. These are meant only to illustrate that I have no difficulties digging into things in which I had limited or no prior experience. When SoylentNews implemented Unicode character support using UTF-8 (Unicode Transfer Format - 8bit), I searched for the relevant RFCs (Request For Comment, aka Internet "standards"). One led to another and that to others and when I was done had found about a half-dozen of those. Further, there were different versions of the Unicode standard published by the Unicode Consortium, so I dug into those, as well. Needing test data, I wrote tools to extract/generate all the NCEs (Named Character Entities) as well as both hex- and decimal- numeric character entities. Oh, and then there was the matter of IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names; like "foo.com" but "foo" could be in any Unicode supported language!) These then were used in all user-facing, text-entry fields that I could discover and the results were reviewed. I am pleased to say that in the subsequent 5 years' time, I am aware of only two bugs that got through.

(Anecdote time. During the Slashcott, I got wind of some "alternate Slashdot" being developed, but could find no announcement of where it was. I did a bunch of searches. They came up empty. Tried a bunch more. No joy. Then I found what looked to be a bug report for this new site with a screen capture of the main page. And, it had this really strange URL in the address bar. Some domain name like "li42-123.com". Strange! But, I tried it and found it was just what I was looking for. Not knowing who was behind this or how to contact them, I was a bit nervous. Still, after enduring several formkey errors that day and into the next morning, I was finally able to create new account. I then kept a low profile until SoylentNews went live. And that, my friends, is how I got a coveted two-digit UID.)

I present the forgoing not to brag, but to give examples of the diligence and thoroughness that I am bringing to this investigation.

Further, I have somehow become the spokesperson for site-related "stuff" be it an annual summary of where we are at, announcements of server outages due to our hosting provider, Linode, providing updated hardware, different virtual hosting software, bug patches for Meltdown and Spectre, etc. When I have made mistakes I have owned them openly and on the front page no less. I cannot persuade you to believe me, and feel free to believe as you wish, but I can only trust that my integrity in all my actions on this site speak more forcefully and firmly than any words I may bring you in support of it.

My investigation is not complete, but given the amount of time that has passed, I felt it important to give an interim summary of what was planned and any results found so far.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @02:48PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @02:48PM (#893664)

    Unfortunately, I've also seen comments modded as spam that I don't think should be. Here are a couple of examples:

    https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?cid=889468&sid=33440 [soylentnews.org]
    https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?cid=889469&sid=33441 [soylentnews.org]

    Make no mistake, these comments I've linked to are trolls/flamebait, but they don't satisfy your definition of spam. From your moderation guidelines:

    Spam can come in many forms, but it differs from a troll comment in that it will have absolutely no substance, is completely undesired, are detrimental to the site, or worse.

    It's laudable that you have measures in place to combat spam, but at least in some cases, it's applied to comments that don't seem to satisfy the definition. Those are trollish comments, which belong at -1, but the spam mod seems inappropriate. They're saying that the stories aren't important and that users would rather moderate the comments into oblivion than explain the significance of the story. If I understand the spam mod, it's intended to prevent crapfloods and actual commercial spam, rather than to curtail actual trolling/flamebait, which is what those comments look like. I'm not defending the comments at all, to be clear, just saying that they don't seem to qualify as spam.

    I wouldn't have said anything, but it sounds like the spam mod has a different effect than a troll mod, even for anonymous comments. As for the original poster, he uses a lot of predictable phrases in his comments that aren't normally used. It should be pretty simple to add a few of those phrases to the lameness filter and reduce his abuse. It would also be interesting to see a filter implemented that would use natural language processing to automatically distinguish spam from non-spam comments, much like the automated email junk filters. I'm surprised that hasn't been implemented yet, either here or on Slashdot.

    Your lameness filter, as implemented, is pretty heavy handed and ineffective. I had no idea that the default subject when I pressed the reply button would prevent me from posting the comment, and the filter text was unhelpful. I'm posting in good faith, which makes it frustrating to me. Filtering based on the subject isn't effective. It's one of the first ways Slashdot tried to block spam like the OP, and he easily found a way around it.

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday September 13 2019, @04:02PM (5 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday September 13 2019, @04:02PM (#893714) Homepage Journal

    When you post the same comment to multiple stories or to multiple places in the same story, they're spam. See the origin of the term [youtube.com] if you don't get why.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @07:26PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @07:26PM (#893821)

      Thank you for your reply. While I don't agree that the spam mods satisfy the criteria in the moderation guidelines, I appreciate you taking the time to reply to me. I also understand that you and the other admins make the rules and I respect that. Obviously I have zero issues with the spam in this thread being modded as, well, spam.

      Regarding the lameness filter, I did encounter some false positives while drafting up my comment. Maybe I used a certain three letters too often in my comment, though I'm not 100% certain what tripped the filter. As someone who does a bit of development for Android, those three letters have a completely different meaning in that context. If that's what tripped the filter, it might make it difficult to have some legitimate on-topic technical discussions. Do with the feedback as you wish, but I think it's worth letting you know. By the way, the original version of this comment also tripped the filter... just to let you know.

      Thank you for being responsive to user concerns. I wish Slashdot admins were more active in the discussions like they were when the site was initially sold to BizX. Even if I disagree with the admins, the discussions are better when admins take the time to interact with users.

      One other question... Slashdot used to do book reviews and user-submitted features. Does SoylentNews do anything like that? I have an idea for a feature about a topic that's been discussed in the comments here in the past. If user-submitted features would be considered for posting, I would consider submitting one.

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday September 13 2019, @07:54PM (2 children)

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday September 13 2019, @07:54PM (#893824) Homepage Journal

        Even if I disagree with the admins, the discussions are better when admins take the time to interact with users.

        I dunno about the other admins but I'm generally down to discuss most anything.

        Re: user submitted features and reviews, yeah, just send them in like any other submission. If they need discussed beforehand, hop over on IRC (there's a link on the left side of most pages) or email us [mailto].

        Re: the lameness filter, what specific error message are you getting? We're really not running but a few filters, so catching one accidentally is either something of an accomplishment or I need to take martyb to remedial regex school.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @08:45PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @08:45PM (#893846)

          Thank you again for replying; much appreciated!

          The error I received was: "Filter error: Please take your trolling someplace else." I have a pretty good idea of why you've implemented the filter and I'd respect if you feel it needs to remain as-is.

          I'm a meteorologist. I work in research and I'm not employed by NOAA. I wanted to write something about the forecasting of Dorian, discuss some of the technical details about forecasting (in a way that should be accessible to the audience here), and address the issues surrounding the forecast in a way that doesn't push a political view. Before I submit it, I'll send you an email so that, should you deem it worthy of being posted, it's attributed to my real name and that it's done in a way that couldn't get my in trouble with my employer. It'll take me 2-3 days to draft something up and since features would be considered for posting and not automatically rejected, I'll definitely submit it.

          Thanks for your help!

      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:32AM

        by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:32AM (#894016) Journal

        Slashdot used to do book reviews and user-submitted features. Does SoylentNews do anything like that?

        Yes, we have a topic on 'Reviews' dedicated to just such things, and there is a book review group which choose authors and books to read and then get together here to discuss them. Not my own cup of tea, but if I remember correctly, takyon [soylentnews.org] can point you in the right direction.

        If user-submitted features would be considered for posting, I would consider submitting one.

        Your submissions would be welcome as long as they are relevant to this community.

        You'll appreciate that it is hard to give you any direct advice because you are AC, but that doesn't affect how we look at submissions.