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Ideologically Modded AC Posts (Day A013)
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Conquering Russia should be done steppe by steppe.
(Score: -1, Disagree) by Fuck You Niggers 2 on Monday March 22 2021, @02:07AM (29 children)
I'm banned from moderating for nearly 30 years, all because I modded up conservative posts. This is censorship and it is WRONG.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Monday March 22 2021, @02:31AM
Your user name is a Troll. Can't help you.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 22 2021, @03:46AM (25 children)
No one could have guessed that this might be an Ethanol Fueled Sock.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday March 22 2021, @04:54AM (24 children)
Eth is usually ranting about Jews, not black people. He's also less coherent than Mr. FYN Jr., if you can believe that.
I will say this: FYN 2: Electric Boogaloo here serves one useful purpose, which is to highlight how completely useless and easily-gamed the current set of rules are (and by extension, how spineless and worthless the current set of admins are).
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 22 2021, @05:31AM (2 children)
What rule is being gamed? My understanding is that there's no rule against rude, obnoxious names and hence, nothing to game.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @12:48PM
Is it just me that can't mod that comment troll or flamebait?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 22 2021, @01:41PM
Sockpuppetry and spamming both. Thus the swiftness and complete lack of proportionality in the response. The Moderation Guidelines are for people who want to actually converse here but occasionally have self-control issues not for people who pay no mind whatsoever to the Guidelines but show up looking to shit on anything they can't destroy.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @05:54AM (20 children)
That's not even counting that a number of their "rules" are secret, even from each other more than once.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 22 2021, @01:57PM (19 children)
If you want a codified and fully fleshed out list of rules, I suggest you start writing them. You might finish shortly after the heat death of the universe.
What we have are Moderation Guidelines. Note the difference in meaning between "guidelines" and "rules". Try for a comprehensive list of malicious asshattery of the moderation system in rule form and you'll get something like the tax code. Make the site's intent known in guidelines, with several examples to get the point across, and you're not hamstrung into a rules-lawyering arms race with shitheads while all the people not trying to render the system useless via loophole have a pretty damned good idea what you mean.
And in his case he picked moderation sockpuppetry (Which is absolutely mentioned in the Guidelines. In bold even.) to go with his spamming of the site.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @11:37PM (2 children)
So the commenting block due to "excessive douchebaggery" is the result of what violation of the rules? This is about as transparent as the TSA's no-fly list. No idea how you get on it, no way to get off it. Other than you must have pissed off TMB.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @11:58PM
Who, exactly, is banned from commenting for "excessive douchebaggery"? Is this a lameness filter? Or is this something else?
If you're being an asshole and doing things like spamming or running sockpuppets, you deserve exactly what you get. Having a "don't be an asshole" rule seems like a good idea to shut down people like you who seem intent on causing trouble for everyone else.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 23 2021, @12:05PM
Spamming. No, we're not going to publicize our spam filters. Posting an anti-spam regex publicly ensures two things:
1) Bad actors will instantly be able to see all loopholes and start spamming again.
2) Everyone else will criticize your regex skills in even less time.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @11:50PM (15 children)
Buzzard, I'm the AC who outed those sockpuppets. I did so because I was aware of a troll bragging about spamming SN. There were plenty of trolls who did similar things to Slashdot and some of them have migrated to SN when Slashdot banned AC posting. There was a time when a lot of the Slashdot trolling was at least somewhat clever and creative. Then groups like GNAA decided it was easier to spam the hell out of the site and others, and that kind of became the norm for trolling.
Anyway, I didn't appreciate you accusing me of running those sockpuppets because I shared what I knew. That wasn't fair. I'm asking you to apologize for your misplaced accusation. If I see someone bragging about abusing the site and let you know, that shouldn't be grounds to accuse me of causing trouble.
That said, I disagree with the AC you're replying to. There's an implied "don't be an asshole" rule that is clearly being violated rampantly by people who aren't interested in making any sort of useful contributions.
There are people who just like causing as much trouble as possible for their entertainment and don't care about the trouble they cause. When Slashdot shut a lot of that down, they just went elsewhere to get their entertainment. One common sense approach to limiting abuse is to require a minimum karma in order to receive mod points. I believe you restrict downmods in that manner. Why not restrict all moderation in that way?
A lot of the discussion on this site is just the same people shouting at each other in the journals. I don't find that interesting in the least. The stories on the front page could be interesting, but it seems fewer stories than ever are being posted. I would consider helping edit down some of the story submissions to something that is ready to be posted on the site if it would increase the number of stories that get posted. I'm not interested in any sort of special access, just getting more interesting stories posted. If I resubmitted an edited version of stories that are already in the queue and linked to the original, would that be helpful?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @02:45AM (10 children)
So you disagree with said AC how? You disagree that there are "rules" or that are ones that are "secret" or that there have been occasions that "secret rules" have been in existence that were not known to all the admins simultaneously?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @04:01AM (9 children)
If you have evidence of these so-called "secret rules" then be specific. Tell everyone what these rules are so we can judge if it's unfair or not. Put up or shut up. If you have an allegation, make your allegation instead of hiding behind vague BS.
A couple of weeks ago, I made allegations about sock puppet moderators: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=42481&page=1&cid=1123007#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]. Now, TMB is dead wrong in his response accusing me of running the sockpuppet accounts. But the allegation was specific, apparently enough to get least one of the asshat's accounts banned from moderating.
If you've got the goods, tell everyone what they are. Otherwise, shut up. But don't make vague allegations about supposed secret rules.
As best as I can tell, the so-called secret rules actually involve specific cases of "don't be an asshole" that weren't explicitly covered in the guidelines. If that's all you have, it's incredibly underwhelming.
What are these secret rules? Be specific.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @05:01AM (8 children)
Probably the most obvious example of getting bit by them is here [soylentnews.org]
But most telling is the admin response of Hrm... yup. Someone's been screwing with the filters. Dealt with. [soylentnews.org] Just take that in for a moment. There is a rule coded in to the site itself that you cannot use certain words in posts. That list is a secret, knowable only to the admins. At least one admin was unaware of the content of that list. How else would that be described other than as a rule that is a secret and not all the admins knew about it? Then on top of it TMB seemingly changed it as the result of a unilateral decision (it is worth noting it occurred despite his claims of being on the bottom of the staff hierarchy) and therefore created a new rule that all the other admins would have been unaware of until they noticed as well.
Now you might say that is an example of "don't be an asshole." But is it? Apparently, one admin thought it was and another thought it wasn't. And now we have a new set, which may have changed again without anyone else knowing in the mean time, with no way to decide whether even using those words is an example of "being an asshole." If that is even the rule at all because no one has actually said what it is. Sure, shortcut the hard work and just say there is an implied and amorphous "no assholes" rule to cover future situations, but don't repeat yourself too much as there is also a "no assholes" rule that covers posts that are too repetitious and one for posts that are considered too similar earlier posts in the eyes of the reviewer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @06:43AM (7 children)
There's a table in the database called content_filters (see https://github.com/SoylentNews/rehash/blob/master/sql/mysql/slashschema_create.sql [github.com]) with a list of regexes against which comment text is matched. If the criteria are met, a lameness filter is tripped and the comment is prevented from being posted. There's also a separate compression filter, which splits a comment into slices and tests how well each slice compresses. If the comment compresses too well, it's likely to be ASCII art.
The filter referenced in your links is based on matching the text to a regex in the database. Those filters have been added as a form of security through obscurity to frustrate abusive posters like APK who repetitively spam comments. Yes, there can be issues with false positives, particularly if a regex is poorly constructed.
The filters presumably aren't disclosed to everyone because them APK would know exactly how to modify his comments to evade the lameness filter. But presumably staff can see the content_filter table and know exactly which filters in place. It seems that a staff member modified the filter in a way they weren't supposed to, and it was undone once other staff were made aware of the issue. It may have been unintentional and simply a poorly constructed filter rather than something that was certainly malicious. It also wasn't secret from other staff. Presumably anyone on the staff can view the contents of the table if they desire.
It's a stretch to call these secret rules. And they exist for the purpose of frustrating the efforts of spammers, whose intent clearly is to violate rules that most certainly aren't secret. Moreover, if a filter is producing false positives, all it takes is notifying the staff to ask them to fix the filter. Those filters are intended to help enforce the rules that are public such as not posting repetitive and otherwise spammy comments. One could argue that security through obscurity is a bad way to prevent spam, but that's a totally different issue from what you're posting about.
Do you have any other instances of supposedly secret rules? I'm not bothered by what you've described so far. It's much ado about nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @07:10AM (6 children)
Yes it is a table in the database and there is a check for it in the public code they list. But that raises the question, do you know what its content is? Apparently not all the admins did in the past and who knows if they do now or how often they check for changes or if changes are even logged. How would you even know that they modified it a way they weren't supposed to instead of the one who "fixed" it? Regardless, I'm not suggesting it is malicious at least not this time, besides most people can justify any action they take as morally correct anyway, but would you have even known it was there if I hadn't mentioned it? How many other people posting on this site know such a capability exists? There are other filters in the software that other admins didn't know the existence of until they were tripped as well as disagreements of not just opinion but the actual breadth of the rules that have been discussed here in the past. Nope cannot know you breached those, even if you asked, until after you break them and better hope you get a admin that agrees with you when you do. But hey, if it doesn't arise to your equally amorphous "asshole" rule, guess it is nothing to worry about until the wrong person thinks you are an asshole too. Because then your even talking about how the rule may be bad is just more evidence that you want to be an asshole.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @08:14AM (5 children)
Yes, I was well aware of the filters. The filters hare are considerably less onerous than those on Slashdot. The filter that was implemented by mistake here is standard policy at Slashdot. There are many other filters present at Slashdot like an average minimum line length for comments that don't exist here. Slashdot implemented the line length filter because trolls would post long comments with just a few gibberish characters on each line. The result was really long pages that required scrolling past garbage comments, so a filter was implemented to prevent page lengthening posts.
If people aren't aware the lameness filters exist, it might be that the filters aren't likely to be tripped unless someone is posting a very low quality comment. Many of the filters that are in place now are specifically to block APK comments because he automated posting large numbers of garbage comments. I don't think many people would argue that APK's behavior isn't that of a raging asshole.
Do you have any other examples of secret rules? Surely you've got more than a poorly implemented regex to support this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @08:57AM (4 children)
Are they though, dear sea lion?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @06:58PM (3 children)
Let's be clear, your allegations of malfeasance were highly exaggerated. The idea of "secret rules" turned out to be that admins hadn't recently checked the content_filters table to look for changes. The "secret rules" really weren't secret from admins at all, so your comment was misleading. When I asked if you had more substantial allegations, your only response was to accuse me of bad faith posting. Based on your posting, I think it's safe to assume that you don't have any actual misconduct to complain about.
I have no real evidence, but your behavior is making me wonder if you're behind the moderator sockpuppet accounts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 24 2021, @12:20AM (2 children)
There were no allegations of malfeasance nor were the "content_filters" the only example I provided. Assuming no bad faith on your part, perhaps you need to work on your reading comprehension or communication skills. After all, there are at least 2 people other than myself that are reading bad faith in yours.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 24 2021, @02:53AM (1 child)
Oh, that's right, you claimed that other filters were encountered, too, but didn't state what the filters are. This codebase was derived from Slash, so that's not even sufficient to demonstrate that the filters weren't simply relics from Slashdot.
Let's be honest, you're a troll. You're probably complaining about the filters because you encountered them while trolling and spamming. You've been disingenuous in characterizing the situation. One admin changing the filter regexes and not notifying all the other admins does not indicate that admins are keeping secrets from each other.
If you had any serious criticisms of the site and its staff, I'd take you seriously and agree with your concerns. You don't. You're just trolling.
Take your trolling somewhere else. We're done here. Fuck off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 24 2021, @06:35AM
Nope. Still not there. And you keep imputing negative motivations or nefarious actions that aren't there. Since you seem to be the troll, turnabout seems fair play anyway. But since others beyond myself also seem to have been duped into thinking Hanlon's razor doesn't apply, I'll take comfort in that. Especially since the people who are in a position to believe you and investigate seem to have come to their own negative conclusions about your and your motives using whatever techniques prove it to them. Unless you want to somehow bring them in on the conspiracy too.
Oh and thanks for fulfilling my prediction that "Because then your even talking about how the rule may be bad is just more evidence that you want to be an asshole." It has been since the foundation of most legal systems that secret legislation and adjudication in the shadows just invites a lack of accountability and the growth of corruption. But I'm the "spammer" just for pointing out that apparently innocent people have been bit in the past by rules that are not even mentioned in passing by the site itself.
No, the troll is you, but I'm sure you and the admins that examined your accusations already know that.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 23 2021, @12:22PM (3 children)
No, "Don't be an asshole" is most assuredly not one of our rules, implied or otherwise. Take part in the conversation and you can be as big of an asshole as you like. We're only interested in whether a comment is signal (part of legitimate commentary/satire/conversation/debate/screaming match/etc...) or noise (not).
Because what would seem common sense in regards to karma isn't. A wee bit of sockpuppetry or mod-brigading would quickly have only a select group able to moderate. Also, it would have those who simply have unpopular views unable to moderate. Neither of those are acceptable at all.
I'm not Ed staff but my guess would be an unfortunate no or at least not much. They'd still have to go through and recheck all the checking you did. That's just my gut instinct though. Feel free to hop over into #editorial on IRC and ask if they don't answer here.
I call em like I see em. If you'd simply pointed out the sockpuppets, I might have believed you. When you go straight into using them as reasons to shit on staff and the site, I'm inclined to think you created the problem so you could bitch about it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @05:35PM (2 children)
Here's the original comment: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=42481&page=1&cid=1123007#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]. I didn't "shit on staff and the site" at all in that comment, so you're dead wrong.
I didn't criticize SN's staff there, not once in the entire comment. The only thing I said that mentioned the staff is that they are capable of verifying the details that I provided. You are capable of seeing who modded comments, so that statement is true. But interpreting that as a criticism of staff is not a fair interpretation. It simply meant that you could verify the details of my allegations to see that they're credible. It doesn't imply that the staff have been negligent or given tacit approval to abuse. If I'd wanted to make an allegation like that, I'd have explicitly done so. I didn't.
What I said is that there are trolls who are systematically abusing the system. I stand by those allegations and I'm certain that those trolls are continuing to abuse the system. But saying that trolls are abusing the site. You've stated that you agree that they are spamming the site and abusing moderation. But I don't see how stating that trolls are abusing the site amounts to me attacking the site or its staff. I didn't allege that the staff were negligent or complicit in the moderation abuse. Instead, I stated that the trolls had tried to disguise their abuses so they wouldn't all appear to come from the same IP address. If anything, it means that SN is the victim of abuse. So, again, it's not a criticism of the site or its staff.
I said I don't care for hemocyanin's script, but I don't believe he's even a staff member. I don't care for his script and his tactics because it seems like another attempt to systematically manipulate moderation, even if it doesn't explicitly break rules. But I explicitly said he's not responsible for the abuse I described. If anything, my comment implies that the site is a victim of systematic abuse by bad faith trolls. I didn't claim that I got the information from the staff, either, something you mentioned in your reply. I said that those responsible have bragged about their bad behavior, something I repeated in this thread.
Yes, Azuma replied and took the opportunity to go after the site and its staff. But I'm not Azuma and I'm not responsible for her comments. If you're mad at me because of Azuma's reply, that's not fair. I didn't criticize the staff or the site a single time in my comment.
I think you should apologize because you've again inaccurately represented what I said. Maybe you're remembering Azuma's reply that was critical of the site and its staff, but that's between you and her. I don't control her posting. I have no interest in causing you trouble or attacking you. Neither do I have an interest in bashing the site or its staff. I'm simply asking for an apology.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 24 2021, @12:07PM (1 child)
I'm not mad. That's my everyday manner of speaking. I just don't believe you.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 24 2021, @05:15PM
Frankly, I don't care about your tone, it's the substance of your comments that I don't take kindly to. Nobody likes being falsely accused. Your only evidence is alleging that I "shit on staff and the site," something that I did not do and is demonstrably false. I pointed that out, so you've now falsely accused me of two things, one of which is provably incorrect. You still refused to apologize, even for an accusation that's provably false. You've continued to accuse me of creating sockpuppet accounts that have been used to harass people and use an ethnic slur that is extremely vile. I don't appreciate that one bit. And by your own words, it's on the basis of something that's not even true. For that reason, I'm rescinding any offer to help this site. I wouldn't want to work on a site where one of the admins has falsely accused me of something so vile, and for the sole reason that I notified them of abuse that they may not have been aware of. I could never be comfortable working with someone who falsely accused me of such things and refused to correct the record. This has left me with a very negative impression and I hope I never encounter you again or speak to you again.
I'll happily go back to Slashdot, where there's a lot more content posted, and without the constant political bickering. I might have to take up reading Hacker News, where the content is a lot like the old "news for nerds, stuff that matters" that Slashdot once was. I'll stay away from this site.
Your false accusations will have run off someone who wanted to help the site. We both know that the trolls spamming your site aren't going to stop on account of a random AC leaving. Because I don't want to see this site brought down by trolls, no matter how offensive I find your accusations, I hope they go away and stop spamming. As for you personally, fuck you.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 22 2021, @01:32PM
This and all your other spammy sockpuppet troll accounts, yep.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @05:00PM
Poor troll, poor bigoted jackass, has to make fake accounts to get fake internet points to make his shitty worldview seem more popular. Sad doesn't cut it, implies a srnse of sympathy. Pathetic, yeah that nails it.