Why not implement a moderation ala digg / slashdot. This way, Charles won't have to watch the forums like a hawk with his finger constantly pounding on the lifetime ban button. Yea, it's not perfect, but it'll allow all of us to filter out the noise.
People constatnly modded at trolls get no modpoints (and their posts show collapsed) and people modded up get more modpoints. Either that or ignore lists.
Just a thought...
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dahat
inanity makes my head hurt
It sounds from Chazz that some form of user moderation is in the works and will be part of the next major build of Channel 9 which should be coming online starting in a few weeks and done some time afterwards... so until then we just need to hope they don’t get too bad.
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HumanCompiler
Now with more program management
daytrip00, the two ways you mentioned are the two we're considering. Ignore Lists seems a lot easier for us to implement ASAP, but the way /. does it is intriguing as well.
Not to say we'll do exactly what you all say but we're interested in opinions on different ways to do it, which you prefer, etc -
Sven Groot
I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favourite store on the Citadel.
I think as a way to deal with the immediately obvious trolls, such as coding4jesus, C9 simply needs more mods. Charles and the MS staff are simply outnumbered at the moment.
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HumanCompiler
Now with more program management
But the idea is to not need mods. We've got all the power in the world we need (you Niners), so we're trying to figure out the best way to give the power to you to make this place great and keep it clean.
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Sven Groot
I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favourite store on the Citadel.
I don't like Ignore Lists.
Say user X is a troll, so I want to ignore him. What happens to a thread that he started, and other people reply to it? Do I not see the entire thread? Do I see orphaned replies to a thread starter post that doesn't exist?
And what is user X posts in an existing thread, and people reply to that? I'm left with a bunch of replies that make no sense because I can't see the post they're replying to.
Ignoring user X will only work as intended when everybody ignores user X and nobody replies to him. But if that were possible we wouldn't need ignore lists, then trolls would just go away because people wouldn't pay them any attention.
It's these exact same reasons why I've never used a killfile on usenet either. If we get ignore lists here, I'll likely not use them either (except maybe to get rid the occasional horrible spammer). Ignore Lists are not an end-all solution, you'd still need moderation. -
Jason Cox
Longtime C9 Lurker
Simple solution, call HR and tell them you have a list of people you need hired. I call Scoble's office!HumanCompiler wrote:...so we're trying to figure out the best way to give the power to you to make this place great and keep it clean.
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It's too easy to join Channel9, anyone who is baned can grab a new Yahoo, Google or Hotmaill account in minutes and away they go!
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Ion Todirel
buuu
i have an idea: baning queue
, blatz was in top of it.
If someone is trolling its added to queue so next time it will be baned -
HumanCompiler
Now with more program management
Sven Groot wrote:I don't like Ignore Lists.
Say user X is a troll, so I want to ignore him. What happens to a thread that he started, and other people reply to it? Do I not see the entire thread? Do I see orphaned replies to a thread starter post that doesn't exist?
And what is user X posts in an existing thread, and people reply to that? I'm left with a bunch of replies that make no sense because I can't see the post they're replying to.
Ignoring user X will only work as intended when everybody ignores user X and nobody replies to him. But if that were possible we wouldn't need ignore lists, then trolls would just go away because people wouldn't pay them any attention.
It's these exact same reasons why I've never used a killfile on usenet either. If we get ignore lists here, I'll likely not use them either (except maybe to get rid the occasional horrible spammer). Ignore Lists are not an end-all solution, you'd still need moderation.
Agreed, ignore lists are not the end all, but I think lots of the problems you've mentioned can be avoided. If you notice on 10, the conversation is threaded. What we would do is if you ignored a particular user that posted in that thread, nothing underneath their post would show up and that particular post would be small and grayed out (probably say something like "this post was ignored because XXX wrote it" or whatever). Personally, I don't know why you'd want to see posts that were in reply of something a troll said. I doubt it would be anything more than "we don't need your kind of crap around here" or something uneventful to encourage them to leave. Maybe that's just me. We're working on solutions for this problem and will keep you posted.
As for being to easy to sign up, it's only going to get easier. Have you seen how easy it is to sign up on 10?
Duncan informed me today though that we'll be able to ban name patterns so they can't sign up under any related name. That doesn't stop anyone
from signing up, but agian the idea is to ignore trolls. I doubt any of them will post 20 times without getting replies.
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Sven Groot
I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favourite store on the Citadel.
It would work better with threaded discussions, I agree. With a flat model such as here you can't discern who's replying to who, so you wouldn't be able to hide replies to ignored users either (yes, I know the actual data model used by C9 is not flat, but most users will use the + on the last post even if they're not actually responding to that particular post).
On Usenet, with most newsreaders killfiling a poster would remove their posts altogether, leaving their replies orphaned or stuck to a post higher up in the hierarchy. That doesn't work at all. -
jsampsonPC
SampsonBlog.com SampsonVideos.com
Why not create an email-verification script on signup? Force the user to specificy a non-pop3 account, so they cannot create multiple hotmail accounts just to re-register.
Once the user is validated, by an email activation code to a non-pop3 account, they can then change the account email to anything they like.
This way, you can ban the email address that the account was initially activated by, which is slightly more difficult to replicate than a hotmail one.
You probably won't be able to keep trolls out for good, but you can make it hella frustrating to get in over and over again -
Sven Groot
I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favourite store on the Citadel.
jsampsonPC wrote:Force the user to specificy a non-pop3 account, so they cannot create multiple hotmail accounts just to re-register.
That's not a good idea. Many people don't have any other e-mail addresses, and while I do, I prefer not to use them for registering on forums (where you'll never know which spammer might end up getting the address). -
jsampsonPC
SampsonBlog.com SampsonVideos.com
Sven Groot wrote:
jsampsonPC wrote:Force the user to specificy a non-pop3 account, so they cannot create multiple hotmail accounts just to re-register.
That's not a good idea. Many people don't have any other e-mail addresses, and while I do, I prefer not to use them for registering on forums (where you'll never know which spammer might end up getting the address).
Which is why your intial email address isn't public, and can be changed to NULL if you like after confirmation. Plus, chances are that anybody registering at C9 will have a non POP3 account somewhere
Nobody says the email address has to be perm., or even available to the public community.
Just brainstorming
ps. Your avatar is intimidating, hehe.
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HumanCompiler
Now with more program management
To me though, it doesn't seem like registering and banning is really what should be done. Why not just give everyone a way to more automatically ignore someone? If you ban a troll, they'll just register another account and while the suggested non-pop3 idea would help, it wouldn't fix everything. There would still be trolls, while possibly making the registration process a bit more annoying for some people. Ignore a troll and they have no purpose. You know...kill the flame by taking away all the oxygen, blah, blah, blah. Not sure how the rest of the team feels yet. I'm sure we'll discuss it once we're all back.
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LaBomba
Summer
I agree with the Mods to a certain extent...
don't feed the trolls, ignore them. But clearly that hasn't been happening, while putting in ignore lists, giving the end user power control over who they want to ignore is an option, it's not the best solution as Sven Groot pointed out.
Clearly, as you have One single person registering multiple accounts under different names, and posting multiple flaming troll threads, you have to realize there is a problem.
Charles said he was going to lodge a formal complaint against this troll with his/her ISP...well before complaining to someone else, why not protect yourself from this, if you leave yourself open people will take advantage.
Hey most people who post here are tech savvy, so i see no big deal in requiring a POP3 account to reg...
just my 2 cents. (actually 0.01558 if you convert to euro) -
Another_Darren
... than you can shake a stick at
HumanCompiler wrote:To me though, it doesn't seem like registering and banning is really what should be done. Why not just give everyone a way to more automatically ignore someone? If you ban a troll, they'll just register another account and while the suggested non-pop3 idea would help, it wouldn't fix everything. There would still be trolls, while possibly making the registration process a bit more annoying for some people. Ignore a troll and they have no purpose. You know...kill the flame by taking away all the oxygen, blah, blah, blah. Not sure how the rest of the team feels yet. I'm sure we'll discuss it once we're all back.
How about slowing the registration process down? Have a probabation period after registering beore you can post. Or moderator activation for new users? IP matches for registering an account, so if an IP address is used more than once in x days then new registration goes on hold for a mod to approve.
I agree the big part of the problem is if you didn't ban people like coding4 jesus and just ignored him, he will just do what he does now and create a new account to troll on. How big before your ignore list gets out of hand?
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HumanCompiler
Now with more program management
LaBomba wrote:
don't feed the trolls, ignore them. But clearly that hasn't been happening, while putting in ignore lists, giving the end user power control over who they want to ignore is an option, it's not the best solution as Sven Groot pointed out.
Like Sven Groot pointed out? Why don't you re-emphasize it for me, because I still don't see it.
Another_Darren wrote:HumanCompiler wrote: To me though, it doesn't seem like registering and banning is really what should be done. Why not just give everyone a way to more automatically ignore someone? If you ban a troll, they'll just register another account and while the suggested non-pop3 idea would help, it wouldn't fix everything. There would still be trolls, while possibly making the registration process a bit more annoying for some people. Ignore a troll and they have no purpose. You know...kill the flame by taking away all the oxygen, blah, blah, blah. Not sure how the rest of the team feels yet. I'm sure we'll discuss it once we're all back.
How about slowing the registration process down? Have a probabation period after registering beore you can post. Or moderator activation for new users? IP matches for registering an account, so if an IP address is used more than once in x days then new registration goes on hold for a mod to approve.
I agree the big part of the problem is if you didn't ban people like coding4 jesus and just ignored him, he will just do what he does now and create a new account to troll on. How big before your ignore list gets out of hand?
Well, IP matching doesn't really do a whole lot since they're easy to spoof and ever changing anyway. We could slow down the registration process, but I'd be frustrated as a new user to the site and wouldn't come back, so I don't think that's an option. And anything that adds work for mods I don't think is a good idea either since we're already limited on time as it is. Anything we can do to put power in your hands is GOOD!
Ignore list out of hand? Who cares?...is what I would ask. It's not something you really need to maintain, you just click on a user and click ignore, done. We could also automagically ignore by a pattern, like if you ignored coding4jesus, then we could automatically ignore coding4jesus*.
Think of it this way. When someone is banned, they instantly know they're out and so they do what every good troll does and sign up another account and start posting again. If people just start ignoring them, they don't know when they're being blocked, so at what point will they sign up for another account? That's a major reason why I think an ignore list is overall better (even though it's not perfect).
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