"Flood Prevention?"

Forums: Growing Pains, a2k Posting Features
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While posting a number of responses (one after the other) on a thread my (I guess) 6th post received this response. :

[quote]Flood Prevention: You must wait 5 hours before making another post in a row to this thread.[/quote]

...and the 6th post didn't register on the thread.

Interesting. I haven't come across this before. I'm curious: has this "flood prevention" feature been around for a while & I didn't know about it? (Not posting six straight posts in a row, usually ...) Or is it a new development? If so, what's the reason for it?

(I would have posted this question to one of the "new A2K" threads but couldn't find a suitable one.)

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View best answer, chosen by msolga

@msolga,

Yeah;
I ran into that too.

I don t think that 's too great an idea.

Suppose that I start a thread
then go and attend to my business,
returning the next day. I might find many comments upon it,
which are worthy of responses; some of them may well
ask questions of me that I wanna answer.

If I wanna answer 5 or 10 posters,
in a series of responses, there is no harm in that.

1 Reply

@OmSigDAVID,

That was pretty much what I was doing, David. Responding (after about 24 hours away) to a number of posts to the same thread.

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@msolga,

msolga wrote:

Interesting. I haven't come across this before. I'm curious: has this "flood prevention" feature been around for a while & I didn't know about it? (Not posting six straight posts in a row, usually ...) Or is it a new development? If so, what's the reason for it?

It's been around about a week, I think it's too aggressive and needs some tweaking but there is a threshold of volume that most would agree is worth preventing.

The aim is to prevent the ability for one user to hijack topics just by sheer volume and create pages and pages of posts (like the copy paste wars that used to happen on Abuzz where people would try to end the discussion just by posting a large number of large texts to the thread), but the variables need to be tweaked to strike a better balance and interfere with non-abusive posting less often.

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@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

It's been around about a week, I think it's too aggressive and needs some tweaking but there is a threshold of volume that most would agree is worth preventing.

The aim is to prevent the ability for one user to hijack topics just by sheer volume and create pages and pages of posts (like the copy paste wars that used to happen on Abuzz where people would try to end the discussion just by posting a large number of large texts to the thread), but the variables need to be tweaked to strike a better balance and interfere with non-abusive posting less often.

Yes, some tweaking would be good. But it would involve some form of moderator judgement, I'd guess, about whether the posts were deliberate nuisance/hijacking posts, or just enthusiastic participation by genuine posters.

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@msolga,

msolga wrote:

Yes, some tweaking would be good. But it would involve some form of moderator judgement, I'd guess, about whether the posts were deliberate nuisance/hijacking posts, or just enthusiastic participation by genuine posters.

Flood control at some point needs to be technical, robots can be used to generate more volume than our moderating team can deal with and human-only solutions to technically generated problems have limits. When the limits strike the right balance they work well (we've always had some kind of automated flood control, but it was less aggressively configured).

There are fewer moderator man hours than the work that is suggested for them.

1 Reply

While checking out the "select" & then "deselect" responses (never having used them before) I received this message:

Quote:

Error
You have just caused an error that took the life of one of the hardest working hamsters. But the good news is that we wrote down the error and will give it to our overlords so that they can figure out how to make it not happen again. Topic not Found

1 Reply

@msolga,

You also helped find a bug. Deleting a post with a selected answer (I deleted all my test posts) doesn't update all the aggregates correctly (so your topic displays a selected answer link to a post that's no longer there).

The selected answer stuff needs a lot of work. If you get a chance, can you try selecting a different post as the answer and see what happens now?

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

You also helped find a bug. Deleting a post with a selected answer (I deleted all my test posts) doesn't update all the aggregates correctly (so your topic displays a selected answer link to a post that's no longer there).

The selected answer stuff needs a lot of work. If you get a chance, can you try selecting a different post as the answer and see what happens now?

Glad to oblige! I honestly have no idea of what all this means, though. I will select a different answer in my next post.

1 Reply

Hey, I like that!
Being able to select the most appropriate answer, I mean! Nifty! Very Happy

0 Replies

@msolga,

Looks like it worked, did you get any error messages when you did it?

And as to the initial topic, I tweaked it to 5 in a row within 30 minutes instead of 3 in a row within 6 hours.

It should be very rare to run into now.

2 Replies

@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

Looks like it worked, did you get any error messages when you did it?

Nope.

1 Reply

@msolga,

Thanks for helping test, it would have been a pain to replicate that scenario all over again myself.

I'd better finish up my work and go to bed, nite.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

And as to the initial topic, I tweaked it to 5 in a row within 30 minutes instead of 3 in a row within 6 hours.

It should be very rare to run into now.

That's much better!

Thanks.

0 Replies

@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

Thanks for helping test, it would have been a pain to replicate that scenario all over again myself.

I'd better finish up my work and go to bed, nite.

My pleasure.

Night night!

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@Robert Gentel,

May I respectfully request that we be allowed 12 consecutive posts ?

I was carefully crafting a response a little while ago,
wondering, in a state of disquiet, whether I was about to
exceed my quota, and be unable to post it,
after investing about 45 minutes of work, to make it look nice.

It went in OK, but it 'd have been emotionally frustrating & alarming
if I had not been able to post all that conscientiously tended work.

David

1 Reply

@OmSigDAVID,

OmSigDAVID wrote:

May I respectfully request that we be allowed 12 consecutive posts ?

I'd like to see how it works out with 5/30 before tweaking it more. I think it's going to be very rare.

Quote:

I was carefully crafting a response a little while ago,
wondering, in a state of disquiet, whether I was about to
exceed my quota, and be unable to post it,
after investing about 45 minutes of work, to make it look nice.

Well the limit is now 30 minutes, so it's much less likely to do that. Let us know though the helpdesk (the webmaster category when you click the contact us link in the footer) if you run into the limit and we may tweak it further.

Quote:

It went in OK, but it 'd have been emotionally frustrating & alarming
if I had not been able to post all that conscientiously tended work.

That brings up a good usability flaw in only checking on submit and not on compose, we'll have to improve on that usability a bit to remove the uncertainty factor.

Either way, it'll have to wait till later, I need to hit the sack.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

OK; thanx for your help

0 Replies

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