Help me vote jfkjdgdf off the forum

right, just sayin'...

That's OK.
It's just that the buggers have got a bit more clever in their spamming activities.

I disagree with some of this advice and while it puts me in the very uncomfortable position of having to disagree with it in public I was given no opportunity to do so in private. In the future I think this kind of confusion can be avoided by seeking consensus when speaking for the site as well as restricting such communication to the official channels of communication that represent the site (such as the blog or the able2know account).



Right now reports go there but aren't likely to go there forever, they can be disruptive there and that is likely going to be reserved for non-moderation communication in the future with reports working more directly within the a2k app. We need a place for the rest of the stuff that happens on the help desk and had planned to stop sending the reports there (letting them be handled on-site when better mechanisms are put in place).



We don't need to respond to them all or merge them. I personally never read them there or respond to them, when I see reports I work through the on-site logs for them and just delete the tickets en-masse (which takes only a few seconds). I get that it can be difficult to handle more tickets but IMO it's worse to have some of the stuff go unremoved for months and that still happens dozens of times a year. We are adding moderators now because we want to have more coverage, not less and this is a process that we can make work on our end without dampening user reports (because fundamentally we want as many of these as we can get, it's our job to figure out how to filter them through our process). If the help desk is overwhelming, I understand, but we are working on it both through bringing on new moderators as well as with plans to change the way the technology works. And if people are going to err in spam reports it's better for us to have them err on the over-reporting side and let us worry about handling the workflow.




The only way a site can hurt your computer by just visiting it is if you have a gaping security hole that will allow it to execute code with privileges it shouldn't have. This is exceedingly rare and is itself a serious problem on your computer, and I have not in the history of a2k heard of a single instance of this happening from clicking on a spam link (of course, if you click and then decide to download and install something that is a different case). Buit I don't think we need to get out the megaphone for this, there just isn't a danger to be shouting about and this is just basic computer security that has been decreasingly relevant for years. We shouldn't shout at people about how to use their computers, that is their prerogative and something we can only advise them on.



Agreed, but more importantly it doesn't usually help anyone else much either.



Reporting something automatically votes it down so this is not true. People should feel free to vote it down if they wish, but it is true that only voting down does not bring it to our attention like reporting it does.



I disagree, I think it comes after number 5. ;-)



A lot of the training focuses on avoiding this kind of situation. Most of our moderator guidelines are about not wielding a big stick and telling people what to do, and about not speaking on behalf of the site:

General Moderator Guidelines

- Uphold our policies. We are always willing to listen if you feel that an existing policy is problematic, but consistency is very important and we expect moderators to uphold our policies at all times.

- Be discreet. While we don’t expect you to go to great lengths to hide the fact that you are a moderator, we also don’t want you to advertise that status. This includes:

- - Don’t threaten anyone with moderator actions, whether on the boards or privately.
- - Don’t announce that you are a moderator (if you are asked directly, you don’t need to lie, but do what you can to keep the information confidential).
- - Don’t share with non-moderators any information that you learn in the course of your moderating duties, such as the reason that someone was suspended.
- - In general, make your moderating as invisible as you can. Our goal is to keep A2K running as smoothly and seamlessly as possible -- if members think that we just happen to be immune from spam, porn, and truly horrible trolls, that’s fine.



Agreed, Green beer is weird.

My apologies for bringing it in public. This has been rather frustrating lately. I am glad that the system will be changed in the future.

I had no idea it was frustrating anyone till now.

We just recently started planning to change this (around the time we added moderators and revisited the process) and I'm not sure how fast it can be changed, but we can certainly do things on the tech end to make things easier. For example, we could automatically group reports (e.g. if 5 people report one post it can show up on one item with multiple reports).

I'm sure we'll discuss it more on the able2know group when we get closer to that, and figure out a way we can programmatically solve some of the frustration but now that we have a place for moderators to talk again please do report any of the admin/mod side frustrations with the site, software etc. I didn't know the help desk workload was getting out of hand but I think that we can probably figure out some ways to make it a lot easier.

I don't know if this helps devise countermeasures, but the spammer was posting from one thread to another really fast -- like he had some sort of automated script to post the same message on every single thread.

I'm sure no regular poster would ever post to more than a hundred different threads in less than a minute. (I didn't count to see if it was literally a hundred, but it sure was a lot, and all at once.)

I have a rule of thumb about reporting spam. If I see an unfamiliar name, whose post has a link, I check to see if it is the person's first post. Some of these spammers are pretty tricky, and their "spamminess" is not as obvious as the person whom we are discussing in this thread.

If it is a first post, or if there are a lot of posts written on the same day, with the same link, I report it. As Jes has said, NEVER click on the link. It will never be good, and might do some harm.

I will also react strongly (as possible) to a named link that has an address completely different to its name.

We do have flood control, and some complain it is actually too agressive. That is a good example of why I'd like to make it more so, not less but that is a balancing act between spammers and legitimately loquacious users.

The spammer is back, wearing a different wig. FYI, I've reported it. No need for others to if you haven't already.

Yeah, he seems to wait until jespah is in bed already

so, I report once, thumb down all the rest.

No, don't thumb them down, as they're hard to find later on...

sorry, thought that's what Janet said----report once, then just thumb down. I misunderstood.

Well, thumbing down just has them not show for you, no? I didn't report, there were so many already and I figured someone got it, and it turned out Bfn did.
I probably should have, as these things go so fast, I might have been the early one there. I'm still catching on re the speed of this stuff.
And I didn't thumb down, confused on that: have to go back and reread Jes and Robert.

Meantime, I'm going to call this clown Feiffer, in honor of my old time favorite cartoonist, if you could call him that. All those mashed letters, y'know.

Janets post

Yes, I know. I thought the question was about should we thumb down, and I suspect it's fine as long as it has been reported.

No, she was pretty specific. She's against it. Still seems like a response is not good, so a negative number should be good, but I don't pretend to know about these things.

OK, could we have some clear "official" A2K guidance, please?
Limit the number of spam reports and .... is thumbing down spam reports OK or not?
(Personally I prefer it if they're gone, out of sight ....)