Topic: Please add a approval of posts system upon registeration (Read 497 times)

We all speculate on what the criteria is, and only theymos actually knows his criteria, but your opinion is as valid as the rest of us as we are making educated guesses. There's probably loads of things that are taken into consideration, and considering there haven't been too many incidents with moderators I would say its been largely effective whatever the criteria is.

Even if someone had something absurd like 100k reports within a year, if they're not reporting in sections which aren't getting addressed quickly by moderators then there might be no need. Of course, it might make sense to just make them a moderator due to the fact that they are doing the work anyway, and putting more workload on the existing moderators, but if the existing moderators are handling that effectively, and other factors aren't in the favour of the user who is reporting, then they'll likely not get made a moderator.

Things like reports, timezone, existing moderators workload, trust, and personality type could all be considered. I'm not sure if quality of posts would come into it, as I'm sure there's a lot of users who would make a good moderator, but don't post amazing content or might not even post at all.  It sounds like a headache, and theymos has to overseer all of the moderators actions, probably with the help of cyrus, but I'm certainly not jealous of the amount of work they'd have to put in to actually overseer that.

I wouldn't say I know better, and discussion from differing opinions usually leads to the better option as we can all see the pros, and cons of our ideas. When I say pretty well dealt with, considering the amount of spam content that was getting posted, and only a few global moderators, and moderators available to deal with it, I think it was fairly well done. I actually turned up late to the spam attack, and had around 1000 reports in my queue, but that shot down to around 100 within about 5 to 10 minutes. So, yeah the bot attack was an issue which a lot of the forum users noticed, but in retrospect it was actually dealt with fairly quickly. 

Reporting is very much a thankless job, and if it wasn't for possibly a few staff members messaging me when I was actively reporting I may have had the outlook that you have now. I still remember the day cyrus messaged me about my reports after I think busting a fairly decent sized account ring. That probably offered even more encouragement to me, and ended up with me spamming the current moderators with nearly 40k reports :p We do appreciate it, and I have started to message those that are actively reporting to say thanks, because this might sound cliche, but our job would be a lot harder if it wasn't the community pulling together as a whole, and reporting anything. I don't care if its plagiarism or just "great project" posts I appreciate anyone who is putting in the time to actively report as I know the pain of going through that.

Some have been doing it for years. I think some people gave up reporting as well once they realised they weren't going to become a mod. I'm sure perseverance will pay off for some eventually though and people shouldn't be made a mod just for a few months worth of high-volume reporting.


Yeah, like Employee of the Month type things. I've addressed the point before. People always like to be rewarded with things, especially for effort, and even more so when there's some benefit to them (especially financially or in terms of prizes). We had a thing called 'gems' in high school which teachers awarded for good work or behaviour. Once you got x amount you actually got things like Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum certificates once you achieved like 100/500/1000 gems over the year or whatever. Some of them came with actual rewards like McDonalds vouchers and book tokens and things like that.


Well yeah, I doubt theymos would promote an unscrupulous character just because they had a lot of accurate reports and the system could easily be gamed if all it took was a huge amount of reports.

Reporter badges sure will encourage users to report. Without benefits with those badges, they will do encourage users to more actively report. Having a badge, that is a recognition from good continuous reporting works, and a kind of honor for users/ reporters. They do will like their badges.

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I am not in right position to say this, but I think there are at least three characteristics that theymos take into consideration for potential staffs:
- Good net-effects: not only includes reports (quality, quantity), but also includes other past contributions in the forum (through threads, posts, scam fightings).
- Good reputation (trust/ flags)
- Acceptable active time: there are moderators removed due to inactive for too long.

I guess that was me back in August 2018 (?) I can't remember exactly when I was made a moderator, but I was made a moderator around 38/39k reports, but there's obviously a few users here who have been reporting significant amounts for months, and there's no sign of them becoming a moderator yet, and I would consider some of them pretty trustworthy too, but then again I don't see too many reports within the sections that are in my opinion in need of moderators.

Reporter badges are definitely going to encourage certain types of users to report, generally those that like to stick out within a community, and I think that's fine. You'll find a lot of organizations offering achievements, and badges to encourage students to learn. For example, a number of language courses do it, as well as when we were all back in school as a kid we had a system where they would put stars on your report card if you done well etc. It does work even in adulthood.

Well I agree. I think it would be nice if it came with some small perks as well as reporting is pretty much a thankless task and even with a badge that doesn't really come with any benefits, especially since it's a time-consuming task and you're helping out the forum a lot. The only previous perk to reporting was that if you were a very high reporter it made the chances of becoming a mod much higher but I can't remember the past time someone was made a mod from sheer volume of reports. I guess when the time comes when theymos feels we need more mods the list of reporters will be consulted but personally I feel like there's a couple of users who have already paid their dues and would be beneficial as staff even if it's just as patrollers (and they could certainly help out with post approval if that ever happened).

I think this approach sounds good. At first, it protect users from reading shitposts from bots, and the solution to hire new staff(s) to do it is great. Spams from bots are easily to realize, normal users can realize them too. With current report tools of the forum, yes, forum users can reports spam from bots, but it takes time to report, then wait for handling from staffs. It takes time, sure. I don't think we should allow such things freely pop-up without control at the start. Prevention is always better than cure!
One more thing, if forum has reporter badges (that theymos asked for designs and ideas months ago), I do think that community will sure more eagerly to report.

It's mostly for spam bots and spam bots wont know about it. It's not really to try catch 'regular' users out on something.


Again, I don't think it will take that long to verify them. Most urgent reports get handled very quickly and it's only stuff like sig spam reports that tend to stay in the queue long-term or don't get handled. I don't think we'll ever get 1000 brand new accounts posting after the other but I can't tell you exactly how long it would take or how much workload it would add but I think people are exaggerating or being overly cautious on the issues it may cause but if it did become apparent that it was causing a backlog or strain on moderation I'm sure there's plenty of willing people who would make good patrollers to help verify them.

It depends. Some newbie may need to confirm if what he/she visited is a phishing site before entering personal information and I think that has to be answered immediately.

Ahhh because this forum has a lot of users who can help?


Say for example there are 1,000+ newbies posted immediately after the other, will it take a few minutes for the 1000^th post to get approved? My response is also under the assumption that there will be no additional mods.  

This restriction could only be useful against spam bots but a regular user could find an easy way around it.
Make a genuine, on-topic post, get approved, and then start the spam fest. You would only be slowing the spammers down for the time needed to get approved. And moderators would need to spend too much time filtering those posts.

I've suggested it before. It's one way for sure to stop all the messy bot spam.


This wouldn't be bringing back newbie jail. They can post. They just need to be whitelisted before it goes 'live' and most will be none the wiser to it.


How immediately do you think people need something answering? What makes you think they would even get an answer? I don't think it would take long to verify at all and more mods could be added to meet demand.


It's not impossible to implement. Many forums have this sort of thing. I signed up to one yesterday which had it. I don't know how long it took to verify me as I got no notification just an alert that my account needed to be verified, but the irony is my account was instantly permabanned automatically when I made my first post as being suspected of being a bot. Had someone actually verified my post that probably wouldn't have happened.


This is more impossible as theymos said he won't be bringing it back. There are much better ways than newbie jail to curb spam and I think this suggestion is one of them.


Accounts wouldn't be banned for making a poor post but just the obvious bots. The people who sign up here just to post a ref link or something similar can also be dealt with without having to be reported. People making their first post in the wrong section (which is very common) can also be directed to the right one. The stats you would need are how many new users sign up and make at least one post. Many accounts just lurk or are bots that never make it to making a first post for whatever reason. Also, how many new accounts are nuked straight away that have to be reported and acted on by both users and staff anyway? Sure, it is more work for staff but reviewing the accounts would be a priority and at least it stops bots from being a nuisance.


In the past four months staff have been handling between 18-20k reports a month. White-listing a users first post probably wouldn't be a big deal. You could even do a trial run. Ie, the system is put in place but nothing actually changes on the user front and we see how long and how much time it would take to handle them and if a backlog quickly built up. As I already said, more staff could be added to meet demand as well. You could even have one or two staff who's sole job was to handle them. I'm not saying it's perfect and there are pros and cons to any spam measure, but at least this pretty much stops the bots nearly 100% from being an eyesore and infecting the forum.


This isn't what is being suggested. A users first post only needs to be approved just to ensure they're not a spambot. Accounts wouldn't be banned or effected just for posting something a mod didn't like and staff could already remove it if they wanted but if they did they wouldn't be a mod for long.

Nah, I simply meant by giving the power to mass nuke based on a repeated phrase to a number of mods, rather than relying on one specific person, who may not be online at the time they are needed.

I do do that in the report comment box - state how many posts the user has had deleted recently and suggest they should be banned - but it rarely happens. We are really good at banning plagiarists; I just think we could be better at handing out escalating levels of bans to mass spammers.

interesting idea but how exactly to decentralize nuking? by voting on spammer?

you can write a post about with all evidences and request a mod to take action on the user
or on your report, you can state the user has spammed a lot and include all related message ids
with that kind of reminder, mods may take appropriate action: nuke or ban the user

Only specific voices can be heard then. 

For me it's quite the opposite. Each post I report means one less reason for them to spam. They waste at least 10x as much time as I do when I report their post. I've already seen some users that I've reported seriously slow down on their spam. And for the return offenders? They'll get the picture.

True, but his bot still identified over 4000 posts. I believe hilarious has said they were posting faster than he could nuke them. I would have thought it would be better to decentralize the ability to mass nuke so we don't have to count on a specific person being online at the right time, but hey, you obviously know more about the best set up than I do.

I still report plagiarism and other serious offenses, but I took a break from reporting spam. It is pretty disheartening to see the same names showing up again and again and again. Kind of feels like a waste of time when for every post you report the spammer makes three more.

Ask and you shall receive.

Are there any pronouncements you can link to where the exact reasons why are stated?

I was a bit surprised when I ended up in there on joining but I wasn't horrified or devastated. It was a little bit of a grind but eminently escapable. A lot of things look very different now of course but I'd be curious to know how it looks from the staff end.

You misunderstand what the intent is. It's similar to a Newbie jail, not a review process for all posts. The latter would be absolutely unsustainable with our current staff.

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Against spam attacks and whatnot, I think we still have the freedom to keep to a reactive approach since malicious traffic is not too common. Moreover, the community reaction to such types of attacks is usually quite swift.

Once we get truckloads of accounts posting about, we might want to insert a temporary lockdown mechanism, but I don't think theymos wants to go back to a permanent newbie jail.

Your idea completely destroys what a forum should be. Can you just imagine how could you practice free speech in a forum when all of your posts will be subject for approval? You simply can't! all your replies will be subject to the moderators reviewing it and it would really depend on whether or not its “relevant” for them. We don't really need to adjust to spammers and plagiarizers and affect everyone in the forum, they are the ones who need to adjust for us that's why we have a report button and bans in placed for them.

This is very similar to the shadow ban system that Hilariousandco has suggested a few times in the past. In theory its a great idea which would prevent spam being seen to the public eye, however whether we have enough resources to handle that amount of posts a day would be debatable. Despite reports not coming in as thick, and fast as a few months ago I would still say that amount of posts could be a little bit hard to deal with. We would likely need a few more moderators in each of the sections. There are still global moderators which have a dedicated section which could probably be optimized by adding a few more moderators to help them out, but only they really know how much additional help is needed.

I for one don't really like imposing restrictions on the majority just because of the minority is causing a few issues. These bot attacks are somewhat quickly dealt with as a community effort, and they aren't as popular as you might think at least to the scale of yesterday. I would have to agree with o_e_l_e_o that imposing to much restrictions is not beneficial to the forum as a whole.


I think the recent bot attack was pretty well dealt with, and a big part of that was down to Mitchell's bot. Reports have died down in recent months across the boards I would say, at least in the sections I moderate, and newbie reports have significantly died down. Although, there are still a few prominent users who are reporting fairly regular.