Topic: Suggestion - Health index for topics to stop spam megathread/bumping (Read 364 times)

Thanks for all the replies, I know that it's hard to work out a solution that solves every problem and doesn't give false positives...
This "grey out" thing seems fine for me, I just wanted to have something automated to let the other users know how to search for topics that worths reading these days...
Maybe we will stick to the merits, somehow it should be shown next to the topic's title that that topic has xx merits, so you can easily select those topics that has the most merits.

Yes, I see the potential problem. In my opinion it would be enough to allow the status to be changed to self-moderated only once by the user in most cases. There is no legitimate reason I can think of to change a self-moderated thread again to "mod-moderated". Maybe if the thread is not popular enough because it's self-moderated. But also then a one-time chance to change the status is enough.

If it was necessary, also a rule that this status can be only changed once per week would give very little opportunity for abuse.

I think if a serious discussion has already been started in the thread, and then spammers are beginning to clutter it, then a rapid change to self-moderated by the thread starter would have good chances for success - it would be highly likely that people already involved in the discussion would continue to participate. A little hint in the OP why the thread starter changed it to self-moderated could help.

The only alternative in this situation would be to lock and start a new thread - then you would lose the whole discussion (if you don't want to include a "megaquote", which would be difficult to read).

(This is obviously a complementary measure to the original "health index" proposal. But it's targeting a part of the problem, so I think it's not totally OT here. If desired, I can start a new thread about it.)

I like the idea, except that posts which have been plagiarized are often left as-is (which is good, as it makes finding plagiarism easier) so a thread that is filled with nothing but plagiarized posts - like the Neogame.io and Neluns ANN threads - would appear to be high quality unless the number of users banned for plagiarizing within them was taken into account.

But I obviously agree with you that something needs to be done to better evaluate when entire threads should be locked or even trashed. I've literally reported 300+ posts in those two threads over the last month or so, all for plagiarism. At some point you'd think the global mods would take the lazy/smart option and trash the thread and ban the OP, rather than individually ban accounts that are clearly stolen and being used just to artificially bump threads.

It was discussed before that some people don't want to post in self-moderated threads, so changing the one from not moderated to self-moderated can cause a bit of a trouble for someone.

That depends on whether the box could be checked and unchecked multiple times. To know how this is going to get abused you have to add it and the scammers will find a way and show it to you in no time.
If they could self moderate and then remove the option it would be a great tool for scamming. Somebody comes with a negative comment? Just switch to self moderated, delete it, switch back, so that people will see the thread as open and unmoderated, and will not suspect that you're cleaning it up. It won't work forever because the next day people will come asking where their posts are, but the possibility remains and at least some of them won't come back to argue.
Adding the option to permanently switch to self moderated should be fine.

That would be really a great idea as currently, the only way is to lock the topic and start it once again and whenever I see that I feel like...neahh, I'm not doing all that again, not going to keep two tabs opened and all the troubles of quoting from locked threads, some that were participating in the discussion leave so the revived thread is not only free of spammers but also void of the old posters.

Besides, we wouldn't waste time just because of a forgotten checkbox:
I forgot to self-mod  

No idea how and if it can get abused so +1.

I was considering this, I have to re-write the whole OP again because some things have changed since when I wrote it.
For those bots, I suggested some time ago to have the deleted posts count (the posts you delete yourself) shown somewhere in the profile. When you reach a member those scores are not needed anymore, of course can help to point out accounts which have deleted all their post history.

I see your point. For these cases I would suggest another measure: Allow the thread starter to change the thread to self-moderated at any time. This way, if he sees that spammer are "taking over" the thread, he can do something. And spammers would always have to fear to get posts deleted. If iasenko's proposal of a "report score" is introduced, then this would be even more effective against signature spammers.

I've just read your "report score" proposal and I like it. I would modify it in a way that only the signatures are not shown if an user falls below the "bad posts" threshold, but the user is never automatically banned. Otherwise there could be too many false positives.

The only problem would be "bump bots", because these do not even need signatures to earn money, but they also don't suffer if they're banned as they can open a Newbie account every time they please. Bump bots could be tackled in a better way with the "health score" mechanism. So maybe both could be introduced

What about the ANN threads which get shitposted? There are some legit posts made by the team of development and marketing there as well, which will obviously not be removed. Then the messages which were shitposts would give an impression that the health index is low and lock up the topic. It would actually mean that the thread was taken over by the spammer newbies than the dev team but to people who dont know about these internal things about the forum would get a wrong idea. 

A bit offtopic: When I see multiple bumps or necroposts on a dead topic, I tend to report only the first bump/necro. I expect the moderator who checks to check the next few messages as well. I want to know if that is ok with the staff or not?

Better to have an indicator of deleted posts per account.
I suggested some time ago a report score, I have modified it a bit more to fit the needs. It's easy to manipulate the a thread, but for profiles such score can be far more accurate.

Unfortunately, that would not work flawlessly either as a serious discussion can be easily destroyed by spammers.
LeGaulois was trying to have a serious topic and a lot of people really discussed it with pretty interesting replies but of course...it went down the hill pretty fast so he had to lock the thread himself after 26 pages of probably tripling his ignore list.

And locking topics would simply mean spammers will flood the forum with more and more useless threads that go nowhere till they get locked and then other pop up...neverending story.

Just looking in the Alt section, we have 4 or topics about the ETH price that have gone over 50 pages, if they get locked others will pop up.
Rather than locking topics, I would actually nuke them, that would make the spammers suffer and will make serious contributors look for moderated only topics.


Yeah, I can see this as another way to attack the competition in the "Who bumps faster his ICO section."

Overall nice idea but not really suited on a forum where money (lots of)  is involved.

I like this proposal a bit. Maybe an "automatic lock" is a bit harsh (because as pooya87 wrote there may be false positives). But instead the system could send an automatic report to the moderators and "grey out" the thread title. The moderators then could decide if they lock the thread or not.

You have a valid point here. But maybe it has a solution: The system could only become active if a thread has reached a certain number of posts. A thread with less than 50 answers is (2 1/2 pages) is unlikely to be a spam megathread, so this could be a good threshold.

So a thread that has been sanitised, and has had a number of posts deleted would rank lower than a thread that hasn't been moderated, and the spam has been left in the thread. Isn't that the wrong way round?

so you are saying that "health" of a topic depends on its replies not the topic itself! well that doesn't sound right to me. for example you created this topic and it already has 1 reply, if it is spammed with 10 spam comments the "health" of it drops to 10%. but should your topic be really considered "unhealthy" and locked because of those spams?

this may work on certain topics or even certain sections. but forum-wide it won't work. for example there are ANN topics in project development that get spammed. putting a low percentage "health" on their topic is also a bit unfair in my opinion since the project may be a good one but it is spammed and it is not in control of the starter.

It is an idea, but how would you implement that in the bounty and ann section, which makes up majority of the spam mega threads.
Most of the comments are reports which are useful for those in the campaign, but not of any use to anyone else.

Otherwise,it could work. Or an upvote or downvote to the post which can get deleted it it gets enough. And rank could determine the weight of the users vote.

When preceding comments get deleted from an original post,doesnt it immediately change the number of posts the topic has already, how are we going to keep track with the number of deleted posts and the original ones

Also there is never a time posts come to a culminating end, comments keeps coming in even after many months or so, there are threads on this front page that are over 6--7 months old
How then can you end calculations when comments are still coming in that very thread/topic

In the fake conversion topic I have just mentioned something and I would like to ask for your thoughts in connection with this.
It would be a kind of "heath index" for each topic.
The index would be a %, we should deduct the number of the reported/deleted posts in the topic from the original post count of the topic and it should be divided by the original post count of the topic.
So if a topic has e.g. 100 posts and 2 posts are deleted because of reports, the health index of the forum is  (100-2)/100 which is 98%.
But if we found a bumped topic in the ANN section and it contains 1000 posts, and we report 520 as spam/low quality/copypaste/etc... the health index of the topic would be (1000-520)/1000 which is 48%.
Every topic which has a health index below 50% could get automatically locked to stop the spam megathreads...
In this case, we could deal with bump bots, because now we cannot handle this situation easily... by the time your report will make the bump post delete, the topic gets another bump post, so it's not effective...
Another thing is, if we could arrange the topics by the health index, we could found topics with quality content more easily...