Topic: Warning against consecutive posts (SMF patch) (Read 499 times)

or edit the op to leave a link to the next reserved spot

Litte bump here.

I would love to see this implemented. I propose the following small additional features:

• Showing the warning is nice, but so far rule #32 ignorants can simply bypass it. I propose to apply some temporary further posting delay if such users deliberately choose to ignore rule #32 and the warning. This might be a minor acceptable annoyance for OPs who want or need to post a consecutive "reserved" post in their own new threads (maybe an exception rule for the 2^nd post in a new thread can overrule this).
  
• I like the merge option that LoyceV mentioned, but maybe not applied automatically: how about a "Merge" button available for the poster to click it if a rule #32 violation has been detected?

Going through the OP, I was impressed with the suggestion of some default message to warn users on posting habits like repeated posting within a thread but, it appears to take a turn I didn’t hope it would at PowerGlove. Your patches have been really helpful on the forum and even this proposal would prove really effective should it take a different direction.

We already have on the forum a default message that alerts you of a post to have been made while writing your text,
Now, this would be a second and could prolong having to make posts as should these events play out, users would just have too much red inked notes to read.

I am no programmer and I know the work you do isn’t one that comes with ease but, if it were possible that, you could put in place a script that would take cognizance of the last username and apply it in terms of a user having to click the post button, by some means run through the authorship of the command and match that with the previous poster for a match before prompting such warnings, it would be really good. I hope you understand what am trying to explain though.

Although I can't guarantee that they aren't true newbie, some of them probably aren't. They try to open topics as a way to motivate themselves to get a lot of attention from forum users, some of them even really know that opening new topics is one way to get merit. Fishing for merit by opening a topic is a newbie's habit, but I don't generalize that all newbie are the same. So there is a motive why many newbies ignore some welcome topics or pinned topics.

Then we'll know which threads to ignore and report.

Newbies now can and should get the benefit of the doubt that they don't know how to navigate to pinned threads and everything is very novel to them, plus they don't have any motivation to commit to this weird forum. But when there is a guarantee that they were giving a manual to cover the basics such noob threads will be shunned and should eventually stop being so common.

They should also get no replies anymore and crash down the topic list very quickly.

The welcome message is helpful and can help some newbies but now all of them.

Most of newbies will not read anything and continue to create topics to ask because you can see in the Beginners & Help board, there are 4 pinned threads. One of them is Newbies - Read before posting with different content and message than the Welcome message, but it contains many links to topics about forum basics.

If now, newbies does not read that thread, most of them will not read the Welcome message when it is deployed. I am pretty sure about it.

Off topic too, this has been one of my biggest ticks of the last 2-3 years. A welcome message will save a lot of repeated topics from newbies who join asking about basic guidelines, it should also help retain more members who register. The forum is a lot different from what most people are used to, getting into it without some pointers can discourage a lot of members.

I think the delay may be less about perfection and more about reluctance to make changes on the current system.

Bumping this one because I think it's worth adding. (I wouldn't have spent time working on it, otherwise.)

I mean, I know it won't stop people from multi-posting, but, I think it'll likely attenuate it.

I was reading theymos' proposed welcome message [1], and this part jumped out at me:


The fact that multi-posting is one of the three rule violations theymos thought important enough to include in a welcome message suggests to me that this patch would add value (I'm not going to re-iterate my own rationale, that's already in the OP).

[1] Off-topic, but, I'm not sure why that welcome message was never implemented: typos aside (a missing period, "sucessful" -> "successful"), I think theymos nailed it. It's a great welcome message, FFS. I think sometimes the community shoots itself in the foot by nitpicking things to death. I mean, is that the absolutely most perfect welcome message? Probably not, but, I don't think I could do any better, and weighed against the ~6 years of new members that could have been reading that upon joining, instead of nothing at all, I mean, just, holy shit... talk about a stupid trade-off.

Enhh... Moderators are humans just like everyone else. In that case, they may choose to ignore a report based on what, where and for what purpose the reported post serves.

---

Gloves, as always has been very relentless on creating 'em patches; There's a particular sense of revival that's derived from the fact that we've got innovative heads in here still.

I wanna say this; Are the moderators going to adopt stricter measures for junk posts that violates the rule 32 now? Atleast there's been something more visible to remind anyone if they ever forget.

as of yet not in effect > I will merge this. I am on a pc.

Another amazing patch by PowerGlove, it's a good one by the way. I always thought that there should be something that may warn during consecutive posts and I guess now we have a good solution. I'm not sure that it's implemented or it isn't implemented yet but it's a quite useful patch.

This thing will work for WO thread as well or it's going to be disable on that thread? Because there are no such rules of having consecutive posting on that thread, and members of that thread don't mind to have consecutive posts either. However, I believe if something like this should be disabled on some threads.

All you'll have to do is scroll down a bit more.

If there is an option to disable this on settings like if there is a new post before you hit a post button is much better, of course this will be enabled by default. Because it will be a bit annoying for those topic OP who usually make reserve posts after creating the thread.

Well said. Most ban appeals are handled case by case. When I was new, I remember two members unbanned within the same space. But I haven't seen something like that again. I would like you to check out this thread, you will see that forum is become very lenient in recent time.

I do not mind this. 99% of ban appeals do not get accepted anyway and same percentage of bans are for plagiarism, the ban punishment on spam is loosely enforced and malicious link bans are not common.
When you narrow it down to plagiarism and sharing malwares, any user doing this knows exactly what they are doing and do not need pointers nor do they need to appeal.

We just just have the one unique situation every once in a long while when a user gets wrongly banned and needs clarification to direct their appeal. This can be handled on a case by case basis.

This will help newbies alot. I was confused when some of my posts were deleted in my newbie days. I wouldn't know if it was an off topic, or spam or was just reported and deleted for no reason (which was what I believed then).
I instead have another striking concern;

• You have been banned because of plagerism.
• You have been banned because of spamming
• You have been banned for sharing malicious links

Etc.
This could guide those writing ban appeals on how to present their cases.

Apart from the above you described, the forum does not operate in such a way to deny anyone freedom. Even bumping warnings doesn't restrict you from posting, rather it will encourage you to start a new topic unless it's very necessary to bump.

I think it will be a good patch.

It's true, as some users mention, there are cases where the following posts make sense or are useful for the topic. But, normally this only applies to the OP. I know that configuring a way for this alert not to appear to the OP will be more complicated, and in the end it has little practical effect. So I think this is fine.

Congratulations on yet another excellent job. 




This would involve a lot of work changing the SMF. And in some cases this wouldn't make sense, because double posting is useful (as some members mentioned).

So the alert solution is the most appropriate.

PowerGlove strikes yet again with another SMF patch 
This sounds like a great idea and it should reduce creation of consecutive posts especially for newbies and recently registered accounts, maybe it can even reduce spam.
I just hope members won't just ignore this warning, so I would even totally disable making consecutive posts for brand new accounts.

I understand that this SMF patch is for a user, a notification for the user and his consecutive posts in a same thread. Like if you make a post, then want to make another post but your previous post is already a latest post in this thread, you will get this notification from PowerGlove's SMF patch.

You will decide to post it or return to your previous post, and edit it with a content you are composing for a new post, which now will not be publish.

For moderators, reporters can use a user script to simplify their report titles to moderators.

[HACK] One-click mod report, not for the faint of heart

Good work as always PowerGlove. But can mods leave clearer messages so the user is not confused when they get a notification? I know it may be too much work to write down a notification message for each action they take, but they can choose an option from the most commonly used actions which will be added to the system. Such as;
• A reply of yours was deleted cause it's spam
• A reply if yours was deleted cause it is off topic
• Consecutive posts merged (see rule 32)

Mods will be in a better position to know what they commonly handle and which options to add to make their job easier and the message clearer.

This will affect lots of other members. Those who make announcement threads for example usually "reserve" the first reply after starting their threads which will count as posting in a row. Campaign managers also after announcing to have made the payment for a week in their thread will commonly have no reply there till the next week, which will also count as consecutive posting too.
There are other scenarios where it's necessary, so disabling it entirely will be counter productive.

Any change that can lead in a positive direction is welcome, although it is always a question of how much effect a warning can have for those who obviously do not read the rules or any other warnings that the forum shows them. Maybe that patch could also have some real preventive measure in the sense that it would disable "Posting multiple posts in a row" in a way that it would simply refuse to publish such posts?

There may be some instances in which it is appropriate to have two consecutive posts.

This is another great addition PowerGlove, I could remember days ago I made a mistake of posting same thing on a single thread after double clicking it. Although it was because I was using my mobile phone, so the first post actually got posted but i didn’t know due to the network connection and I clicked on post again, luckily I could be able to delete the post immediately from that board. A warning like this could have easily prevented that.


Yes the user can definitely still proceed to post, it’s a warning not restriction just like the usual warning we get when a new post is added to a thread while typing yours.

How about automatically merging them? Like this:

The post is untouched, but the black parts aren't shown anymore. Now that I type it, I realize this is probably much more work to do. And even more work if the second post is on a new page.

This should also work fine with "Reserved" posts, and since posts aren't really merged, the post size limit shouldn't be a problem either. If the new post doesn't count as a bump, rule #32 becomes obsolete

After the warning, the user can still proceed to post? Let us say the user first clicked on 'post' and this warning appears, but clicked on post again and he successfully posted it. If this is how it is, that is good.

Moderators are acting on it. I mean the ones that I have reported before are often merged. But there are sometimes that I will not report it, example is if the person posted on the thread a day or some days or weeks before posting on the thread. If the information is useful, I will not report it.

Moderators may not act on it if people are not reporting it because it is hard to find unlike new topics. Even moderators act on new topics fast when reported.

Good idea but by the way you could make a patch for the moderators to explain why they don't act on reports of rule 32 violations.

Another banger by the mysterious Max Headroom wizard.


You're probably right about that, and I think its equal parts annoying for the the mod and the poster who is having their posts merged. Sometimes its pretty clear when a thread-starter is just posting to keep their thread at the top of a section; sometimes its just an rules education issue, and I usually warn the poster that their posts will be deleted if they keep doing consecutive posts. Some listen and some don't.

I like how its just a warning and optional rather than explicitly prohibiting the poster from making a consecutive post. Seems like there is a precedent for such a thing to be instated as there is a similar warning that accompanies would-be necro-posts/bumps.

I like the idea!
Being a warning it will still allow a new topic to be followed with multiple sequential posts (usually 2 or 3) following the opening post. This is often done when starting say a new hardware review. For example, the reserved post(s) usually end up holding pictures and testing details.

Testing to see.

No sign of warning.

It should be nice once it is done.

at

Mods feel free to merge this.

I am on a mobile.

Has this been done?

I've been thinking for a while now that rule #32 violations (unnecessary consecutive posts) are handled pretty poorly... As I understand it, when posts like that are reported and moderators merge them together, the author gets notified that one (or more) of their posts were deleted, but they're not given a specific reason why, so they're unlikely to learn anything from the interaction. I remember when I had an early post of mine deleted by a moderator, it was a pretty confusing/deflating experience, and I was kind of left guessing at what was wrong with my post... I think that especially when it's for something that amounts to a very minor posting misbehavior, being left to figure out on your own what you did wrong is even worse. In fact, in this case, I think overzealous reporting might actually do more harm than good (that is, it's probably counterproductive in terms of the forum's health: for minor violations, the benefit of having a superficially cleaner forum is probably more than matched by the damage caused in making this place feel inhospitable).

Long-term, I'll make a patch to let moderators leave an optional reason for post deletion, which will hopefully make the general being-moderated experience less confusing/deflating (especially for newbies), but, for now, all I really have in mind are rule #32 violations (because I've been reporting quite a few of those lately, and I'm starting to feel like a douchecanoe for doing that, especially when you consider what I said in the previous paragraph). I think adding a warning against consecutive posts is a good thing to do (both to hopefully curb multi-posting, and to maybe reduce moderation busywork, along with providing users with at least some context for when they get notified that their posts are getting deleted/merged: after all, if they've been seeing and ignoring warnings given to them before they post, then they'll probably be able to correctly guess at what they've been doing wrong).

So, this patch adds the following warning when you're about to add another post to a topic that you're already the latest, recent (<24 hours) poster in:



(There's even a handy dandy link that takes you directly to the appropriate "Edit message" page.)

Here are the diffs for @theymos: