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@secularmerlin
Hi there, I've moved the topic to Philosophy.
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@bsh1
I think this is a great idea, with one suggestion. Private forums still shouldn't permit some actions (like doxxing). But I can imagine that virtually all of the COC could be suspended in those threads. What things shouldn't be allowed in those threads, and how will that be enforced?
I have no idea yet, that's a tough question.
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@ResurgetExFavilla
This is a really good idea. I think it also might be a good idea to let all people see the thread title and maybe a short description by the moderator, but not the content, so that they know that a discussion exists and can ask to join it if they're interested. It would give people a chance to escape from the stifling moderation atmosphere that's currently settled over the site, and allow each user to self-sort into their own level of comfort. It will also let normal members get some moderation experience, and allow some criticism of moderation. For example, I recently wanted to discuss a controversial deleted thread, and linked an archived page of that thread so that another member could see what was actually deleted, and that post was itself deleted. It's kind of Orwellian that we can't even talk about content that was deleted without our posts being censored, and I can definitely see a private thread being devoted to documenting oversteps and trying to hold moderation accountable.
It sounds like a good idea!
Just to be clear, it may be my fault, not the mods', since we have no means of deleting only the first post from the topics and therefore they might have had to delete the whole topic to achieve the goal. But yeah, I see your point and the private topics could solve some problems for sure.
Just to be clear, it may be my fault, not the mods', since we have no means of deleting only the first post from the topics and therefore they might have had to delete the whole topic to achieve the goal. But yeah, I see your point and the private topics could solve some problems for sure.
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@Buddamoose
I noticed that issue right after posting. Having an appeals system adjudicated by a separate set of lead moderators would counter that issue for the most part fmpov.
Appeals system lol Just as I mentioned in the previous post, we can't even remove first posts from the topics yet, so the appeal system would have to wait a while ... haha
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@Tyrone
I don't ignore you, I just can't handle all of the comments here at the same time without loosing context.Fine. I apologize for misjudging your motives.Okay, let's imagine I just say fuck it and make you or drafterman a mod, can you imagine what shit storm RM would start? He would make it his life mission to remove you and drafterman from the mods position. And nothing would change, people will always complain.Drafterman is a reasonable choice as a mod. He's clearly demonstrated the seriousness, attentiveness, and willingness needed to do the job.I already conceded that no mod can please everyone. But some mods clearly please more people than others. I think RM throwing a shit storm is better than more than half the site throwing a shit storm (as is currently the case).But if to be serious, I do think that the current mods do rather a good work, they are not perfect but nobody is or could ever be anyway.You don't think the tendency to overreach is a problem?
It's okay, I should have replied quicker, that's my fault.
Well, we do have some decent people that could do moderation as well and as I pointed out above, once we have a good tech foundation for that, we'll try to ask more people for help. It's not about me not liking drafterman or any other person, I just don't see a reason to change the mods at the moment.
I don't think it's overreaching. For example, let's take that video that you uploaded recently, truth be told, it made laugh for quite some time but nevertheless, it can easily be extremely offending to certain group of people, which is obvious I hope. So even though some people did enjoy the video, it doesn't change the fact that it was rude in its nature and therefore I think bsh1 (or Virt) made a good decision to remove it***.
Well, we do have some decent people that could do moderation as well and as I pointed out above, once we have a good tech foundation for that, we'll try to ask more people for help. It's not about me not liking drafterman or any other person, I just don't see a reason to change the mods at the moment.
I don't think it's overreaching. For example, let's take that video that you uploaded recently, truth be told, it made laugh for quite some time but nevertheless, it can easily be extremely offending to certain group of people, which is obvious I hope. So even though some people did enjoy the video, it doesn't change the fact that it was rude in its nature and therefore I think bsh1 (or Virt) made a good decision to remove it***.
*** There is no way to remove only the first post from the topic at the moment, so that's probably why the whole topic was deleted. So this one is also on me.
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@drafterman
I don't understand why the solution to the mods being unable to keep up with the work isn't too get more mods.
The problem is not that they can't keep up with the work, but the fact that they may have to handle a lot of unneeded work, it's just inefficient.
We have 2 mods for like 50 people here and they are already flooded with reports, that's just ridiculous.
We could and we should get more mods at some point, but we need to build and improve the moderation system first. We'd need to implement layers of mods responsibilities, create different contexts and scopes, like those subreddits things, build a proper admin panel, which now loos like it's 1995 outside the window. But it's going to take time. If we simply add more mods now, they will create lots of confusion, since they'd have different moderation styles, different interpretation of the rules and lots of unnecessary communication to coordinate their efforts.
We have 2 mods for like 50 people here and they are already flooded with reports, that's just ridiculous.
We could and we should get more mods at some point, but we need to build and improve the moderation system first. We'd need to implement layers of mods responsibilities, create different contexts and scopes, like those subreddits things, build a proper admin panel, which now loos like it's 1995 outside the window. But it's going to take time. If we simply add more mods now, they will create lots of confusion, since they'd have different moderation styles, different interpretation of the rules and lots of unnecessary communication to coordinate their efforts.
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@RationalMadman
@Tyrone
If this is true, then you should take my suggestion seriously. I don't expect you to make me a mod after the ruckus I've caused on this site. But you should definitely make Drafterman a mod (if not outright replace Bsh1 with him).Regardless of my history, though, there's no excuse for blatantly ignoring me like you're doing right now. Don't be an asshole.
I don't ignore you, I just can't handle all of the comments here at the same time without loosing context.
Okay, let's imagine I just say fuck it and make you or drafterman a mod, can you imagine what shit storm RM would start? He would make it his life mission to remove you and drafterman from the mods position. And nothing would change, people will always complain.
But if to be serious, I do think that the current mods do rather a good work, they are not perfect but nobody is or could ever be anyway.
Okay, let's imagine I just say fuck it and make you or drafterman a mod, can you imagine what shit storm RM would start? He would make it his life mission to remove you and drafterman from the mods position. And nothing would change, people will always complain.
But if to be serious, I do think that the current mods do rather a good work, they are not perfect but nobody is or could ever be anyway.
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@drafterman
I have never used reddit so can't be sure but it sounds like they have mod teams per subreddit, whatever that is, which they may have what, thousands? So they have thousands of free volunteer mod teams, we have 2 GLOBAL mods, they moderate everything.I think you're confused as to what I'm talking about. Reddit moderators are simply people like the moderation team here: unpaid volunteers who have agreed to moderate a subreddit. Yes, they do have access to some tools to help with moderation such as an auto mod, but that has nothing to do with anonymity. They have to deal with the same issue of potentially frivolous reports as any other site does, yet they seem to deal with it just fine.
Now, it raises the question why we wouldn't do something like this as well, as in, change the moderation scopes and create a bunch of mod teams managing only some specific things, and well, we might, it may be a good way to go, I don't know but possibly, who knows, but again, implementing something like that would take me a long time, I am no reddit, I can't delegate shit to 50 other devs, that's just me and a friend of mine helping me sometimes and this website is only 3 months old anyway, and reddit is probably a decade old, if not more.
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@drafterman
That is completely unprecedented. I'm not aware of any website in the world that implements such an absurd policy.If there are issues with workload, you get more workers.But let's set that aside. Let me know if I have this right:1. You see absolutely no problem with stripping users of reporting anonymity.2. You are fine with mods using that information to contact users about behavior that doesn't violate any of the rules of the site.3. You have no intention of preserving user anonymity when it comes to reporting.
Well, first of all, there is a difference between good workload and bad workload. One thing is to moderate actually problematic objects and the other is wasting hours just handling the things that were reported simply outta anger at the mods.
Answering your questions:
1) Well, as I pointed out before, we need to discuss it, I try not to go against the users if there is a way to avoid that. But I haven't given it much thought and at the moment, I am not sure how to handle the problem with abusing the reports, if somebody provides some good ideas how to keep the anonymity and prevent the mods from wasting their life on handling empty reports, then we'll go that way.
2) People abuse the reports creating unneeded work for the mods, that's just disrespect and the fact that they actually contacted the person and asked him or her to stop, or whatever it was, I have no idea, that's just showing how diligent they are, I wouldn't bother with this. Also it's important to understand that it's probably impossible to write some CoC or anything of the kind that people wouldn't be able to find loopholes in. And again, we don't have a dedicated department for that.
3) I have no idea what we're going to do, I realized it was a problem only like 30 mins ago, we need to discuss it and decide what to do.
3) I have no idea what we're going to do, I realized it was a problem only like 30 mins ago, we need to discuss it and decide what to do.
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@drafterman
Secondly, It's the ratio. For example, one of the most active subreddits, r/AskReddit has 20.5 MILLION subscribers but only 23 mods. I can't think of any single subreddit that has "hundreds of moderators" let alone any significant number that are paid.
My guess is that they have bunch of devs working on complicated (possible automatic) moderation systems that substantially reduce the amount of work for the mods, or something along the lines, it's a big company after all.
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@drafterman
How does making them not anonymous fix that?
As one way, we can simply forbid abusers to report things, simple as that.
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@drafterman
What does that have to do with reporting anonymity?
As I mentioned before, anonymous reports can be easily abused without any means to prevent that and could simply flood the admin panel and paralyze the whole moderation process, coz it would be hard to find normal reports among thousands of fake ones. And we have no men power to handle that.
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Also I want to point out that changing mods won't do anything AT ALL, it's impossible to have the mods that everyone likes, even if we find Jesus righteous himself and make him moderate, people will hate him anyway. And in my opinion, the mods do quite a good work here, not many of you would be willing to sacrifice your free time to work for free for the good of the community here and do it with the same diligence that we see from @bsh1 and @Virtuoso.
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@drafterman
Well, you see, the difference between this website and Reddit is in, I'd guess, something around tens of millions of dollars of revenues.
This website makes no income whatsoever, not any single user here has paid a penny, so we can't hire lots of developers to implement advanced auto moderation systems and we can't hire people to do the manual moderation either.
This website makes no income whatsoever, not any single user here has paid a penny, so we can't hire lots of developers to implement advanced auto moderation systems and we can't hire people to do the manual moderation either.
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@drafterman
I apologize for the confusion, I believe this one is one me.
So the logic is that the reports have never been anonymous BUT we didn't have a page in the admin panel where the mods could see the reports list, they could see only the number of reports and that's it. That's why the mods most probably thought that the reports had been anonymous. I should have done better to keep them informed in that regard.
Anyway, it changed a couple of days ago when I released some changes to the admin panel and introduced that list of reports, where it's possible to see who reported what. I had no idea that people thought that the reports had been anonymous, so please accept my apologies.
Anyway, it changed a couple of days ago when I released some changes to the admin panel and introduced that list of reports, where it's possible to see who reported what. I had no idea that people thought that the reports had been anonymous, so please accept my apologies.
Now, I am not sure if the reports should be anonymous, I guess we'll need to discuss that and come to some decision, but one thing I'd like to note is that it's unavoidable that some users will abuse the reporting and it creates LOTS of work for the mods which don't get paid anything for that, they dedicate their free time to help keep the community healthy and if they don't see who abuses the reporting, there is no way to prevent that person from doing that endlessly. To report 10 forum posts, it takes like 5 seconds, for the mods to manage that, it may take up to 5-10 mins and we may have hundreds, or even thousands of those, if the users get really angry and report everything they see.
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@1harderthanyouthink
What do you by "hasn't collapsed in userbase" ?
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@ethang5
Yeah, you are absolutely right, it has increased but only slightly, just as you mentioned. And thank you!
Regarding the search optimization, I think at this point we can just wait, we have submitted around 1000+ links for the website but at this point only 300 have been indexed, so it's taking a while.
Regarding the search optimization, I think at this point we can just wait, we have submitted around 1000+ links for the website but at this point only 300 have been indexed, so it's taking a while.
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@Castin
I am not sure how to go about it, I'd need to think about it, as I mentioned that's just a random idea. I am open to suggestions though :)
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@ethang5
Well, to be honest, I haven't given it a lot of thought since it was just a random idea but I'd imagine those being self moderated, so if somebody misbehaves, it's the creator's responsibility to kick him out.
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@RationalMadman
It's okay, it's probably my fault anyway and I apologize, the language barrier is still a problem sometimes.
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@Earth
@Mopac
Awesome, those sound like good reasons.
Also considering the popularity of the religion forum, we may consider to change the name of the website to DebateGod.com haha
Also considering the popularity of the religion forum, we may consider to change the name of the website to DebateGod.com haha
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@RationalMadman
You won't get any rating if ALL of the rounds from BOTH sides have been forfeited. If there is at least one published argument from any participant, that doesn't apply.
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@Castin
Yeah, my apologies, I should have mentioned it.
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@Castin
The private topics would be hidden from those not invited, you wouldn't even know that they exist. Regarding the group private chats, I will definitely implement them :)
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I've seen people complaining that we barely have any people here and that's true, but I wanted to point out some things nevertheless.
So first of all, the site has been in production for only 3 months and is still barely indexed by Google, hell if I know why, but it is what it is. Maybe because we don't have a mobile version but I am not sure. But despite that, I still have a few ideas how we could attract new blood here, but it needs to be understood that before it happens, we need to have all the required tools to prevent bad shit from happening and that's gonna take some time to implement and test them. There is simply no way to attract only smart and decent people; idiots, spammers, bots will follow anyway, so we need to be sure that we can contain them.
So the bottom line is that at this point, it's better to have 100 decent and smart people than 300 with 2/3 of those being trouble makers.
Once we have, among other things, some filtering mechanisms, like sandboxes for the new users or stuff like that, we'll let them flood in and cherry pick the good ones.
So first of all, the site has been in production for only 3 months and is still barely indexed by Google, hell if I know why, but it is what it is. Maybe because we don't have a mobile version but I am not sure. But despite that, I still have a few ideas how we could attract new blood here, but it needs to be understood that before it happens, we need to have all the required tools to prevent bad shit from happening and that's gonna take some time to implement and test them. There is simply no way to attract only smart and decent people; idiots, spammers, bots will follow anyway, so we need to be sure that we can contain them.
So the bottom line is that at this point, it's better to have 100 decent and smart people than 300 with 2/3 of those being trouble makers.
Once we have, among other things, some filtering mechanisms, like sandboxes for the new users or stuff like that, we'll let them flood in and cherry pick the good ones.
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@Ramshutu
Yeah, it's a problem that we discussed literally only yesterday and we'll try to come up with something to improve the situation.
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I am wondering if it would a handy thing to have private forum topics? By private, I mean that only users, invited by the creator of the topic, would have access to it and I guess they wouldn't be moderated either, since neither the mods nor I would have an access to them, that is, if we're not invited.
What do you think?
What do you think?
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@Username
That's easy enough, sure. But the list of improvements is huge so it may take some time till I get to it.
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@1harderthanyouthink
Yeah I know, RM has already mentioned that the list of countries is messed up, I will fix it soon. I didn't write it myself, just found it online and it turned out to be bad.
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@RationalMadman
I don't ban people anymore but I'll make this button a priority for the development nevertheless.
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@Tejretics
Hi, I am afraid that not yet, I am working on the admin panel for the mods because it's a piece of garbage at the moment and rather hard to moderate properly using it.
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I hope you don't mind me correcting the topic name, it just hurt my eyes haha
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@mourningeyes
Oh it's okay, don't worry about it. And welcome, by the way :)
I will move it to religion then, because I am afraid that this category is for discussing the website itself.
I will move it to religion then, because I am afraid that this category is for discussing the website itself.
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@mourningeyes
Looks like you've put it into a wrong forum category. Do you mind if I move to religion?
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@ResurgetExFavilla
That's a good idea, we'll need to discuss it and it shouldn't be too hard to implement.
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@bsh1
Yeah, we'll have it at some point
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@sui_generis
Yeah, that'd be handy to have, but I am not sure when I could get to implementing that, so maybe I'll just come up with some Google Sheet to make it easier.
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@RationalMadman
Oh mate, you never stop entertaining me, I sincerely enjoy this.
First of all, I am sponsored by Illuminate so have no doubts there, I could lie to you that it was just the first icon I found for the religion theme but I won't do that.
A lot of Russians are indeed bitter and angry people and living in such a society obviously affected me as well but I do my best to be better than that, especially with people here, which I find to be really nice.
I did have the website before the situation with DDO but it was made for the Russian auditory and therefore was in Russian. When that shit storm happened to DDO, I just decided to switch the name and the language to English and give it another try.
The FB group was closed because I had created it before the first release.
Twitter probably blocked me because they found out about my Illuminati connections, they must have seen the religion icon as well. Now that I am disclosed, you'll know what happened to me if I disappear. Thanks RM, now they'll have to get rid of me.
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@bsh1
That's my favorite kind of a feature request: a feature, that's already implemented haha
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@bsh1
Sorry guys, I've had enough of this. Maybe @bsh1 will decide to unban her for some reason or do something else but until he gets back online, our lovely guest here will have to enjoy the read-only mode.
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@RationalMadman
Don't tell anyone, people would get suspicious
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@RationalMadman
Hmm okay then, I will take a look at it, maybe there is a way to use it to attract more people here somehow. Thanks!
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@RationalMadman
I mean, it's online now but I believe it will be closed, at some point -> https://www.quora.com/Is-Google-planning-to-shut-down-Google+
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@TheHammer
Nah, I don't really cate about Twitter, they've been testing my patience for quite some time, not only with this project but with some other things as well.
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@RationalMadman
I believe Google decided to close this social network and it's kind of messy anyway.
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