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It was interesting to see this many people weigh in. Perhaps the greatest number of individuals to weigh in on a topic. I think how it panned is unfortunate and I believe it would have went differently if the user base was consulted when the status quo was anonymity and the question being asked is if it should be removed. (Kind of takes away from the democratic process to wait until after a change has been made to call a vote for it, but I digress).
The vote is what it is and I think the issue is settled for the mean time. I wish y'all the best of luck on the site.
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@DebateArt.com
Far enough. I was just considering that the "Debate Voting" thread is what users are trying to do anyway: notify people that a debate is in the voting period and they are soliciting anyone for votes. A notification feature would do that far more efficiently. The desire to have specific people voting on a debate is already an option.
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@DebateArt.com
Suggestion: Once this feature is implemented, have a site-wide notification sent out to users (with option to opt int via Notification settings) whenever a debate enters the voting phase.Believe me or not, but I am gonna work today on a similar thing, a site wide notifications, I imagine it could quite useful to announce important things. Regarding the topic scope, that'd require some thinking but I'll see what I can do.
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@Castin
Given that the loss of anonymity didn't prevent it, how do you think it will prevent it in the future?
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@Paul
But do you think the mods should have access to that information?
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The government cannot revoke someone's credentials without due process. So, no, Trump cannot just snap his fingers and Thanos someone's credentials on a whim.
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I agree that it is completely bad form to argue with anyone's vote or to influence a person to vote some way. If you could not make your points clear and convincing in the debate, then you get nothing, you lose.
While I think it should be socially unacceptable and frowned upon, I do not think that it, in itself, should be a CoC violation except when it verges into existing harassment prohibitions.
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Suggestion: Make it so people that you have blocked cannot challenge you to debates.
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@bsh1
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@bsh1
That's nonya bidness and has nothing to do with moderation.If two people constantly report each other, it indicates they may not get along, for instance.
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@bsh1
Does report spam/abuse exist despite the lack of anonymity in reporting?
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Suggestion: A way for mods/site owner to send an automatic notification for everyone linking to a specific thread (without having to manually mention every single member). Useful for threads where site-wide awareness is important.
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@Castin
You said you didn't feel special because I did a very callous and inconsiderate mass notification.
How about being a tie breaker? Special enough? ;)
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@Logical-Master
@Logical-Master:
If a mod has a vendetta against X user, that user can bring it to the attention of the community as we've seen with the issues that have raised in the past several weeks and get it resolved out in the open.As long as the community has the power to keep mods in check, I'm fine with it.
Well, I do think the mods have used this information inappropriately, though I wouldn't call it a vendetta. I don't see that anything has been done about it, nor do I see that we have any power to keep them in check.
For - 15
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@3RU7AL
Well, in this case it literally is a more complicated option. We're talking about a not insignificant coding change on the site versus just undoing something that was done. Even if we got approval for your idea, it'd have to go at the end of a long list of site change proposals.
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@3RU7AL
I think we should tackle a single issue at a time.
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@Outplayz
In addition to the points I made in the OP, I think there is a general principle that they should have as minimal power as needed and they simply don't need access to that information.
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@breakingamber
We have moved the game over to Discord and we are about halfway through. If we have some drop-outs, I'll let you know. I'll also let you know when the next campaign starts.
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@Polytheist-Witch
Yes, I agree to this point. I disagree that us being here is a bad thing, but I digress.
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@Polytheist-Witch
Correct, but not in the way you intend.
The revocation of anonymity was given to the mods incidentally, not in response to any specific event happening on the site. So we wouldn't be here, not because things would still be anonymous, but because we wouldn't know about it. We only know about it because the mods decided to act upon that knowledge.
But is that a good thing? Is it good for bad rules and bad configurations to persist simply because they are unnoticed by the site?
Are you ok with the mods having knowledge of who makes what reports?
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@PGA2.0
That's an entirely separate issue. I don't think that the identity of a reporter will ever be given to the person against whom the report was made. The mods would always be a third party in that relationship.
Also, reports aren't "accusations" other than to flag something on the site for the mods to review against the CoC. Your "defense" is resides in whether or not the comment or vote reported is against the rules are not. If you follow the rules of the site, then no amount of reporting should ever harm you (nor should you even be aware of it).
With respect to the mods knowing who makes reports, where do you stand?
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@Buddamoose
Preaching to the choir. I'll admit I'm surprised at the number of people who are so cavalier about it and it boggles my mind given the available information. But I stand by the results. I think that most people are ambivalent or don't care because they don't imagine it could hurt them.
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@Buddamoose
One person suggested that multiaccounting could be used to get around the limit, but multiaccounting is already a violation.
Others haven't really explained why report spam is still an issue given the current limits.
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@Castin
You can check out my post above, where I explain it.
As an addition to that, consider that the vote reporting shouldn't have had an adverse affect on the public community. But it did, because a large number of votes were deleted as a response. But let me ask you this:
If the votes were legitimately bad votes, should their removal bother the community?
If the votes weren't legitimately bad votes, their removal should bother the community, but shouldn't the ire be directed at the standard that judged them inappropriate?
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@Ramshutu
your specific abuse of the system, in the way you did it, that time - was fixed because you stopped being an a*****e and reporting every vote - not because they enacted limitedyou could STILL report within the voting limits, or start up a proxy account’- and have the same effect. So no: the one major instance of disruption - from you - where an internet d*** decided to abuse reporting facilities is still more than possible, and is not solvable without anonymity being removed.
But it was solved. The issue was never about the amount of reports nor was the loss of anonymity even given to the mods to fix it.
Firstly, let's acknowledge that the amount of reports wasn't a technical issue for the site. It was 70 reports in 4 days. 70 extra packets of information the site had to handle. The issue was in the extra workload of the mods in responding to those reports. Specifically:
"Each report, even on full forfeit debates, takes about 5 minutes to process, and on borderline cases, a report can take up to 10 minutes to process. That's more than 4 hours worth of reports."
But, why does it take 5-10 minutes to respond to a report? The answer is: because the mods decided that it did! The issue at hand (at least the issue I had) was the insane and stupid voting requirements (something I believe you agree with). It was an issue that wasn't being addressed simply because not enough people were speaking up about it in a way that the mods were willing to listen.
So I made it an issue they couldn't ignore. What I exploited wasn't anonymity, it was the mods personal and voluntary decision that every single vote report needed a wordy, bespoke message. Consider that if I had tried this with comments there wouldn't have been an issue because the mods have a double standard here.
By forcing the mods to apply their ridiculous standard to every single vote they were forced to acknowledge that the standard was ridiculous. This has nothing to do with anonymity. Anonymity didn't cause this issue and the loss of anonymity didn't fix it. What fixed it was changing the standard of voting: Mods now don't have to respond to every vote and what vote constitutes deletion (and therefore a more lengthy report) has been changed in favor of keeping the vote. All of these are sensible and well received changes, brought about by the mods seeing how ridiculous the previous standard was.
As an aside, Mike never granted the mods this level of visibility deliberately, it was merely a side effect of the new moderation panel he created.
Im sorry that you appear to have reported every vote, disrupted this website, caused the mods to remove anonymity to find out who you are - and then make you stop - that’s EXACTLY what’s supposed to happen, and how this is supposed to work.You used the system abusively, and are now asking for a policy that would prevent you from being caught or dealt with again.
You seem to be under the impression that once the mods saw it was me, they "dealt" with me and it stopped. This isn't correct. They approached me about it, yes. I asked if this was a violation of the CoC. Do you know what happened?
NOTHING.
Nothing because it wasn't a violation of any rules. Nothing because they had no actual cause or basis on which to do anything with me. Did they ban me? No. Did they remove my ability to make reports? No. Did they try and convince me to stop? No. Did they do anything after I continued reporting votes after anonymity was lost? No.
The inadvertent loss of anonymity did nothing to solve this problem. The problem stopped because I decided to stop. And I decided to stop because I saw the changes being made. Generally people stop protesting when the thing they're protesting against goes away. Even then, even if I still wanted to be a dick, it's no longer a viable avenue because it wouldn't create the same workload for the mods that it previously did.
Again, none of this having to do with the loss of anonymity.
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@Ramshutu
I feel as if these points have already been addressed thoroughly.
There are abusive ways of using your reporting power that can be used, have been used, and will be used, and have been abused repeatedly over the history of the internet. Nuisance reporting, mallicious singling out of peoeple, and time wasting - even with reporting limits - are all actual abuses that can, do and will occur if people know there is no comeback to a report and if the mods won’t know who you are.
But the high volume reporting that was going on was fixed without needing to rely on report anonymity, nor did the loss of anonymity stop the high volume of reports. Do you disbelieve me when I say this?
This is, as opposed to the theoretical, and arbitrary “abuse”, of some theoretical moderator who somehow manages to use reporting information - howndoesnt seem to be immediately clear - in an abusive way that I have never seen happen in all my use of being on internet discussion forums with reporting.
But it isn't theoretical. It actually happened.
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@janesix
By contacting users based on their reports without a rule violation having been made.
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@Ramshutu
I just want to clarify:
You believe that the current measures (limits on reporting) are insufficient to deal with reporting abuse;
Anonymity is required to sufficiently deal with reporting abuse;
The utility of anonymity to stem mod abuse is not significant
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@janesix
If you are talking about this:
Also, I can personally attest to the fact that the loss of anonymity didn't actually stop the report spamming that was going on. It provably isn't a solution to report spamming.
The answer is because I continued to report votes after anonymity was removed.
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@Ramshutu
You misunderstand. It can be abused by the mods if not anonymous.
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REMINDER:
There was a problem with report spam:
1. It wasn't fixed when report anonymity was removed.
2. It was ultimately fixed without relying on the loss of anonymity.
It doesn't solve the problem of report abuse.
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@Castin
From a technical standpoint, the threat of a DDOS attach is a fictional bogey man that has been conjured to scare people into voting one way or the other. Currently, people are limited to 10/reports a day. If this site cannot technically handle An extra 10 packets per person, then there are bigger issues at hand.
But, that is not the only kind of DDOS. What actually happened was a kind of DDOS in the that time resources of the mods were being consumed by a large volume of reports. But removing anonmity didn't fix this. What fixed it was a) limiting the number of reports a day and, more importantly, b) changing how they responded to vote reports.
The mods have significantly changed how they respond to reports on votes which has eliminated the affect large volume reporting can have on them.
The take-away is that there was a problem but removing anonymity didn't fix it and it has since been fixed without needing to rely on that loss of anonymity. A lot of people are wringing their hands about report abuse, but don't seem to be factoring this in.
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@Ramshutu
It can also be used abusively if not anonymous.
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@nmvarco
I don't understand what this has to do with report anonymity, but I have recorded your vote.
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