Suggestion

bobmalooka

There has been a high number of new users joining boards to post exclusively anti-Palestine posts on threads relating to the conflict in Gaza, these new users usually drag the thread into a game of semantics or accuse people speaking out against the deaths of innocent people of being anti-Semitic or pro-terrorism.

It stifles (purposely in my opinion) any chance of meaningful discussion.

Would it be worthwhile to introduce a minimum number of posts before you could post on these sort of topics? (Like the soccer forum perhaps)

degrassinoel

i think this is an awful suggestion, luckily i have 5000+ posts so my opinion counts.

ffs.. sorry, but it's an awful idea imo

How would you feel if you found a discussion forum that didn't allow you to discuss the topic you joined it for?

Black Swan

bobmalooka wrote: »

Would it be worthwhile to introduce a minimum number of posts before you could post on these sort of topics? (Like the soccer forum perhaps)

No, because it may discourage new members. Such threads are often difficult to moderate, but should be open to all members regardless of their post count. If there's a problem, report it.

Zaph

The Soccer forum has a specific access protocol, and anyone requesting access to the Soccer forum does so because they want to discuss soccer. AH has threads on a huge range of topics, so what happens someone who wants to post there but has no interest in posting on the Gaza thread? Should we deny them access to the forum just because they don't have enough posts even if they only want to post on the two day hangover thread? And if we didn't require access to the forum to be specifically requested, how do we decide which threads to restrict access to based on the number of posts a person has?

bobmalooka

Zaph wrote: »

The Soccer forum has a specific access protocol, and anyone requesting access to the Soccer forum does so because they want to discuss soccer. AH has threads on a huge range of topics, so what happens someone who wants to post there but has no interest in posting on the Gaza thread? Should we deny them access to the forum just because they don't have enough posts even if they only want to post on the two day hangover thread? And if we didn't require access to the forum to be specifically requested, how do we decide which threads to restrict access to based on the number of posts a person has?

I understand the difficulties in trying to implement my proposal, but what we have seen in the Gaza thread isn't merely people looking to discuss the conflict but (possibly) an orchestrated campaign to stifle discussion while keeping within the rules of the site.

I'm not saying that all of AH should be subjected to a minimum post count or even threads in AH on divisive issues, what I am suggesting is that when a thread is attracting a disproportionately high level of new accounts which are all acting in a manner consistent with an orchestrated movement (political or otherwise) then appropriate measures should be taken to stop such actions.

kneemos

bobmalooka wrote: »

I understand the difficulties in trying to implement my proposal, but what we have seen in the Gaza thread isn't merely people looking to discuss the conflict but (possibly) an orchestrated campaign to stifle discussion while keeping within the rules of the site.

I'm not saying that all of AH should be subjected to a minimum post count or even threads in AH on divisive issues, what I am suggesting is that when a thread is attracting a disproportionately high level of new accounts which are all acting in a manner consistent with an orchestrated movement (political or otherwise) then appropriate measures should be taken to stop such actions.

Hard to know if it's orchestrated or browsers moved to join in a very decisive issue.
Are there any new accounts in support of the Palestinian side?
Either way it's a modding problem I'd imagine.

P_1

Best solution is to do things as they currently are, if you see a post you suspect of being an [insert side x of the debate] shill then report it and let the mods decide what to do about it.

dr.bollocko

kneemos wrote: »

Hard to know if it's orchestrated or browsers moved to join in a very decisive issue.
Are there any new accounts in support of the Palestinian side?
Either way it's a modding problem I'd imagine.

From seeing this pattern in the past - it is orchestrated.

K-9

Israeli and Russian Government sympathisers actively encouraged to go online and defend them is well documented at this stage. Tbh I haven't noticed a big problem in politics, nothing that can't be dealth with anyway.

Overheal

Israeli government mouthpieces are relatively easy to spot, ignore, and report. It's essentially a mod issue but users can help by not feeding them; they will in most cases just soapbox with or without your input anyway.

KahBoom

In the past, this was also a problem with some economic threads - but only on a handful of occasions.

Right now there's also the opposite problem in the Ukraine thread, where you can barely disagree with some posters, before they start labeling you a shill (could do with a clampdown really, if people are avoiding addressing arguments - it's really lazy).


One good way to implement this, would be to add a feature to the forum code, so that mods could mark a thread as restricted - then only posters with 'x' amount of posts can post to it.
Then leave it up to forum posters, to report posts of suspected shills - if a mod thinks the thread (of any topic) 'might' be getting shilled, then the mod can slap the restriction on it.


People are almost definitely getting paid to shill some topics, so I think a restriction like this is actually pretty important - it will force shills to actually gain some credibility before they can post (if their first 'x' posts are obviously garbage, they're easy to spot as shills), which will make it more expensive to successfully shill on Boards (it would literally cost more money, and be less economical, because of both skill and time required).

Zaph

To the best of my knowledge, the software that Boards runs on doesn't have the facility to mark individual threads as restricted. Either an individual has access to a forum or they don't. That's it, I'm afraid.

nesf

This was one of the reasons why AH wasn't used as a place for political debate many years back. It's much harder for the mods there to control the crowd and the subjects tend to generate a lot of trouble. There are no easy solutions here though, moving the discussion to Politics/wherever doesn't fix the problem, it just makes it easier to handle due to less traffic but you're dumping a lot more work on the mods there. Limiting by post count doesn't work too well as if you set the limit too low people just spam nonsense to get there and if you set it too high you are barring too many genuine users from the discussion which is a very bad thing.

KahBoom

^^ If people spam nonsense to get within limits though, that's a good thing, because then they are really easy to spot as likely reregs.


Is Boards code, where it comes to controlling user-access/thread-reply and all, still mostly VBulletin? Programming is my day job, and I'd be surprised if I couldn't figure out (after playing around in spare time for a few weeks) some way of hacking a 'thread restrict' in, by examining the public/original VBulletin code that's available out there.

Could probably reverse engineer this, and find a way of doing it more efficiently:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=259017

It would improve the quality of debate so much on some threads, that it's well worth looking into - am sure mods would love it too (save them having to watch a thread when saying "don't post in this thread again").

nesf

KahBoom wrote: »

^^ If people spam nonsense to get within limits though, that's a good thing, because then they are really easy to spot as likely reregs.

You want to ask the mods to manually check every user that starts posting in these topics in AH in a live discussion? An access control system like Soccer would generate far less work for the mods and that itself would generate a ton of work for the mods. It's not even that easy to spot if someone is clever about it. Where's the line between short on-topic replies and spamming posts to surpass some threshold?

Don't get me wrong, I fully agree that there's a problem, I just don't see an easy solution to it.

KahBoom

Ah no, the mods would only check if a forum user reported a poster as being a likely shill - then a quick "check first 25 posts" would show a lot of garbage being posted by the shill (unless they put in an effort), making it obvious that they are fluffing up their post count; there wouldn't be an easy line to draw, so doubtless many shills will still re-enter discussion.

The less mods have to do, the better I think.

Dav

The ability to quickly check someone's post history already exists within the ModUtils toolkit that we built.

An access system like Soccer for AH is a bad idea. The access system in soccer as it is is a terrible fix to the problems of soccer fans being such idiots with one another. I wish we could get rid of it, but we're not going to fix petty and pointless human tribalism any time soon (and I'd rather start with Party Politics as it'd probably help the country a lot more ).

There's no quick or easy fix for the issues highlighted in this thread I'm afraid. If there was, we'd roll it out. Whilst I appreciate the offer to hack some code together, I can tell you that anything you'd send to us would be politely refused for all the obvious security reasons. There's about a million (and growing) lines of code that makes this site tick, it's no small task to make *any* change to it and trying to fold in outside code on top of that is a security and practical coding nightmare that we won't be taking on However, again, I really do appreciate your offer KahBoom, it's always great to see people wanting to help out in a very real way like that.

KahBoom

Ya no worries - I figured if it were easy to do, could be taken more as inspiration, with Boards rewriting it from scratch Ya though, does sound like Boards is too customized for that to be useful.

Annasopra

Perhaps there is a need for an international affairs forum

P_1

Maybe have a new user's first 25 posts be pre-moderated might be a solution? I do worry that might cause far too much of a workload for the mods though.

Dades

P_1 wrote: »

Maybe have a new user's first 25 posts be pre-moderated might be a solution? I do worry that might cause far too much of a workload for the mods though.

That's too much of a restriction on new posters. A lot of people wouldn't bother sticking around if we made them jump through too many hoops to post.