Memory-holing: Now here on DailyWTF! Abusive mods ahoy!
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I enjoy the majority of Blakey's threads and posts.
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I enjoy the majority of Blakey's threads and posts.
Even when he is being an ass to other forum members?
I will put myself in the @Yamikuronue camp:
I enjoy a good blakeyrant. I'm quite interested in the 4k thread, for example. But threads like this make it sound like you're on a crusade to get everyone who wasn't one of the most frequent posters on the old forums banned. That's just not cool.
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And the discussion wasn't as bad until baiting started, from multiple people.
Some of whom are masters at it.
Filed under: Somebody had to make the obvious joke.
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Without knowing what post that was, I can't really comment.
I saw it, so I can.
It was much more personal of an attack than I've seen here or elsewhere. I would've flagged it for exactly the same reason, but I was on mobile.
I administer another forum (with a larger userbase than here, nonetheless), and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that had that post been made there, the one responsible would have been at the very least temp-banned. Yes, this is TDWTF and not some other forum, but Blakey crossed a line, and that's why his post was deleted.
Also, the bot thing is utter bullcrap. The bot was @PaulaBean, and it was an automated message telling Blakey his post had been deleted. That's not "the mods sending a bot after me", that's normal system functionality.
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Any moderator action anywhere, ever, has and will be questioned.
Not all of them. Certainly, taking action against an obvious spammer would seldom, if ever, be questioned.
It's moderator's call in the end, every time.
Yep, that's why they were made moderators.
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Yes, this is TDWTF and not some other forum, but Blakey crossed a line, and that's why his post was deleted.
That post wasn't deleted. It was temporarily hidden.
And from the auto-message the software generates:
Your post was flagged for moderator attention: the community feels something about the post requires manual intervention by a staff member.
Multiple community members flagged this post before it was hidden, so please consider how you might revise your post to reflect their feedback. You can edit your post after 10 minutes, and it will be automatically unhidden.
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Oh, so it wasn't even a moderator action?
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Don't blame anyone else for your distinct and utter lack of humor.
I disagree with this. I believe Blakey does have a sense of humor. It's rather different from that of most other users, including me, but it does exist. He's not unique in this. People post jokes I don't find funny, and I post jokes others don't find funny, and that's ok. Rather say, "Don't blame anyone for having a different sense of humor."
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Oh, so it wasn't even a moderator action?
The flags brought it to the attention of the moderators. The result was what happens when a moderator clicks the "Agree" button on the flag.
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Ah OK
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Yeah, and the tantrum half is getting fucking old already. Much older than the random furry lesbian thing in my book.
I dunno, I think his rants and tantrums usually have some sort of point or grain (or more) of truth.Not that it affects me at all, but I definitely scroll past/leave threads where the whole "I'm a badger lol" thing happens. So I get why it'd bore/enrage Blakey.
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The message from the bot itself says it's moderator action, but it doesn't tell you WHO the moderator was. (Then again, it also tells you to respond to feedback without giving you any feedback to respond to, so it's obviously the result of a buggy and broken Discourse development process.)
The thing I was most annoyed at is a moderator using a bot to do their dirty work instead of at least TALKING to me. (Or at the very very very least, CCing themselves on the PM.)
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Yeah. Just keep the new kid on a leash, he's got "corrupt cop" written all over his face.
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No idea why they're being conflated.
YMBNH. He thinks it's funny, apparently. As he pointed out recently in another context, deliberate misinterpretation is his bag, like Austin Powers and penis pumps.
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@PaulaBean is not a bot in the sense that all the others are - she's part of/representing the software itself. It'd be like complaining about @system posting messages.
I can't imagine that's a default Discourse name, for obvious reasons. So I'm curious--is there a stock "bot" account that someone here renamed?
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quite a lot of effort, to the point that the bots that are based on sockbot code actually place more load on the server then they otehrwise would as they have to load an additional page of posts just to check to make sure the OP of a thread is not one of the two people the bot is programmed to ignore the threads of.
That seems like the kind of thing you could maybe cache and persist, to save effort.
BTW, who's the second person?
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BTW, who's the second person?
that keeps the bots out of official threads and articles (although the article category is also ignored by default)
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That seems like the kind of thing you could maybe cache and persist, to save effort.
saves effort, but there's the memory to consider and it all adds up.
could probably cache it even so but then i'd have consistency issues.
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Who does this? Seriously, who does this?
It's probably safe to assume that what he actually means here is "everyone who doesn't espouse rabid opinions about hating Atwood".
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That's because I'm 40 mega-Hitlers.
Pffft, you wish. At best you're about 23 kilo-Hitlers.
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Ah! This must be a new definition of the word "funny" of which I was not previously aware!
Do you hate it when people randomly quote Office Space/Star Wars/Star Trek/etc, too? What about IRL?
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no, it really isn't. but i can see how you would think that.
It's actually good not to be overly concerned with others' opinions of you. That's not necessarily exactly what he said, I know.
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At best you're about 23 kilo-Hitlers.
More like micro-Hitlers. After all, how many Jews has Blakey killed? Not many, I'd wager.Filed under: And that's a good thing.
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The thing I was most annoyed at is a moderator using a bot to do their dirty work instead of at least TALKING to me. (Or at the very very very least, CCing themselves on the PM.)
I tend to agree, but I think this is simply how Discourse works because moderator actions not hiding behind bots is somehow Doing It Wrong™ and Uncivilized™ and shouldn't be allowed.
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Well like I said above, if we're going to use the bot, if this is a thing we as a community have decided to do because we're all idiots, could we at least fix it so the shit it says makes some kind of sense?
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The message from the bot itself says it's moderator action, but it doesn't tell you WHO the moderator was. (Then again, it also tells you to respond to feedback without giving you any feedback to respond to, so it's obviously the result of a buggy and broken Discourse development process.)
Just out of curiousity, what value would that (knowing which mod hit "Agree") be to you, beyond knowing who specifically to rant at?
I will agree with you that "feedback" isn't a good word, but I realized that--as @PJH mentioned above, the feedback is the flagging itself. You got told 'a bunch of people didn't like what you said, maybe you ought to rewrite it'.
You know who to complain to about the specific text of the message, though, and it's not @pjh or alex.
(Also, I have to wonder how much of "it also tells you to respond to feedback without giving you any feedback to respond to" is your schtick.
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I don't see it as hiding behind anything; it's simply an automatic notification. Somebody replies to you; you get an automatic notification. A moderator acts on your post; you get an automatic notification.
Should the notification appear to come from the moderator who took the action, rather than an anonymous system account? Possibly. Should the moderator include an explanation of his/her action? Definitely. But I don't think the software allows either of those for the automatic notification. Since it doesn't, it would probably be good policy for the moderator to
PM the user either before or immediately following the action.
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Just out of curiousity, what value would that (knowing which mod hit "Agree") be to you, beyond knowing who specifically to rant at?
It's common courtesy.
I will agree with you that "feedback" isn't a good word, but I realized that--as @PJH mentioned above, the feedback is the flagging itself.
For all I know, the only reason the flag was hit was, "oops! the screen spazzes all over on Windows Phone and you end up accidentally pressing shit all the fucking time!"
Telling me a flag exists isn't feedback. Saying "this is bad" to a post that makes a bunch of different points in different paragraphs doesn't tell me which bit of the post was bad, or why the person who flagged it thought it was bad.
It actually reminds me of YouTube's blanking out your entire hour-long video because 23 seconds of it happened to include a song from some musician YouTube won't even tell you the name of. (And until recently, it didn't even tell you WHICH 23 seconds were the issue.) Maybe that's where Atwood's getting his design ideas for this feature.
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Even when he's being an ass to the other forum members?
It's mostly painful to watch others behave like children whenever that happens.
Seriously. It's like you all lived under a glass jar for all your lives, and only now encountered someone who's not all rainbows.
Also, I've seen the deleted post, and it was fairly obvious to me Blakey was playing a joke - the old "ha-ha, you can't hear me, you dumbass" routine we all did as kids when someone wasn't listening. You could only find an insult there if your sense of humor died in the bloody WWII.
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the screen spazzes all over on Windows Phone and you end up accidentally pressing shit all the fucking time
While that may be true, accidentally flagging a post would require a minimum of three accidental presses in the right (wrong) locations in the right sequence. ISTM the probability of that is low enough that it can be neglected.
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I can't imagine that's a default Discourse name, for obvious reasons. So I'm curious--is there a stock "bot" account that someone here renamed?
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Or a convenience store.
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@blakeyrat said:
The thing I was most annoyed at is a moderator using a bot to do their dirty work instead of at least TALKING to me. (Or at the very very very least, CCing themselves on the PM.)
I tend to agree, but I think this is simply how Discourse works because moderator actions not hiding behind bots is somehow Doing It Wrong™ and Uncivilized™ and shouldn't be allowed.
Actually, the Jeff way is to just memory hole stuff and not tell anyone about it, eventually leading to a suspension or ban. This is looking better and better every day.
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saves effort, but there's the memory to consider and it all adds up.
Can't necessarily be all that much: 8 bytes (optimistically) for a topic ID, and a "keep out" bool per topic.
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could we at least fix it so the shit it says makes some kind of sense?
I bet @PJH can't do that, and it would require an actual discodev to change the notification.
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It's common courtesy.
I'm not objecting to that, btw. I think it's probably on balance a good idea.
Telling me a flag exists isn't feedback.
I'd say "clearly Jeff thinks it does", but I can imagine what you'd say to that. Technically speaking, to does: it tells you that at least three people thought something you said was offensive enough to formally complain. I will agree that it is, at best, a bare, technically minimum amount of feedback.
Maybe that's where Atwood's getting his design ideas for this feature.
Wouldn't surprise me.
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Can't necessarily be all that much: 8 bytes (optimistically) for a topic ID, and a "keep out" bool per topic.
given the fields of the topic proper that are examined it's rather more than that. we have the user who posted, the trust level of that user, the status of the topic (muting the topic will mute the bot in that topic), so we have.... call it 200 bytes of info about the topic to track.
we have ~50k topics right now. that adds up to ~10MB per bot instance. on a server with only 512MB that's a lot of ram to consume.
yes, that's all solveable and if loaded as needed it's no where near that memory limit. but it adds extra complexity and risk to a system that even with the extra work it does to load the topic and the post it was summoned for causes less stress on discourse than an actual user browsing the site does. (given my wireshark poking, the bot produces about a third the requests as chrome does to perform the same actions.)
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You could only find an insult there if your sense of humor died in the bloody WWII.
What if my sense of humor died in Kosovo, you insensitive clod?
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A "yes" would've sufficed.
Just out of curiousity what's the default name?
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we have ~50k topics right now. that adds up to ~10MB per bot instance. on a server with only 512MB that's a lot of ram to consume.
Well, you could put it in a sqlite DB or something. It's probably silly to try to keep it all in RAM.
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Well, you could put it in a sqlite DB or something. It's probably silly to try to keep it all in RAM.
True, but then there's nothing stopping the sqlite library holding the whole DB in memory (unless there's an always-flush option or something)
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Just out of curiousity what's the default name?
@system. It's there in the screenshot...
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Well, you could put it in a sqlite DB or something. It's probably silly to try to keep it all in RAM.
well at that point we're still talking about reducing the server impact of a process that already takes less server resources than an actual human.
I'm still not saying that it couldn't be done or shouldn't be done. I'm simply saying that every feature starts at -100 points and this one hasn't got enough positive points to bring it over the 0 point mark for me.
of course, and as always, PR is accepted should you be interested in implementing it. I'll even happily provide you with all the documentation i have as well as answer any and all questions you might have about the system or the documentation (or lack thereof)
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@system. It's there in the screenshot...
Technically, the screenshot says "the default System account." Nowhere does it say @system. That's not a difficult inference for the user to make, especially since you said earlier that @system is the only reserved user name, but it is still an inference; it's not "in the screenshot."
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I bet @PJH can't do that, and it would require an actual discodev to change the notification.
The real problem: what do you change it to?