Scratch

lilacfuzz101 wrote:

This is a really interesting idea, but I don't know how many people are going to want to sign up for an extra account and all that. How much work do you think it would be to impliment a flagging system like we have on the main site for the forums? I'm somewhat familiar with computer programing (took Computer Science last year) so I know it can be a lot of work...

It's not impossible, but it'd take some work. The thing is, we're planning on abandoning this code base when we switch to 2.0, so it'd be a significant investment of effort for something we won't be using for all that long.  That's one reason I'm not too excited about that strategy.

Vista4563 wrote:

Or instead of limiting the upload source to one domain, we can just block out the problematic ones?

Well, that gets complicated pretty fast. Right now, you can link an image from anywhere on the entire webs. So we could limit to a few places, and then blacklist if they are used inappropriately... but I feel like we'd have to be updating a list a lot.
There's always so much else to do, I'm reluctant to add an additional maintenance thing that must be kept track of / thought about / etc. So if we can find a simpler solution, I'd prefer it.

Servine wrote:

I respect your desicion, but...

@ The forums are now a bit more boring
@ Bye-bye Block Library
@ Everything is less attractive

Couldn't we just upload the post, but until a mod looks at it, the tags are disabled.

This is the "infinite moderation budget" strategy. I'm afraid it's just not practical for a free site run with grants and donations. The other thing is that 99.9999% of the time, the army of mods it would take to do this would be looking at stuff that was totally fine. Also, if we used this strategy, every time you posted, you'd have to wait till a mod was available to review your post before it would show up for others to see. It would probably take hours. Most posts get read soon after they're posted.

Last edited by Lightnin (2012-01-12 11:47:20)

Paddle2See wrote:

Because of some recent abuses of the embedded image feature (the [img] tag),  we have disabled it on our forums.  We regret the inconvenience but feel that it's the best thing to do given the circumstances.  If an image is necessary for a forum discussion, we suggest that you upload it in a Scratch project and link to the project from your forum post.

Is it a problem that I still see images everywhere? What was the abuse that lead to the image blocking, if you don't mind me asking?

I haven't used the images much on the forums and I don't care much for them being removed. Though I would still like to have the ability to easily access them.

Maybe instead of completely disabling them, you could just turn the img tag into a link to the image?

Another idea is since the problem had happened during the holidays, maybe disable the images during holidays and enable them when moderators and admins are online.

If the second one isn't possible, could we at least have the first idea? It would make life a lot easier instead of needing to highlight > Copy > then paste into the URL bar and pressing enter.

silvershine wrote:

Magnie wrote:

Maybe instead of completely disabling them, you could just turn the img tag into a link to the image?

This seems like a good temporary fix. Would this be pretty easy to implement?

It's already implemented for when you quote somebody...

Mokat wrote:

couldnt someone just put a link to the image

Yes but that's not as immediate and people don't always click links.

silvershine wrote:

Magnie wrote:

Maybe instead of completely disabling them, you could just turn the img tag into a link to the image?

This seems like a good temporary fix. Would this be pretty easy to implement?

Probably.

coolstuff wrote:

Yeah, I don't think animated GIFs play a particularly great role in the grand spectrum of the forums. 

Well, maybe you could take just 1 edition of nope.avi and make that still in. We still need the Engie saying "Nope" as his neck enlarges, don't we?

veggieman001 wrote:

SJRCS_011 wrote:

PaperMario123 wrote:

I just want a 3-flag rule. If anything is flagged/reported by 3 users, they'd have a quick little checkbox with something like: "should this be hidden from the community?" If 3 people report/flag and check that box (I want the checkbox because, sometimes, they might just want to move the topic, etc.), the topic/post would be completely censored until a mod approves it, if they choose to approve it.

Maybe two.
Because it sometimes seems to me that by the time three users come along who know to actually use the report button report the pictures, they have been exposed for a while.

But the smaller amount, the easier it is to defeat the system. The person/people who did it could create accounts on proxies and easily get tonnes of posts removed. Their goal is to mess up as much of the forum experience for Scratchers as possible.

But what if you get a capcha on signup?

joefarebrother wrote:

veggieman001 wrote:

SJRCS_011 wrote:

Maybe two.
Because it sometimes seems to me that by the time three users come along who know to actually use the report button report the pictures, they have been exposed for a while.

But the smaller amount, the easier it is to defeat the system. The person/people who did it could create accounts on proxies and easily get tonnes of posts removed. Their goal is to mess up as much of the forum experience for Scratchers as possible.

But what if you get a capcha on signup?

OR what if they have to be from different IPs

IHeartGaming wrote:

mattlai2 wrote:

The_Magic_Puppeteer wrote:

Imgur is much better

I agree. I love how you can just drag the picture into the browser to upload.

Imgur actually has no moderation whatsoever.

ihaveamac wrote:

soupoftomato wrote:

IHeartGaming wrote:

Imgur actually has no moderation whatsoever.

http://imgur.com/tos

But then someone could get Scratch banned from imgur easily.

veggieman001 wrote:

Mokat wrote:

couldnt someone just put a link to the image

Yes but that's not as immediate and people don't always click links.

I always click links out of habit. Unfortunately, sometimes this isn't good-- I once gave my mom's laptop a virus 

Lightnin wrote:

How about only permitting images hosted at a site like flickr?

This would mean you'd have to create an account at flickr in order to be able to post images.

I can't see how that would stop spamming though; people would just upload them to Flickr instead of the website they normally use