Scratch

for 3
maybe not removed
just hidden

Lucario621 wrote:

Recently, there have been numerous topics posted by one user with inappropriate content. This includes attempting to break the censoring system, as well as image posting. With the image posting being said (and that this was in Misc.), he obviously became a member in order to do this trolling. During this time of roughly a quarter of an hour (8:20 PM to 8:35PM EST), no moderators were actively available to remove the topic and/or ban the user.

What I'm not here to discuss is what happened during the event, but what can be done to prevent this from occurring again.

As mentioned previously, there were no moderators actively moderating the forum. (Paddle2See was the one who later removed the threads.) Right now there are 7 main moderators: coolstuff, demosthenes, Harakou, JSO, MyRedNeptune, cheddargirl, and Paddle2See (the latter two are Scratch Team members, but moderator the forums often.) It is a holiday week for most children, so the traffic is most likely higher than usual. At the same time, there are people (including moderators) that may be traveling to relatives or elsewhere and unable to access the forums.

This all being said, what can we do to prevent this from happening again?

1. More Moderators

This is a simple solution, so as there are 7 right now, there should most likely be closer to 10, or possibly more. Also, moderators from different parts of the earth would be useful (so more time zones are covered).

2. Temporary Moderators.

During holiday season and the summer, it may be useful to have temporary moderators that would be briefly trained to be able to have basic permissions that moderators do (but not all). These would most likely have to be people who are active on misc, but still mature. Up to 6?

3. Vote-to-close/remove system.

Perhaps once at least 5 users report a topic it is closed, and once 10 years report it, it is completely removed. Of course, moderators could then be able undo the changes. The only flaw in this system is that people may purposely gang-up to vote down threads that they simply don't like, apart from threads that are genuinely inappropriate.

EDIT: 4. Improve the ranking system.

If this user was able to turn into a member so easily, than perhaps the system should change. More posts needed, more projects, more comments, etc. (Manual approval by moderators would most likely be last resort.)

What are your thoughts? Let's keep this discussion focused on how to prevent this type of event from occurring again, not about "how bad it was" or anything similar.

wut?



.....Anyway, good suggestions 

I think a vote-to-remove system is all that is needed (voting to close seems purposeless as it leaves the content up), and it works well on the main site.  Quite frankly, I don't know why we don't have this already (though of course, as they say, "hindsight is 20 20").

I'm not sure having more mods is necessary or an efficient way to solve the problem, to have 24/7, you'd need quite a few mods, probably from different time zones, which makes communication between mods difficult, and how would the team discriminate between time zones (I doubt that people living in the Pacific Ocean makes up even 1% of the population of Scratch).  It just seems that adding mods to guarantee greater time coverage doesn't fix the problem efficiently, if it even fixes it at all.

Last edited by MoreGamesNow (2011-12-26 21:08:26)

I've been thinking and talking about number 4 for a while, and I think that is necessary.

EDIT: Maybe even 3 ranks would be necessary.

Last edited by JJROCKER (2011-12-26 21:08:04)

my-chemical-romance wrote:

I'm on all day every day, yet I stand so powerless. It feels bad being powerless.

+1

JJROCKER wrote:

Thanks for making this and you are very fast! And you used some of mine suggestions    Let me think...

Thanks! I tried to make this as soon as possible so most of the crowd during the incident would be able to see it.

GameHutSoftware wrote:

for 3
maybe not removed
just hidden

That essentially is what happens to all topics that moderators remove. The innappropriate threads are moved to a separate forum called the "Dustbin" - essentially an archive of topics by spammers, trolls, and other "bad" content.

my-chemical-romance wrote:

This happened in Wurm, mods were offline due to timezones and people would come on and troll. It was fixed by a mass ignore system, if 33% of users online which have said something within the last 20 minutes ignore the troll he will be muted. I'm sure this could be changed to suit Scratch.

Interesting idea. What do you mean "ignore"? Like, not reply? Also, what if simply nobody has something to reply to a topic, even if it's not inappropriate?

Lucario621 wrote:

JJROCKER wrote:

Thanks for making this and you are very fast! And you used some of mine suggestions    Let me think...

Thanks! I tried to make this as soon as possible so most of the crowd during the incident would be able to see it.

GameHutSoftware wrote:

for 3
maybe not removed
just hidden

That essentially is what happens to all topics that moderators remove. The innappropriate threads are moved to a separate forum called the "Dustbin" - essentially an archive of topics by spammers, trolls, and other "bad" content.

my-chemical-romance wrote:

This happened in Wurm, mods were offline due to timezones and people would come on and troll. It was fixed by a mass ignore system, if 33% of users online which have said something within the last 20 minutes ignore the troll he will be muted. I'm sure this could be changed to suit Scratch.

Interesting idea. What do you mean "ignore"? Like, not reply? Also, what if simply nobody has something to reply to a topic, even if it's not inappropriate?

Well, ignoring was basically saying "/ignore user" and anything they say will not appear for you. And as long as the people who are reporting are reporting then it's all good, but in Wurm they had to make sure that people couldn't just mute someone if they did nothing wrong.

AnimeCreatorArtist wrote:

Lucario621 wrote:

Perhaps once at least 5 users report a topic it is closed, and once 10 years report it, it is completely removed.

wut?



.....Anyway, good suggestions 

Haha yes, a mistake I fixed just earlier. Good job noticing  .

MoreGamesNow wrote:

I think a vote-to-remove system is all that is needed (voting to close seems purposeless as it leaves the content up), and it works well on the main site.  Quite frankly, I don't know why we don't have this already (though of course, as they say, "hindsight is 20 20").

I'm not sure having more mods is necessary or an efficient way to solve the problem, to have 24/7, you'd need quite a few mods, probably from different time zones, which makes communication between mods difficult, and how would the team discriminate between time zones (I doubt that people living in the Pacific Ocean makes up even 1% of the population of Scratch).  It just seems that adding mods to guarantee greater time coverage doesn't fix the problem efficiently, if it even fixes it at all.

I agree, I think the vote-to-remove solution is best as long as nobody abuses it. I had a situation with the flagging system where I did not allow people to access a project's content by including a password that you could not find even if you downloaded. People were very frustrated, and decided to all start flagging the project, resulting in it being removed. I received an automated message from the Scratch Team telling me to not post inappropriate content, but later the project was brought back up.

As for your second part, you are right. Adding more moderators may help to a certain extent, but could cause more problems than fix problems after a while.

my-chemical-romance wrote:

I'm on all day every day, yet I stand so powerless. This happened on a late Scratch-based Minecraft server, a griefer came on and I had to stand there killing him over and over again until a mod/admin came on to ban him, it feels bad being powerless.

I've had similar situations on minecraft servers. Scratch however is supposed to be appropriate for children of all ages, and it is public with a large user base, so it's very important that this doesn't happen again.

I say we set up a rotating schedule to help the mods out. There's only 7 of them, and there's tons of us. If just a few of us set up a little schedule to look for bad posts and report them, that could help the mods out tremendously. We could communicate via messages (comments on projects).

my-chemical-romance wrote:

As I've said on the server console for Scratchia:

"Make it idiot proof and people will design better idiots"

The voting system is the best, as it doesn't harm the legit user as much as the other ones.

What about a person using a proxy and using multiple accounts to block all the posts

schnrfl wrote:

my-chemical-romance wrote:

As I've said on the server console for Scratchia:

"Make it idiot proof and people will design better idiots"

The voting system is the best, as it doesn't harm the legit user as much as the other ones.

What about a person using a proxy and using multiple accounts to block all the posts

Yup, that's the problem with it.

Or we could increase the post time I guess but nobody would want that.

imnotbob wrote:

cpumaster930 wrote:

Lucario621 wrote:

4. Improve the ranking system.

If this user was able to turn into a member so easily, than perhaps the system should change. More posts needed, more projects, more comments, etc. (Manual approval by moderators would most likely be last resort.)

What are your thoughts? Let's keep this discussion focused on how to prevent this type of event from occurring again, not about "how bad it was" or anything similar.

This seems like a tricky one to fix because it's pretty much impossible to determine a user's intentions about posting.  Will they be helpful or spam?

Increasing the number of posts, comments, etc. would likely upset a number of New Scratchers wanting an upgraded rank; however, it was apparently easy enough for the spammer to attain the Scratcher rank by the current conditions.  Manual moderator approval would also be quite tedious considering Scratch's large userbase.

Honestly, someone could probably find a way to spam if he/she put enough effort into it.
The New Scratcher system is just meant to discourage spammers, but that won't necessarily work 100% of the time.  Hmmm...

How about, instead of automatically, a mod or ST member could manually do it.

cpumaster930 wrote:

Manual moderator approval would also be quite tedious considering Scratch's large userbase.