Abuse of the "offensive" button
- Locked due to inactivity on Nov 25, '16 3:54am
Thread Topic: Abuse of the "offensive" button
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1st, the reason it's there for all users and not just mods is so that everyone can have their influence, in proportion to their status level. Users who've gained higher status have earned more weight on their reports. In this way, there is a democratic aspect to handling improper content. The community as a whole can participate in regulating itself.
The mods are given extra weight on their reports such that two mods together can cause posts to be deleted. Two are required so that one mod acting alone cannot delete posts.
The reasons mods exist at all are several. 1) they are active, long-time users trusted by me to correctly identify improper posts. 2) their extra report weight can help take care of troll/spam issues more quickly. 3) they're here also to assist newer members and answer questions. 4) they are liaisons between the community and me, since I'm not always checking the forums.
Here's the problem: I know there are users who generally don't like mods. And it's not necessarily even personal. Whenever there are mods, some people are going to object to how they handle something. I doubt there has never been a mod on any site who hasn't been accused of unfairness, or being oppressive, or whatever else. It's ok not to get along with a mod, for whatever reason, but constantly giving them grief is not fair. And abusing the "offensive" button is definitely not okay.
Like I said at the top, the "offensive" button is there for all users to give everyone a democratic "vote" so to speak, instead of leaving it up to just the mods. However if it is going to be abused, I don't really have a choice but to take it away. So ironically, the very people who complain about mods are causing me to remove the tool I gave them to empower them, thus shifting more power to the mods. Why would you do that?Admin -
thanks for the support gtq guy, i really honestly appreciate it, and i'm sure the other mods do too
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Thank you so much, GTQ Guy.
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The Godfather AdvancedIt would surely be better to keep the button as long as it's ineffective on moderators?
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Alrighty
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That wouldn't work, though, because it's been proven users can abuse it enough to suspend a moderator account. They can start targeting non-moderators now.
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Or, they would have been able to.
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*They've already used it against non-moderators, actually. In quite a few cases.
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The Godfather AdvancedSurely that's always been a possibility? And as I'm aware from reading around, it's only moderators that have been targeted. Taking the power away from everyone because it was abused by a few seems the wrong way to go about this.
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That is untrue. We can see who marks what and I've seen several regular users marked wrongfully just in the short time since that feature was instated. There is no way to prevent abuse of the button among regular users without doing this. On any other site, the moderation process is left solely to the mods. The ability to help mark posts as regular users was an uncommon privilege that could only run on trust, and that trust was abused, resulting in loss of privilege. You were nowhere to be seen defending the victims of this abuse, so why are you showing up now to argue you should have that power?
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tl;dr offensive button is fundamentally flawed and a poor system
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If someone marked several posts that were not offensive would their account be deleted?
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GTQ Guy did go through and delete several accounts used to abuse the offensive button.
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Are you concerned about the times you marked Maddie's posts?
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No, I'm just asking what are the consequenses of someone marking a non offensive thread
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