EDIT: Changed the title from the very blunt "Approve more moderators." to something less demanding.

Spam and trolls on Cemetech are nothing new and will never go away completely. As many of us are aware, the amount of spam and the number of trolls has increased lately. More often than not, the members that are online when the spam is posted don't have any power to do anything about it. This isn't necessarily devastating for those random ads for shoes, however, for explicit posts and trolls; those are things that should be removed as quickly as possible.

No moderator has the time to watch Cemetech through the entire day, and half of the current ones them only visit once in a blue moon. There are a lot of trustworthy, active members who could significantly reduce the time that spam and trolls are active on Cemetech. I think it would be very beneficial for Cemetech to fill in some newer members in place of, or in addition to, the less active moderators.
Although I may not be a significant member of the community yet, I would support this.
Quote:
Approve more moderators.

No.
I support this as well. As someone who has only trolled Cemetech a few times a long time ago I believe I could help.

KermMartian wrote:
Quote:
Approve more moderators.

No.

Oh
More moderators seems a bit extreme, if there aren't enough mods around already then interviewing and training more would be difficult. A "Report as Spam" button by posts would be good, perhaps where at least 10 members with over 30 posts or so could report it and it would disappear from the main feed and go to a special moderator-only list that could be sorted through later.
King Dub Dub wrote:
More moderators seems a bit extreme, if there aren't enough mods around already then interviewing and training more would be difficult. A "Report as Spam" button by posts would be good, perhaps where at least 10 members with over 30 posts or so could report it and it would disappear from the main feed and go to a special moderator-only list that could be sorted through later.


What if all users could do this, but it would only get removed if a certain number of "reports" came in. Then it would be moved to that special list.
KermMartian wrote:
Quote:
Approve more moderators.

No.


Why not?
kg583 wrote:
Why not?


I am not Kerm, this is my theory.

I mean, first they have to trust someone enough to make them mod, and I imagine the incident on Thursday didn't exactly inspire trust in the userbase.

There also needs to be demand for a moderator- these spam posts aren't exactly flooding the forum, they happen once or twice a day on average, probably even less. Though the current staff may not exactly be able to get it all instantly, there's not really a reason to get it instantly.
As far as the spam posts go, I think those could be handled better by an automated spam filter rather than adding more moderators. They don't really bother anyone in the long run, while adding additional mods to deal with them might potentially hurt Cemetech's reputation for having an extremely responsible (if somewhat busy, as of late) moderation team.

As for the trolls, it would be more effective if we the users just ignored them. They won't keep trolling if they don't get a reaction, which is far more effective than banning a single account for someone who can create more.

I will say, though, that Cemetech would likely benefit from becoming more open-source. The fiasco that happened on Thursday was only as big as it was due to a failure with the bot - if users were allowed to view the configuration file for the bridge and join the testing Discord, it's possible that someone might have spotted the issue (which sent a push notification to everyone in the Discord) before it occurred. I know that that would be the type of thing that I would try almost immediately after seeing there was a new bridge, if not for the fact that it would disrupt people if it actually worked.
There are also still a decent number of bugs in the site, and I feel that if people were able to submit PRs fixing these, they would - at least on the client side, which is the only thing that we can really modify at the moment, several people are currently writing userscripts to improve the site.
While I obviously don't expect Cemetech to just put the entire backend on GitHub, I think that moving in that general direction might be beneficial for the site as a whole.
Usually, it seems to just work well to post them in spam posts, though maybe a "Mark as Spam" that would temporarily remove the post from view until a mod could look into it would be a good idea.
I agree with commandblockguy, security by obscurity is only as secure as, well, nothing. Now while we most likely won't have big name security researchers finding issues with the form, we will still have users reporting issues. Issue reports are issue reports, and if done correctly, help tremendously (aside from fixing the problem). So maybe open sourcing PARTS of the forum software will help.
Okay, now the serious answer to your "order".

If you take a look at the forum index, you'll see that we have a decent array of per-subforum moderators, most of whom either are no longer active members or remain here but don't actually exercise their moderator powers with any regularity. We also have a set of Global Moderators that can moderate any subforum (e.g., delete posts or topics), but almost all of them are no longer active. I'm enthused about giving more members more responsibility to deal with spam and leadership, but one of the most important lessons I've learned leading a site like Cemetech is that the skills to be a good programmer/contributor to the forum and a good leader or moderator are not exactly the same, and I can think of a number of recent instances that have proven that good social skills and an ability to diplomatically interact with a large group of users are not universal among our membership. Where I see the biggest gap at the moment is in areas like news and content - which many of our members, like TheLastMillennial, Jeffitus, iPhoenix, PT_, and many others have been making great strides in solving.

If our audience continues to grow and we successfully continue to add topics with broader appeal to our foci, and as a result have more frequent incidents of spamming or abuse, I will be enthused about adding more moderators. In the meantime, I'd like to promote those that show the right personality and skills to earn that promotion, but not simply promote people for being around here for a while. A certain other site or two in the community's history has/have provided excellent evidence why that's not the right choice.
KermMartian wrote:
In the meantime, I'd like to promote those that show the right personality and skills to earn that promotion, but not simply promote people for being around here for a while. A certain other site or two in the community's history has/have provided excellent evidence why that's not the right choice.


I like the cautious approach.
I am going to be blunt and say that I am not a good choice to be a moderator.

I am on often enough that given enough time, maaaayyyyyybeeeee, I might be a good choice to be a subforum mod? But super highly unlikely.

TIny_Hacker wrote:
Usually, it seems to just work well to post them in spam posts, though maybe a "Mark as Spam" that would temporarily remove the post from view until a mod could look into it would be a good idea.


Imagine someone (or a group of people) that went down an entire thread marking everything as spam. The mods would get a flooded inbox, for no positive effect.
- A few more moderators (perhaps specific to SAX?)
- Filters that can check new forum posts (or even SAX dialogue) for spammy stuff and reject forum posts and warn users whose contents match certain regexes
- Restricting the number of posts users can make to some function of their time as a member and/or their interactive karma (I believe that gets rewarded for positive interactions on SAX?), such that new users can only post 1 new topic per day, but that restriction lifts as they stay longer or gather karma.

Any combination of the above would help to weed out all but the most determined trolls/spammers.
I support. Of course they need to be carefully selected. The names that Kerm dropped feel like very good candidates to me, although PT_ is already an admin.
As for the current moderators, there are a couple that haven't posted since DoorsCS has been released Unsure
Nomkid wrote:
TIny_Hacker wrote:
Usually, it seems to just work well to post them in spam posts, though maybe a "Mark as Spam" that would temporarily remove the post from view until a mod could look into it would be a good idea.


Imagine someone (or a group of people) that went down an entire thread marking everything as spam. The mods would get a flooded inbox, for no positive effect.

I already decided this was a bad idea. A better idea might be a wait time, where new users had to wait a day before posting topics or commenting in the sax. This way, people could report the users to the Spam thread before they could even make a spam post.
TIny_Hacker wrote:
Nomkid wrote:
TIny_Hacker wrote:
Usually, it seems to just work well to post them in spam posts, though maybe a "Mark as Spam" that would temporarily remove the post from view until a mod could look into it would be a good idea.


Imagine someone (or a group of people) that went down an entire thread marking everything as spam. The mods would get a flooded inbox, for no positive effect.

I already decided this was a bad idea. A better idea might be a wait time, where new users had to wait a day before posting topics or commenting in the sax. This way, people could report the users to the Spam thread before they could even make a spam post.

A lot of new users create accounts just to ask a question. If we timed them out for a day, I suspect they wouldn't come back the next day to ask their question. Also, you can't really report an account just for existing, its often not obvious that its a spam account before they post some garbage...
Well, there are a few examples, such as the guy who's website was microsoft outlook help.
Maybe it should be that all new members with less than x number of posts need to get their posts approved by a mod OR by someone with more than x number of posts.
  
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