There's a pretty big set of changes coming down the pipe. These shouldn't have much impact on users - it's all internal bookkeeping - but there's a lot of it, and if there's bugs, it might cause issues. Let me know if anything weird happens! Weird, in this case, is probably "comments you can see that you think you shouldn't be able to", or "comments you can't see that you think you should be able to", or anything else strange that goes on. As an example, at one point in development reply notifications stopped working. So keep your eyes out for that. I'm probably pushing this in a day or two, I just wanted to warn people first.
EDIT: PUSH COMPLETE, let me know if anything goes wrong
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Alt Accounts: Let's talk about 'em. We are consistently having trouble with people making alt accounts to avoid bans, which is against the rules, or making alt accounts to respond to their own stuff, which isn't technically against the rules, and so forth. I'm considering a general note in the rules that alt accounts are strongly discouraged, but if you feel the need for an alt, contact us; we're probably okay with it if there's a good reason. (Example: We've had a few people ask to make effortposts that aren't associated with their main account for various reasons. We're fine with this.) If you want to avoid talking to us about it, it probably isn't a good reason.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is not set in stone.
Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is also not set in stone.
Private Profiles: When we picked up the codebase, it included functionality for private profiles, which prevents users from seeing your profile. I probably would have removed this if I'd had a lot more development time, but I didn't. So it exists.
I'm thinking of removing it anyway, though. I'm not sure if it provides significant benefit; I think there's a good argument that anything posted on the site is, in some sense, fair game to be looked over.
On the other hand . . . removing it certainly does encourage ad hominem arguments, doesn't it? Ad hominems are kind of useless and crappy and poison discourse. We don't want people to be arguing about the other person's previously-stated beliefs all the time, we want people to be responding to recent comments, in general.
But on the gripping hand . . .
. . . well, I just went to get a list of the ten most prolific users with hidden profiles. One of them has a few quality contributions! (Thanks!) Two of them are neutral. And seven of them have repeated antagonism, with many of those getting banned or permabanned.
If there's a tool mostly used by people who are fucking with the community, maybe that's a good argument for removing the tool.
On the, uh, other gripping hand, keep in mind that private profiles don't even work against the admins. We can see right through them (accompanied by a note that says "this profile is private"). So this feature change isn't for the sake of us, it's for the sake of you. Is that worth it? I dunno.
Feedback wanted! Again!
The Volunteer System is actually working and doing useful stuff at this point. It doesn't yet have write access, so to speak, all it's doing is providing info to the mods. But it's providing useful info. Fun fact: some of our absolute most reliable and trustworthy volunteers don't comment. In some cases "much", in some cases "at all". Keep it up, lurkers! This is useful! I seriously encourage everyone to click that banner once a day and spend a few minutes at it. Or even just bookmark the page and mash the bookmark once in a while - I've personally got it on my bookmark bar.
The big refactor mentioned at the top is actually for the sake of improving the volunteer system, this is part of what will let it turn into write access and let us solve stuff like filtered-comments-in-limbo, while taking a lot of load off the mods' backs and maybe even making our moderation more consistent. As a sort of ironic counterpart to this, it also means that the bar might show up less often.
At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers, but that takes a lot of code effort. Asking people to volunteer more often doesn't, so that's what I'm doing.
(Feedback wanted on this also.)
I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I would support getting rid of private profiles. It doesn't stop someone from keeping their own list of comments from users they might find convenient to bring up in a later argument, or just remembering. It does make it more difficult to track down comments that might be interesting or helpful.
Making alts to avoid bans seems like a no-brainer immediate long ban to me. Replying to yourself on alts also serves no purpose except to mislead other others; I would modhat and ban aggressively if you know for a fact this is happening.
There's a rule on the sidebar, "proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be." (emphasis mine). I think this rule is a great idea, as it supersedes meandering arguments about burden of proof that would otherwise consist of "no you" back and forth. It also encourages users to, well, do as it says, and provide evidence for things! But, that's only if the rule is enforced. This might be the rule with the highest ratio of violators to modhat comments, in my opinion. Sometimes it feels like I must be crazy, and have to scroll down the sidebar to make sure it still exists, because it feels like no one else knows it's there. Either that, or my idea of what is proportional here is entirely out of calibration with everyone else. I think it would improve the forum greatly, and help cut down on low-effort vagueposting, to more vigorously enforce this rule.
Amadan disagrees with you
Amadan can disagree, but I don't think I have seen a modhat comment explicitly invoke that rule in a long time. Since the migration off of reddit, at least. If they have receipts, I would be happy to see them. @ZorbaTHut, since this is a meta-thread do you mind if I tag them in this thread (or you can let them know or whatever you think is best) to ask for specific examples?
Cjet at least a couple times. Zorba too. Amadan used to more, but not recently, afaik. Same for nara.
I suspect things which might be labeled inflammatory usually get modded for booing. Especially since only the latter is a report option!
Thanks, and I feel especially bad now since I upvoted one of those! (It is old, to be fair to me). I do feel like the standard here is pretty low, and is more along the lines of "discourage the worst posts" rather than "encourage a high standard of discussion" but I'll take what I can get.
I meant to mention this fact originally; since several rules are not listed on the report default, I assumed this was either a technical limitation or to prevent decision paralysis.
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One problem we've got, that I'm having trouble solving, is that we could use more mod time to aim at issues like this. Unfortunately, the way we last got mods, through the Doge system, is very difficult right now because it relied on a working on-site chat system. Which we currently don't have.
And some of this gets kinda obsoleted if I get the volunteer system in place. So maybe I should work on that? Or maybe I shouldn't, maybe I should take a break from that to solve the doge/new-mod problem.
I'll look into this a bit more, at least.
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