Wakey wakey mods...
- Thread starter ScottulusMaximus
- Start date
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huh? by whom?
Granted I skimmed some posts here (Vaudril's was even more tl/dr than usual) but i thought the gist was all constructive.
I certainly don't feel like anyone's insulting me. I do my part, and I'm reasonably sure the rest of the team appreciates it
Not you, it's jordsta(whom I've butted heads with before) who acts like FTB's cheerleader and sole protector and it gets wearisome...
Haha and apologies to Padfoote for straining the leash of his self control.
Anyway back on topic, the "don't want to add more mods in case someone goes mad" argument is a fail for me. You're balancing something that might happen(with a very remote chance) against something that is happening everyday to destroy the sites reputation.
Agreed on this front. And FWIW, you and the other spam cleaners have probably nuked fewer legitimate posts than I have on accident.
Eh, I'll take the criticism, I actually prefer getting it to know what's going on here for everyone rather than not hearing anything.
???
You realize that I am starting up competition to FTB , so cheering it on isn't really something I'd do?
And as for the job thing... Do you really think any of the FTB staff/moderators do this as a full time job (or at least moderating the forums)?
That's probably his interpretation of my admonition to not just hire a bunch of people and throw them at it. And I stand by that admonition; because it's a spike-phenomenon, you aren't going to retain the long-term interest of would-be moderators such that they'll be attentive for the spikes they're meant to handle anyway. If they were attentive enough to stick around, they'd be stepping all over each other toes for the off-periods. This doesn't mean don't get any more people, but understand the consequences of such (and I offer this same admonition on almost any issue of this nature because that's my political leaning; it's often not about more manpower/funding, it's about the right manpower/funding).
And I think now I will discuss the elephant in the room that's probably impolitic of me to discuss but that I stupidly assume people already know about: very simply and inelegantly put, the forum does not loom very largely in the FTB brass' day-to-day priority list.
This doesn't mean it isn't important, but it isn't important enough given the resource allocation in FTB's hierarchy. The main person who can handle all that administrivia I've mentioned, Captainnana, just so happens to have the skill set and list of duties that has him handling far more important issues in the org (namely, the actual management of FTB's actual services/launcher, which always come first, and which require a bit more attention than you might think; as a former executive in a firm whose primary products were home-grown secure information management solutions, I know this very very well). A few other people do have admin here, yes, but they don't necessarily have the know-how to craft the appropriate solutions and it's rather outside their field to be handling it anyway.
As I said before, it's hard to get the right convergence of qualities to have somebody on hand to fix this more regularly. They have to be trusted enough to be given the access, knowledgeable enough to know what to do with it, and not end up diverted to other projects where they'll get engrossed and not deal with the issues here. It's harder than it sounds in a volunteer organization where a lot of triage is going around, particularly in keeping somebody on something that's not at the top of the triage list when other things are (things just tend to drop off the list, like deactivating the account of a global moderator who retired several months ago when he really isn't logging in anyway to cause trouble
).Obviously barring getting an admin here who focuses on this stuff, if I had a wish list it would be:
- Lift the report cooldown, at least from the accounts who meet the "is actually a human and has been around the forum a little bit" criterion, with the publicly transmitted understanding that people who use the button to harass moderators will get a sledgehammer to their face.
- Get a few more spam cleaners activated, particularly if their activity period is 0400-1200 GMT (i.e. when the spambots are running rampant).
- Get at least one more moderator who is regularly and normally awake and active in that same 0400-1200 GMT period (not only to be there for the onslaught, but to reduce the queue actively; I can say from experience that it's super-annoying to wake up to a 90+ mod queue and have to clean it all).
I do wish folks luck on figuring it all out and making it work. The prosecution of the spambot war kept me good and angry for a long time myself and still has the potential to agitate me (some people get mad and flip tables when they're irritated about something, I tend to make numbered and bulleted lists; it took many years of honing to channel it into that, because I used to rage in all caps myself). Luckily now all I need to do about it is find a spot in the shade and wish folks well with it. =)
The mod queue is actually a lot easier to take care of thanks to a few improvements lately. That many items takes about five minutes now, assuming you aren't on mobile trying to handle it. So with that taken into account, having a few additional spam cleaners would be enough to take care of the issues that pop up when the rest of us aren't active. That being said, I know nothing of the process to become a spam cleaner, so I don't know what to be looking for to recommend people to the team.
For everyone who's confused about what this mod queue is that keeps getting tossed around, it's the area where all posts that get caught by the spam filter go for a moderator to approve them. As you all have seen, spam bots have figured out how to bypass it and are going crazy with that ability.
This thread really needs to be re-titled to "Wakey wakey admins..." Or even Slow for that matter.
When the first group of moderators were selected (my group) We were selected for all different time zones (this was before I got my night shift job)
Which mean during the day time (for me) I was banning bots and used to somewhat tag team Vauthil (Swear he used to sleep with one eye open on the forums anyway)
This whole Spam bot has been a problem for AGES! It's just being a joke nowadays, It took forever while for even slow or Nana to see the spam that was in front of them. (kinda a reason why I retired.. I loved being a moderator however hated being a garbage collector)
TL;DR - Admin/slow need to fix this problem, Doesn't come down to moderators all the time.
spam collector will can bored and leave anyway.
No one gets paid so meh.
When the first group of moderators were selected (my group) We were selected for all different time zones (this was before I got my night shift job)
Which mean during the day time (for me) I was banning bots and used to somewhat tag team Vauthil (Swear he used to sleep with one eye open on the forums anyway)
This whole Spam bot has been a problem for AGES! It's just being a joke nowadays, It took forever while for even slow or Nana to see the spam that was in front of them. (kinda a reason why I retired.. I loved being a moderator however hated being a garbage collector)
TL;DR - Admin/slow need to fix this problem, Doesn't come down to moderators all the time.
spam collector will can bored and leave anyway.
No one gets paid so meh.
From my experiences Slow is rarely on the forums. However, a few of the people who have posted here are in (potentially) direct contact with him daily via Skype, and other means of communication. So I wouldn't put it past them to have made him, and captainnana aware of the situation.
It's actually kinda funny you put it that way. For some of the core team, it's disinterest in the forums since it doesn't affect their "job" very much. But for people like slow and me, it's actually because we're afraid of messing things up by changing something we don't know the consequences of. I've actually intentionally spent a lot more time on the forums recently so when I did start trying to fix things I had a better feel for the community.
Which, as my main point, I do want to help do.
Spam bots are always going to be a major problem. They constantly evolve to bypass whatever measures you put in place to stop them. We do in fact have a team of spam cleaners who have the ability to click a button and ban a spambot as well as clean up all their threads. But you saw how helpful that was when they got out of control for a bit. Most spam is caught in the filter. We delete a few hundred posts a day that are never seen by the average user. I really don't think adding one more moderator, even one awake in the 0400-1200 GMT time period, will help much.
There are two types of people in the world. Those who religiously read every message they get, and those who don't. Slowpoke is of the latter, though partly due to the volume of messages he gets each day. I can guarantee I'll show up in a thread if someone pings me. Your first resort should be to report a post and let the moderators deal with it, but if you ping me I'll be happy to help.
That should be done asap. I have skipped spam reporting because waiting is annoying.