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Yeah, I was guessing it was very much a Potter Stewart kind of thing.

Some forums have a “must comment X times before you can start a thread” policy, but I think that just leads to mindless spam commenting just to fulfil a random quota.

 d-usa wrote:
Some forums have a “must comment X times before you can start a thread” policy, but I think that just leads to mindless spam commenting just to fulfil a random quota.

Aye and such policies often do more harm than good; yes they kind of stop spam but not really as spam systems easily copy-paste a load of posts to get there; the only sure fire way to stop spam is moderated early posts and unless you've got an active mod team on at all hours of the day 7 days a week that will fail (in fact when it takes more than a day for posts to appear whilst waiting for a mod a lot of new members move on fast)

 Mysterio wrote:
What's the threshold that has to be passed to become an Established member of Dakka Dakka?

About 26,200.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:

 War Drone wrote:
Totally agree with Kronk on this (though I wouldn't dream of hitting the triangle with my lowly post count).

Speaking as someone with moderator experience on other sites, and as this post appears to have been overlooked I'd like to encourage you to change your viewpoint. Reports are essential for moderators to get, be they from brand new members or those who have been around for years. Post count doesn't matter, the report tool is your means to highlight problems or issue on the site for mods to review.

Mods are people too and they don't see everything, plus they might well not interpret a post or thread in the same way as you have. So even where you see a problem or an inappropriate comment a passing mod might not. Sharing your views through reporting (and commenting in the report) is a means to enlighten the mod team to your interpretation (which might be a view many share).

Effective reporting is a critical part of effective moderating of a site.

Exactly! Report early! Report often!

Help the mods get better. They mostly screw around on Facebook, anyway.

The way a useralert appears to us, we can click on a link to see who reported a post but we immediately see the little explantion written about why they are reporting the post. Perhaps from sheer laziness, I can say this description matters more to me than the ID of the person reporting. That said, I look at every single modalert I come across and try to look at the preceding posts and figure out what's going on.

 kronk wrote:

 Mysterio wrote:
What's the threshold that has to be passed to become an Established member of Dakka Dakka?

About 26,200.

Along with a redesign of Dakka to just be tiles of cowbell-playing and migration to the url of Kronk.com

Teena Hancock. Every time I see a long winded 'look how deep this is, let's have a discussion which I can not participate in' post from them I seethe internally with the rage only a nerd with nothing better to do can summon.

 CREEEEEEEEED wrote:
Teena Hancock. Every time I see a long winded 'look how deep this is, let's have a discussion which I can not participate in' post from them I seethe internally with the rage only a nerd with nothing better to do can summon.

This.

Is it possible to at least contain these types of posters (content creators?) to individual threads like in news and rumors? It is annoying to click on say painting and modeling tutorials, or Warmahordes, and there are 15 topics on the first page all by the same person who only dumps a link to their YouTube battle report/tutorial.

 CREEEEEEEEED wrote:
Teena Hancock. Every time I see a long winded 'look how deep this is, let's have a discussion which I can not participate in' post from them I seethe internally with the rage only a nerd with nothing better to do can summon.

If I wrote “+1!”, I would be spamming...

feth it. +1!

Also, Exalted!

Sure we all have our pet hates, but they're arbitrary. A fair amount of my Facebook feed is friends posting pictures of lunches they've ordered in a cafe, or Christ forbid, cups of coffee. I just scroll down through it to get to the stuff which might actually engage me. Not worth your time or energy getting bothered about it.

 Overread wrote:

 War Drone wrote:
Totally agree with Kronk on this (though I wouldn't dream of hitting the triangle with my lowly post count).

Speaking as someone with moderator experience on other sites, and as this post appears to have been overlooked I'd like to encourage you to change your viewpoint. Reports are essential for moderators to get, be they from brand new members or those who have been around for years. Post count doesn't matter, the report tool is your means to highlight problems or issue on the site for mods to review.

Mods are people too and they don't see everything, plus they might well not interpret a post or thread in the same way as you have. So even where you see a problem or an inappropriate comment a passing mod might not. Sharing your views through reporting (and commenting in the report) is a means to enlighten the mod team to your interpretation (which might be a view many share).

Effective reporting is a critical part of effective moderating of a site.

Absolutely this.

 greatbigtree wrote:
The point of the site is to hopefully generate interesting content.

The point of a discussion forum is to generate discussion.

 Dendarien wrote:

Is it possible to at least contain these types of posters (content creators?) to individual threads like in news and rumors? It is annoying to click on say painting and modeling tutorials, or Warmahordes, and there are 15 topics on the first page all by the same person who only dumps a link to their YouTube battle report/tutorial.

That's certainly a possibility, and is something we have done in the past where a poster is generating multiple threads in short spans of time. If you see someone doing that, report it and we'll look into it. Usually it's just a matter of us sending a request to the poster to limit themselves to a single thread within a given timeframe.


For the overall issue - as I said just above, the point of a discussion forum is to generate discussion. Within that, we also try to provide an open venue for people to share their hobby related content, because for the most part more exposure to things that people might otherwise not see is good for the community overall. Whether or not the original poster participates further in the thread after the opening post is really rather irrelevant. All we're really looking for is - does it generate discussion and/or is it hobby content worth sharing?

We DO however ask that some effort be made. If someone is just posting links to YouTube videos or Blogs with no accompanying explanation, that's likely going to be considered spam. Whether or not they participate after that, we expect some actual content in the thread opener.

And yet, the DakkaDakka website houses interesting non-discussion generating content. As noted, the galleries. What can I say? This site is demonstrably more than just a forum. I'm happy for that.

Hooray for discussion generating threads!

I think part of the issue is where it's posted. For instance: "Check out what glasshammer gaming is saying about Custodes" gets posted to the 40K tactics subforum with only a link. I'm fine with resources being out available, it's just that it's hard to have a discussion without the content being there and it ends up defeating the entire purpose of having a subforum if all the content is external. And when it's strategically set up in the most popular subforum (rather than say Dakka Discussions or even swap shop) it looks a lot like someone is trying to drive clicks to their site rather than contributing to the dakka community.


EDIT: I think a solution might be an "External resources" subforum in each major group (40K, AOS, etc) where people can post those links.

While annoying, this is pretty simply "I don't like it, so I don't click on it."

I suppose if I got really frustrated, I'd just add the person to my ignore list.

Otherwise, I think the free market takes care of these threads.

I think the best of all possible worlds would be not seeing threads created by people on your ignore list.

I feel like everyone would be a winner, and as a bonus, this is how you would think the ignore functionality should work in the first place.

Reiterating this:
Teena just needs to be a banned account. There's no value or substance to the posts being plugged by that bot. The posts themselves have key elements wrong to start with, which seems to be part of a drive to get traffic to their site/blog and get discussion there.

 Polonius wrote:
While annoying, this is pretty simply "I don't like it, so I don't click on it."

I suppose if I got really frustrated, I'd just add the person to my ignore list.

Otherwise, I think the free market takes care of these threads.

This seems right to me.

Maybe I haven't seen enough examples but I think there's a fairly clear distinction between when an advertising account is constructive and when it isn't. If some company making 3D terrain for tabletop use opens a thread about some line of trees or buildings they're doing, answers questions, and even posts updates or new products in the same thread, it's a win-win. Yes, they're making money, but they're engaging the community, fostering discussion and making some money by catering supply to the demand.

If someone posts a battle report and it's literally just an embed of their youtube video, ok, whatever, if no discussion comes of it there but they're bouncing ideas off in the general discussion or tactics subforum trying to refine their list they're still contributing and engaging elsewhere on the site, even if the thread itself is bust.

In contrast, the Warzone Studio posts are on the other extreme. Almost all of their activity is to open a new thread with an excerpt from one of their articles and a link (at time of writing, 94 opened threads out of 106 posts total) and while the articles themselves are typical (from what they've posted, I'll never click the link) the resulting discussion is usually someone challenging a statement they've made or asking for clarification, only to be chastised by someone else for having fallen for the bot, at which point the thread either dies or splinters off some other discussion that was already happening in another thread.

I wouldn't call them disruptive, but I do find them annoying. And I dread what would happen if the likes of Spikeybits or BoLS followed their example.

 Manchu wrote:

 Polonius wrote:
While annoying, this is pretty simply "I don't like it, so I don't click on it."

I suppose if I got really frustrated, I'd just add the person to my ignore list.

Otherwise, I think the free market takes care of these threads.

This seems right to me.

That's great and all when it comes to the more active forums, but in AoS' combined mass of a forum(Background AND General Discussion!) it means threads with life still left in them get vanished since the bot keeps adding new posts every time a new release comes out.

It'd also work a lot better if ignoring a person removed their threads from the thread lists, but that doesn't happen.

 Mysterio wrote:
What's the threshold that has to be passed to become an Established member of Dakka Dakka?

I've seen subreddits that had a posting threshold where for every thread you create linking to your website/blog/youtube channel, you had to make X posts in other people's threads. Don't know what X was, but it was probably something small like 5.

Personally, I don't have a problem with it, but I think Achilles's new thread every time he posts a new video is a bit much - especially when they never generate any discussion at all. I love GMG and subscribe on Youtube, but I'd rather see a single thread for all GMG-related posts rather than having them spread out everywhere. There are lesser used subforums on here that are half GMG video threads with 0 replies.

 Sqorgar wrote:

 Mysterio wrote:
What's the threshold that has to be passed to become an Established member of Dakka Dakka?

I've seen subreddits that had a posting threshold where for every thread you create linking to your website/blog/youtube channel, you had to make X posts in other people's threads. Don't know what X was, but it was probably something small like 5.

Personally, I don't have a problem with it, but I think Achilles's new thread every time he posts a new video is a bit much - especially when they never generate any discussion at all. I love GMG and subscribe on Youtube, but I'd rather see a single thread for all GMG-related posts rather than having them spread out everywhere. There are lesser used subforums on here that are half GMG video threads with 0 replies.

From an attracting people to content perspective, it would surely make more sense to have only one thread which then the person keeps posting in? Because then people can subscribe to that thread and so will be notified every time a new link to a video is posted, rather than have to keep checking the subforum.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
From an attracting people to content perspective, it would surely make more sense to have only one thread which then the person keeps posting in?

That's a super good question because this is already the standard that bits vendors like Victoria, Kromlech, Puppetswar, etc are held to.

 Sqorgar wrote:
I've seen subreddits that had a posting threshold where for every thread you create linking to your website/blog/youtube channel, you had to make X posts in other people's threads. Don't know what X was, but it was probably something small like 5.

That seems like medicine worse than the disease - I'd probably rather see one easily ignored spam thread than a large influx in low-quality post padding everywhere.

Maybe:
"Reply to comments in your thread within 1 week, or the thread is closed by week 2".

The problem with automated rules like "reply or it's closed" is that it's too easy for bots (and posters whose "contributions" are indistinguishable from bots) to get around it. The bot will just quote a random comment and say "thanks for commenting" to keep their thread open, if it even matters once most people have already seen it and they've moved on to a new spam post. There's no substitute for a human moderator taking a look at posting history and deciding that, if someone's behavior is indistinguishable from a bot, they get banned like a bot.

Better than threads about female knight pilots

I was thinking about known users getting a guardian-mod making sure they abide.
Automated systems are too dumb to help, as you say.

I think that a system like that is, more or less, already in place.

So volunteers that are already dealing with actively disruptive posters now need to spend more of their free time dealing with non-disruptive posters?

No one gets their feelings hurt / flamewars started over junk posts. Or links to outside content. There's no HARM being caused. Other than the potential loss of a couple seconds time wherein someone actively clicked the click bait and then had a "Damnit! I clicked the clickbait again! They chumped me! I'm gonna piss and moan about it now!" moment. Because their time is so very, very valuable. That after clicking on the click bait they then need to spend minutes thereafter complaining about it. And complaining about it. and complaining about it. and *you guessed it!* complaining about it.

UHR-Mhur-Gherrd! It drags down the quality of the site! People will see that and never come back because a single "Oh crap I clicked the Click bait" event will make them say "feth it, y'all need a hi-er qual-tee posts er I'ma not commin' back!" and their buddy will be like, "Y'unk-too!"

And since that didn't happen, this defense of the position is also just bunk. If you know who's posting it, don't click it. If you click it, and you realize you were chumped, laugh it off and try your luck elsewhere. Get off the narcicism train. It doesn't go anywhere. Except back to my beautiful, captivating face. But enough about my face. Let's talk about the other parts of me that are amazing. Like my round physique. So round.

 greatbigtree wrote:
So volunteers that are already dealing with actively disruptive posters now need to spend more of their free time dealing with non-disruptive posters?

No one gets their feelings hurt / flamewars started over junk posts. Or links to outside content. There's no HARM being caused. Other than the potential loss of a couple seconds time wherein someone actively clicked the click bait and then had a "Damnit! I clicked the clickbait again! They chumped me! I'm gonna piss and moan about it now!" moment. Because their time is so very, very valuable. That after clicking on the click bait they then need to spend minutes thereafter complaining about it. And complaining about it. and complaining about it. and *you guessed it!* complaining about it.

UHR-Mhur-Gherrd! It drags down the quality of the site! People will see that and never come back because a single "Oh crap I clicked the Click bait" event will make them say "feth it, y'all need a hi-er qual-tee posts er I'ma not commin' back!" and their buddy will be like, "Y'unk-too!"

And since that didn't happen, this defense of the position is also just bunk. If you know who's posting it, don't click it. If you click it, and you realize you were chumped, laugh it off and try your luck elsewhere. Get off the narcicism train. It doesn't go anywhere. Except back to my beautiful, captivating face. But enough about my face. Let's talk about the other parts of me that are amazing. Like my round physique. So round.

You could say the exact same thing about the BUY CHEAP KITCHENS NOW spambots, and yet we still delete that trash.

False comparison. Designer kitchens at discount prices have nothing to do with war gaming, while blogs, sites, and whatever else the cool kids are doing these days that are dedicated to war gaming are, you know, about war gaming and not about other things that get removed.

Because they're not the same, falsely equivalent thing. Unlike these wicked scarecrows that keep being put up. Those are basically the same thing. Could you just ignore me, or something? That would be best for both of us.