Note Locking (Builder+) and Post Locking (Admin only)

issue #2743 brings up the possibility of getting rid of note and post locks, as they are seemingly rarely used. Before anything is decided though, it would be good if the rest of the community chimed in on this, to ensure that nothing gets missed.

Here are some of the facts in regards to those locks as presented on GitHub:

Evazion said: (excerpt/paraphrased)

• There are no status-locked posts.
• Note locking is hardly used: only 100 uploads in the past 6 years.
• Most don't have notes or text to begin with.
• The majority of locked posts date from 2008 or earlier, presumably when anonymous editing was still a thing?

Let me put it this way: if we unlocked every post more than 2 years old we'd be left with 16 note locked posts. I see only two vandals among those, both of whom were banned right away and didn't come back. So I think vandalism is a non-issue, it's rare and note-locking doesn't stop it, at best it just shifts vandalism to other posts.

Thoughts?

I've always wondered why we lock the post rather than accounts. If two users get into some kind of verbally-unstoppable edit war on a post, it seems rather silly to lock the post from anyone editing it rather than temporarily removing editing privileges from the offending user accounts.

Sometimes users get terribly offended by a specific image and keep making new accounts to edit it.

With the 7 days delay on editing for new accounts i think a easy way "undo everything this user did + ban" is plenty.

Maybe instead of having them as locks, would it instead be useful to have them function as some kind of edit event notification flag, that is, any time that post/note/wiki/pool/whatever gets edited, it'd get fed to something similar to the mod_actions page. It could be called something like "High Interest Items" page.

Taking itsonlyaname's example, if the post that the vandal is obsessed with gets flagged as a high-interest item, if that same user tries to come back and edit that page from a different account, it would immediately pop up an event on the "High Interest Items" page. Since all user's would be able to monitor such a theoretical page, they could then much more quickly catch any bad edits by the same user as well as notify a Moderator/Admin.

Thoughts?

Well, does it really COST anything to have a function that is almost never used? I don't see any benefit in actively taking a capability away from oneself.

That said, the "High Interest Items" proposal seems perfectly sensible. Unlike Wikipedia needing to lock anything that gets mentioned in a highly trafficked part of social media or television, if the need for the function is so rare, then it shouldn't be much hassle for a mod to respond to each case individually.

itsonlyaname said:

Sometimes users get terribly offended by a specific image and keep making new accounts to edit it.

With the 7 days delay on editing for new accounts i think a easy way "undo everything this user did + ban" is plenty.

The probation period for new accounts is ineffective against dedicated vandals who are willing to create multiple accounts at once. When one gets banned, it doesn't matter, because they already have a dozen more on standby. There are steps that may be taken to mitigate this, like comparing IPs to detect sockpuppets, but no single tool is enough to prevent all malicious activity.

Also, some vandals are persistent enough to keep making sockpuppets for months on end. Just look at post #2184839's tag edit history. Seven days is nothing to anyone with the patience to keep that up.

iridescent_slime said:

The probation period for new accounts is ineffective against dedicated vandals who are willing to create multiple accounts at once. When one gets banned, it doesn't matter, because they already have a dozen more on standby. There are steps that may be taken to mitigate this, like comparing IPs to detect sockpuppets, but no single tool is enough to prevent all malicious activity.

Also, some vandals are persistent enough to keep making sockpuppets for months on end. Just look at post #2184839's tag edit history. Seven days is nothing to anyone with the patience to keep that up.

Not that this is directly related to the topic at hand, but... Who has so little else to do with their life that they want to dedicate it to removing a "no socks" tag?!

NWSiaCB said:

Well, does it really COST anything to have a function that is almost never used? I don't see any benefit in actively taking a capability away from oneself.

There's a cost in maintaining the code. Every little thing adds up and increases complexity, and after ten years the site has grown a lot of complexity.

This came about because I wanted to remove the options in the mode menu that nobody uses and replace them with metatags + tagscripting. So I added the ability to tag posts with locked:rating / locked:notes / locked:status to lock them (likewise with -locked:notes to unlock). But I was about to announce this when I checked locked:notes and realized: no one actually uses note locks, so why am I wasting time on this?

Also there's a long-standing issue that locks aren't recorded in a post's version history. Any builder can lock anything with no record of when or who did it. That ought to be tracked, but at the same time I don't think it's worth the effort when note locks have been basically unused for the last five years.

Generally I use note locks when there's some sort of back-and-forth note edit war going on. This usually only happens either with a persistent note vandal (like a certain foot fetishist a while ago), or with translation style disputes (honorifics, family name/last name order, translation of certain in-universe terminologies, etc.). Sure, other Builder-level and above translators can revert the note lock, but in my experience those aren't the type to initiate edit wars anyway.

I don't think it's absolutely necessary per se, but it is occasionally useful as a tool of last resort.

We can probably remove it provided we have better moderation tools to deal with vandals.