Note edit wait time for new users?

There's been some note vandalism from throwaway accounts lately (post #312990, post #459913, post #283998, post #413295).
Would it be too harsh to set a waiting time before newly registered users can edit notes, like there is for posting and commenting? It's likely it's all from the same guy, so a ban may suffice.

Yeah, ever since post #470390 (where seven notes were deleted), I've been monitoring the note history with fervor and have been noticing random one-off deletes, from accounts of varying ages with little to no other recorded activity (whether it be comments, favorites, tagging, notes, etc).

Bump since this has been going on pretty regularly.
If admins can ban on IP, I think that would be a suitable solution.

Just out of curiosity I checked the note history from today to the beginning of the month to get an idea of how often the vandalism is. I could only easily pick out deletions, but here are the images that have had a note or notes deleted by vandalism (most recent July 14th to least recent July 1st):

post #481317
post #179210
post #436095
post #367760
post #212010
post #396343
post #443067
post #474512
post #477178
post #470376
post #299004

All these deletions have occurred by users who have done nothing else but these 1-2 note edits. While most of the accounts involved were created in the last 30 days, there were at least 2 that were several months (and I believe a year in one case) old.

Anyways, just stating what I saw.

What NWF Renim reports is (more or less) exactly what I've also been seeing myself. There does not seem to be much apparent pattern in what gets deleted, but the accounts that delete notes are clearly, as zatchii so terms it, throwaways.

Unfortunately these are all from different IP addresses. Not sure if there's a bug, it may be worthwhile to message these people to see if they claim innocence. I'm not sure if blocking note edits for the first week would help with the issue but I'll look into adding it.

What do you think the chances are of those deletions being accidental? Maybe they tried to edit a note, decided against it and hit delete instead of cancel?

Like albert said, though, I don't think wait time would help much, since it's not really the frequency of the edits that's the problem here.

I think it's a good idea for a mod to send them a warning message, perhaps even put it on their record so that they can easily be banned should they persist.

The chances of accidentality are effectively zero.
Note vandalism hasn't been a problem until quite recently, and now we're seeing it about a couple of times a day. The accounts show no other usage apart from a couple of note edits each, typically on a single post.
The vandalism sometimes are edits rather than deletions, as in post #418192 or post #460429.

They don't "persist" as such - it's a new account every time. Though the registration date varies, so whoever is doing it seems to have has a pool of accounts already.

I had hoped they would all be from a common IP for a quick solution, but ah well, it's pretty harmless and gets repaired quickly.

If those accounts are used for nothing else, I think they should be banned anyway. It probably won't solve the problem at hand, but it could only do good (it's not like anything of value would be lost).

You could always make note edits by normal accounts need mod/janitor approval. I don't know how hard that would be to implement and it would just add more work for mods/janitors, but if note vandalism persists then this seems like a pretty simple solution.

homeless_homo said: You could always make note edits by normal accounts need mod/janitor approval. I don't know how hard that would be to implement and it would just add more work for mods/janitors, but if note vandalism persists then this seems like a pretty simple solution.

While this sounds good in theory it would be very difficult to actually police.

Probably only half a dozen mods/janitors are truly qualified enough to police translations in this manner, and I know I'm not one of them.

I imagine that "Translator" class that was suggested some time ago might have been useful here. Though it doesn't sound like the vandalism is bad enough to warrant opening that up again.

homeless_homo said:
[...] pretty simple solution.

Strongly disagree. jxh has already described why.

My suggestion wasn't necessarily for us to check the credibility of the translations within the note itself, but to check for the removal/adding of notes in general.

If anything, all we would really need to have is a "flag for deletion" for notes. If you want to delete a note, flag it and give a reason.

Fair enough. While the idea of moderating each new note is far too big a scale to realise, a moderation of deletions may be a tamer, workable solution.

Still, as was mentioned, deletion of a note is almost completely intentional. Even moderation of deletions can be circumvented by deletion of the content of a note, not the note itself, which is mostly the same annoying result that someone has to monitor and fix.

I don't think it's that large a problem, as it's mostly fixed pretty quickly, though it requires the translators to be a bit more vigilant.
Every note edit already gets read, so just changing it from post-approval to pre-approval or shifting it over on someone less competent wouldn't save any work.
Probably best to do nothing.

Considering that it's pretty much child's play to revert a deleted or altered note via the Notes history, I don't see that there's anything that needs to be done, aside from increased vigilance on that front.

Quick question: I know that altering or adding a note bumps an image to the front of the recent notes listing, but does deleting a note do the same?

Yes, it does.
Just tried on an older translation of mine.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend placing too much restrictions on notes, seeing as they're really easy to revert one way or another.

I don't usually check the overall Note History list, but I'll start doing it more frequently and try to keep an eye out for deleted ones whenever I can.

One thing that would be worthwhile would be the ability to sort out only posts that had a deletion as the last change to its note history.

That would make tracking these things much simpler.

(unless you can do this already and I simply didn't look hard enough)