Blocks should be given more frequently and for less time.
Posted under General
recklessfirex said:
Especially when it comes with tag vandalism.Exhibit A: post #622696
Banned them all for obvious sock puppetry and vandalism.
the_redstar_swl said:
People roleplaying in the comments section should be dealt with similarly.
We actually have a provision against that in howto:comment. Please give out negatives to people who disregard it.
I have been thinking about the comment section for a while. I will likely write up a proposal for a new layout and interface for it in the next few weeks, after I'm done with a major work-related endeavor. It certainly isn't good as it is... To the point where it's unusable for its intended purpose. It needs work.
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To be honest, the only benefit I've seen thus far to come from the comment voting system is that the obnoxious comments are easily hidden. However, as this thread shows, it also leads to abuse.
In other words, I've seen no benefits thus far that wouldn't be outshined by a neutral "hide this comment" button (which I've asked for since the voting system was introduced).
I also have a pet theory that the comment voting system, as it is, encourages users to be lazy in reporting misbehavior in comments. Users who are repeatedly obnoxious on the commentary should be brought to the attention of the moderation team, not merely shuffled out of sight.
Once you see the annoying comment, the damage is already done so to say. Its not like you're going to see the same comment over and over.
I completely agree with the second paragraph however, but its tough enough to police danbooru without playing comment police and filling up the records page with negs just because someone was being particularly obnoxious. How does one define the border between mediocre comment and shit comment? This is why negs only get handed out to the most horrible comments.
How about a "can't post comments for x hours" that can be freely given out without the outrightness of a ban?
Kikimaru said:
I honestly think you guys are over-stressing on this. I find that the impromptu role-play and camaraderie just adds a bit of fun to Danbooru.
Why so serious?
Give an inch, they'll take a mile. As soon as you say a little bit is ok, suddenly it's everywhere.
Also how do you determine what is acceptable and what isn't? What makes instance A ok and instance B not?
It's all or nothing, and I'd personally rather there be no comments at all if the only other option is Youtube-level idiocy.
The howto:comment page could get some words about how to use the comment voting feature properly.
Surely most users who actually read it have a good insight on which reasons should make you vote up/down a comment, but we probably also have some people confused about it who think it's meant to work as a like/dislike system regardless of the comments usefulness.
What really annoys me is that people downvote questions, opinions, and mistakes in comments.
Asking questions as well as making mistakes are a part of learning, and just because someone does either doesn't mean the comment is bad. If you downvote a question, there's less of a chance of it getting answered for the convenience of the person who posted it as well as the people who wondered the same thing. If you downvote a mistake, especially without correcting it yourself, the poster may never realize whatever mistake it was that they made.
If someone criticizes a post that is generally liked, their comment gets downvoted. On the other hand, if someone expresses liking for a post that is generally criticized or hated (mostly guro pics) their comment gets downvoted. Opinions are diverse, and there is no reason to downvote them unless they are expressed in inflammatory ways.
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Meh, comment-voting is more of a popularity contest than anything else. People just don't understand that you're supposed to up-vote comments that -- whether you agree with someone's opinion or not -- add value, while the comments that are spammy or just plain-out terrible should be down-voted.
So yes, I agree with the notion that comment-voting here feels like YouTube's.
But, le-sigh, I suppose saying that is just going 'round in circles, since we all already know that comment-voting just doesn't work. And I don't think much can really be done to change any of this, given the... "special" mentality that people who flock to anime-related subject matter generally seem to exhibit. I know I'm painting with a very broad brush here, but it really seems kind of hopeless, and trusting the masses with the responsibility of crowd-sourcing comments on the site was an idea that was doomed from the start.
And after all, the reason we have a good quality-control level on post uploads (and post-voting, to an extent) is because the task of moderating them is delegated to a relatively small subset of people, who can generally be trusted. While comments, and comment-voting are not, which is why they're a big, fat problem. Though, I am not suggesting that creating comments should not be a public feature, since we would be severely narrowing the scope of people's opinions.
Anyway, I'm starting to tread into circular meta-level territory now. I guess comments are just a complicated problem we'll always have to deal with.
tl;dr: You can'ts trusts them's peoples on the Internets.
[edit: fixed typo]
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Bapabooiee said:
I know I'm painting with a very braud brush
Pure curiosity: did you mean "broad"? Or is that some mysterious word I don't know?
And re: comments, I believe there are ways to cure them, but it needs significantly more work. The voting system has been one of albert's famous *cough* summaries *cough* of a long discussion thread, and has been disliked and criticised pretty much from the beginning. It seems the dislikers were right.
I don't really have a ready solution to propose, but I think it'll need a combination of smarts built into the system (a'la Advogato's trust metric) and a maximally streamlined and optimised manual moderation system with robust history review capabilities. Things like this are one of the reasons I keep requesting DB dumps, but so far without much luck it seems.
葉月 said: did you mean "broad"? Or is that some mysterious word I don't know?
T'was a typo. I don't use a spell-checker (spell-checkers are my bane; they make you lazy), so I sometimes misspell stuff.
But regarding the comments issue, I am sure we can definitely improve it, but hopes aren't too high for actually truly solving it. It's a heavy issue, and -- in contrast to core system development -- is not something that's the least-bit trivial to solve, even with some smarts and what I presume to be a proven trust formula. It'll definitely be a tough one.
Also, considering Danbooru's development is (and I could be wrong) a one-man effort, Albert has got quite a plate full, and I think effectively tackling this issue would require a collaborative effort, or, as you suggested, giving public access to (sanatized) DB dumps, so that others could tinker with that dataset, and work on their own solutions using that data - and then possibly have their fixes or improvements fed upstream.
But hmm, maybe we should try taking a look at how other websites deal with their trust issues -- which, again, I do not think can be resolutely solved yet -- as I'm sure there's probably a few good examples we could take a gander at and learn from.
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Most sites frankly don't deal with these issues. Which is where youtube comments or any newspaper / political magazine comments come from. But then, as Yahoo! Answers shows with painful explicitness, these sites actually cater to the general public. We don't. We do value the community built around our goal, but it's a community built around a goal of having the best possible quality anime art repository.
We couldn't care less how much an average narutard thinks us elitist (in fact, I'd say it's a good thing if they do). And in this space of specialised, technically-oriented collaborative efforts, it's much easier to do something about it [1]. Out of these, Advogato is one of the better known ones, and something I'm most familiar with, with papers and source code published. But there's also years of research in Bayesian filters, which could probably be used to filter out a good deal of the least valuable comments. There's SpamKarma 2, which is absolutely amazing in what it can do and could presumably give much insight on properly implementing compound filters[2]. But most of all, we have enough competent moderators. I'm pretty sure giving us tools that don't conspire to take our sanity every time we so much as think of moderating the comments would be a better option than implementing youtube-style votes.
There are more radical possibilities lurking there too. For one, I'm not convinced a flat, globally-bumped list of all comments ever is the best approach, I've long thought of some way to provide threading and compartmentalisation allowing people to focus on things they care about and easily ignore things they don't need to see. I'm not exactly sure how to do it, but a variation on cliques is probably in order, which gets us back to a certificate network a'la Advogato.
[1] Aka. we believe there's a nonzero chance it's not entirely impossible
[2] Anyone up for reading delicious Wordpress-flavoured PHP?
Bapabooiee said:
So yes, I agree with the notion that comment-voting here feels like YouTube's.And I don't think much can really be done to change any of this, given the... "special" mentality that people who flock to anime-related subject matter generally seem to exhibit.
The very fact that you compare this system to that of YouTube seems to contradict your notion that the anime community is somehow special in this regard.