Slashdot Mirror
On the Subject of Trolls
So it happened again recently. You guys who read a lot probably know where but this time it was much more hurtful then usual. So I've implemented 2 changes to help prevent this from happening again.
First I added an additional scoring penalty to posts. Originally the default range of comment posting was 0 for ACs, and 1 for Registered Users. In addition, a +1 or -1 could be Registered users based on their posting history (I'm gonna use the word "Karma" to describe the sum of all moderation activity done to a given user: thanks nate). If a user has karma of +20, they get a +1 bonus to their comments. If their karm is -10, they get a -1. I've added an additional rank of -20 which ads one more -1 to the post, which will make it possible for a comment to be posted at -1.
There are only 2 accounts out of the 80,000 that are this low.
Second is a bit trickier. The code now checks for "Trolls" as part of comment validation. Essentially, when a comment is posted, a troll factor is computed for your Account and your IP. This is the sum of all moderator activity done to your account in the last 24 hours or so. If your IP or your User Account has a -5 or worse total, your comment will not be posted.
Right now there are 5 accounts in the system that should show up as trolls. 3 of them are the 3 worst offenders from the story that caused me to have to write this code.
It was hard for me to do this. I'm feeling pretty wierd because this is the first time I've ever made it impossible for anyone to post. My guess is that in the end this won't help: There is no end to the number of IPs or User Accounts a determined troll can acquire to continue pestering people trying to have a real discussion. All I can say to those of you who are offended is to try to browse at Score:1 or Score:2 because the moderation system as a whole works quite well. And to those of you who are causing the problem (and I know who you are) please grow up.
Update: 09/05 01:51 by CT : A lot of good points are being made in the comments, but let me try to justify something: I'm not trying to cause censorship, I'm trying to prevent a denial of service attack. Under this system it will be quite possible for a troll to post 5-10 comments before the system rejects him. This isn't a censorship thing: He's been given plenty of opportunity to speak, he's just screwed up. He's not trying to communicate, he's trying to drown out other speakers. This is precisely the kind of thing that we need to resolve to allow a rational discussion to continue at the scale we're dealing with here. There are most certainly loopholes here, but no system can stop all abuses. This will just make it a little trickier.
Other Ideas:
- No Anonymous Posts. You all know how I feel about this one.
- Restrict the # of comments any single IP/Account is allowed to make in a single article. This gets problematic: anyone have a good idea on how to make this fair, that will scale from 1 comment to a thousand?
- Assorted restrictions on AC posting (Allow only 1 AC per registered post? Allow only registered users to post top level comments? No AC posts after 100 comments in a story? There are dozens of ideas, but I think they all are bad)
Oh, and if enough people bitch, I'll remove the extra '-1' from new posts. I'm not convinced that its a good idea, but it *did* serve to solve the current problem.
Interesting problems, thanks for the feedback (good and bad!) I'm glad that some folks are addressing the issues instead of just swearing and screaming at each other. I'm open to any suggestions, but anything angry will simply be ignored.
I'd also like this. I've twice had moderation points time out because I didn't see five posts that really screamed out 'moderate me up.' Since I generally only check Slashdot once a day, it's easy to lose nearly half the time before even seeing I'm a moderator.
If you penalise trolls, please automatically inflict the penalty on all replies to trolls
"Until we as a society learn that we don't really want the government/media to protect us from ourselves, we're doomed as a nation to greater losses of freedoms. By /. advocating censorship, that's just one more nail in the freedom coffin."
Censorship in and of itself is not a bad thing. We all do it. How many of us use an answering machine to filter out the calls we don't want, or immediately trash any junk and mass-market snail mail? We all filter information. Even the most open-minded of the media do it, otherwise our morning papers would be three feet thick!
Censorship by a government is a bad thing. These are people who can't even run their own lives but try to run ours, and with our tax money to boot. It's an instance of our "rulers" determining what we see.
However, if slashdot deletes posts, that is a completely different thing. Slashdot is not the government. Unlike a government, when it deletes a post it is not eliminated from all other internet and real world outlets.
I don't own slashdot. You don't own slashdot. Only slashdot has any rights whatsoever in determining what gets posted and what doesn't. This affects nobody's freedoms. You have no rights to slashdot, just as nobody but you have rights to your website.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to speak. Freedom of the press includes the freedom not to publish.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
<RANT>
What I do not agree with, is what is moderated. Too often I see technical posts moderated down, and jokes moderated up. This is not "Slashdot: Comedy for Nerds." This is "Slashdot: News for Nerds." I want to learn, so I want to read posts from professional tech people. If I want to laugh, I'll listen to a professional comedian.
</RANT
Maybe we need a few more moderation points. Slashdot is growing and growing, and I don't think the number of eligible moderators is keeping up.
;)
I'd say "Let us keep our moderation points for longer than 3 days", since I often see nothing worth moderating during the 3 days I have my points, and end up either not using them, or wasting them on moderating down some childish post. I know that this will cause abuse, but I'll waste a paragraph on the idea anyway.
Maybe we could be issued a few more points, or be allowed to keep them for a few more days...
Part of what makes Slashdot Slashdot is that it's a community. Once you have Andover (no matter how cool or smart they are) behaving as full time moderators, you've taken the power from the community and placed it outside of our hands.
Though I sometimes don't agree with what moderators do to posts, I usually feel comfortable enough to browse at 0... the -1's usually trully are flame bait and such... I find it amusing when I post something, put clearly in the subject field that "This is Flamebait", ramble about something stupid, and then see the comment moderated up and spawning a whole new discussion thread!
My two cents are that:
1 - Moderators should get more points - I often don't moderate comments down because I feel my points would be better served highlighting the more insiteful comments than by filtering out people... With more points, I would feel more tempted to help point out the trolls.
2 - Posters of comments should be allowed (at least registered ones) to moderate themselves (just so you can see what they're thinking - I could moderate myself as offtopic, just so people would know that's what they're getting into). Don't have that posters moderation change the point total, just use it for a "mood"
3 - we need more categories for moderation
4 - allow more people to moderate at a time... Again, I tend to hold onto my points for a couple of days, hoping an interesting article gets posted, rather than getting drawn into an Apple vs Linux, or Redhat vs. Debian, or everyone vs. microsoft discussion. Having more active moderators with more points would definitely weed out the trolls and polish the gems.
5 - People who are consistently moderated down probably should start at 0... Don't make them go any lower than that, but rather send an automatic email to their account as a warning, and then discontinue their account... They can then sign up again with the same login, just make it a tad bit more difficult for people who abuse the system.
> posts at an automatic 2, I certainly have to
> agree. There are many times when I've posted
> something off-the-cuff that I've wished I
> could specify that it should be with a score of 1.
As another "+2 karma" poster, let me just say "me too", for precisely the same reasons.
More specifically, I propose that - at the time of posting - the poster of an article ought to have:
(a) his or her karma score displayed on the "post comment" form
(b) a pull-down option to select whether the post should be posted with a score of -1, 0, 1, or 2.
As for the issue of whether or not ACs should be allowed to post, IMHO they should. While there are many trolls and abuses of this privilege, there are also benefits. I find myself reading crypto/NSA/spooky posts and science posts at level 0, largely because in the case of the former, people with clue may also have a reason to want to post anonymously, and in the case of the latter, those with clue may not post frequently enough to Slashdot to justify the trouble of registering with the site. When it comes to astronomy, I'd much rather read the AC post at 0 from the Ph.D. in Astrophysics debunking the 5-10 registered posters at +1 who have no idea what they're talking about.
It's not just the blatant trolls that get under your skin. What's troubling (and disheartening for people concerned with the current state of humanity) is the huge number of attitudes expressed at Slashdot with attitudes like:
Keep in mind that here I'm not talking about people who are just saying that to get everyone riled up (i.e., "real trolls"), but people who say it with true spite for other people behind it.
I honestly do believe that there's a relatively high number of people here that have damaged psyches and could use some mental help. Stuff like this makes me think of Jon Katz's Hellmouth series and wonder if these people suffered abuse when they were younger which turned them into such despicable human beings. No matter how much it might seem like a short-term fix, cutting down other people instead of improving yourself will never give you the peace that you seek.
This site can be an entertaining read, but when you look at the big picture, it can be one of the most depressing sites on the web.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
P.S. Sorry if you've read some of this before, but I thought that this was a more appropriate thread for it.
First, I have to thank Malda for going through all the work of implementing a reasonably sane moderation system for the comments. Second, I'd like to point out that even though user comments comprise a substantial portion of the site, they're still a very small part of the "Slashdot Experience". Just remember to stay on target with the news and features (and of course the radio show :) and things will be good.
As far as the 'slashdot junkie' problem, that's exactly why I proposed that. If someone gets their /24 block banned from posting and there's a lot of other people on that /24 block, there'll be MAJOR hell to pay for the person getting them banned, and quite a few people will be quickly sending angry comments to their ISP, thereby removing the troll permanently, or at least until they get another ISP.
As far as spoofing, the IP address which is banned won't have been something that would have been validly routed at the time. If the ISP knows what they're doing, they'll realize that someone was spoofing. Unfortunately, most ISPs don't know what they're doing. :/ I don't see TCP/IP spoofing as being a major source of these problems, though. Most of the ACs in question are just (well, seem to be) stupid kids who know nothing but try to shout everything. Most notably being that one (I hope) particular AC in the Rich Stevens article who was spamming the discussion thread with porn sites under the guise of on-topic conversation and is likely the same one who kept on talking about "spraying his petrified face with scalding-hot jizz" or whatever. He made me nauseous with rage, in any case.
Maybe just punishing ACs on the same subnet, then, yeah... or maybe every day posting a list of the banned IP addresses and who caused the ban, if applicable.
And yeah, I know what Pvt Pyle did in that movie. :) But Pyle can't go and blow away Rob (well, actually, Rob's home address *is* easy to find...) and Pyle had other problems to begin with (not that the bad ACs here don't seem to to begin with). But as you said, it was an analogy. Just an analogy. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
I considered stopping to read the comments posted, because of the immaturity of many posters, but many of the comments are Insightful, and I enjoy reading, and contributing to them. Plus, the open forum idea adds to the overall quality of Slashdot. The A/C's detract from that quality, and piss a lot of people off. (Not only that, but as I pointed out to Rob, they're using up system resources with their bullshit too.)
This is a big Thank You to the management staff of this site. While I agree, it won't solve the problem of immaturity among posters, but it will curb it quite well.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
1) So say someone on my ISP posts a bunch of trolls and logs off, and that when I come home from work and go online, I get assigned that IP. Will I be blocked from posting? (Rob's essay said that if your account *or* IP had a sufficently bad record, you'd be blocked. Why isn't that an "and"?)
2) I've marvelled that there's no ad-spam on slashdot. Do you guys have a team of grunts that deletes those, or do the folks who flood USENET with "Pamela suck off Tommy Lee" posts just not peruse slashdot? If there is a troupe of squirells to delete ads, maybe they can be used to delete the really bad trolls.
3) What were the offending posts that inspired this?
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
While deleting bad posts seems to be a good idea, it really is a bad road to go down. Didn't Prodigy have this issues a few years ago? Once they started moderating posts, they became liable for anything that fell through the cracks.
There's also the question of where to draw the line. It is a tough one, and over time it is easy to become a little less stringent.
I'm strongly in favor of anonymous posting, and browse at -1 typically, though recent events are causing me to rethink that.
Yet, I am really happy to see CmdrTaco trying to do something, even if it proves futile. I've seen too many online communities suffer and wither from the irresponsible behavior of a very small minority of posters. I beg those leaving to consider that they are only giving the assholes exactly what they want, and worsening the problem by reducing the number of worthwhile posts.
I have to believe that if there is a technological solution that sufficient quality minds exist at slashdot to find it. CmdrTaco has made a good start.
The major problem I see is that its too easy to start a new account with a clean record. Could the number of new accounts created from a single IP be time limited - say no more than one per week?
I am not sure how dynamic IPs (for the majority of us on dialups) work into this scheme. Could someone explain?
Postings by none other than Alan himself, Bob Young, Jim Pick, Rasterman, and someone at Transmeta. And absolutely no mention of any bodily fluid. :/
Rob, I hate to see it, but I hope that your new code to deal with the trolls helps with the recent problems. I was saddened by the posts I saw yesterday. It's amazing how callous people can be. Sad little boys...
Censorship on /. seems really wrong to me, especially considering the recent article posted by Hemos on Congress trying to force censorship on the media. How is this any better? I believe it is a lot worse. Rob, even you admit that this "fix" has loopholes. What about people abusing the system to lock out other people from posting? (via open proxies)
/. is to get a rise out of people. Take that away, and the trolls go away.
/. community problem that requires the community to fix it. No manner of technology can fix it.
/. advocating censorship, that's just one more nail in the freedom coffin.
If you really want to stop things like hate speech or blatent trolls, the only way to stop them is to get/teach people to NOT respond. The only reason someone posts this on a public forum like
Let's face it, this is a
I hope Rob you'll reconsider this move. 99.99999% of us may loathe 0.0001% of the posts, but that doesn't mean that we should censor them out, even if they are blatent trolls. We all have to learn to grow up and just ignore them. Trying to censor them won't make them go away; rather it will just make them more determined to find a way to work around the censorship.
Until we as a society learn that we don't really want the government/media to protect us from ourselves, we're doomed as a nation to greater losses of freedoms. By
If you want to rate them -20 or something like that, so that people have to opt-in to read trolls, that's fine. But don't kill the posts.
I agree with Rob. You can't just let any idiot "express" himself (if trolls are an expression form) at the loss of others.
Freedom of speech OK, anarchy NO.
Most of the people who will protest against Rob's decision are the ones who, in their posts, usually promote the idea of censoring everybody who doesn't share their opinions.
Every society finds itself confronted with this very problem eventually, which can be seen i.e. with the "first ammendment" of the US constitution. On behalf of a supposedly guaranteed freedom of speech, how many morons/lunatics/facists abuse the system every day? I'm not promoting censorship (censorshit?), far from it. Just agreeing with the idea of keeping immature and stupid people away from what would one consider as an intelligent discussion space, at least until they *learn* something from their peers.
Opinions are like assholes, we all got one but you ain't forced to show it to everybody.
Just my 0.02 (let's be different!)
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Even worse! Lets look at this situation:
1) someone dials up to my ISP and floods slashdot. They get a -10000 rating.
2) Said person disconnects
3) I dialup to my ISP and get the same IP address as this luser.
4) I try to post
5) my post is rejected.
It seems to me that basing my rating on my IP is __very__ dangerous.
How many people will be turned away from /. by those events?
Tom Christiansen sure looked disgusted with Good riddance, Slashdot in the title of his post.
I understand that seeking attention is part of the puberty process, but if you kids have really chosen Linux as your operating system of choice because you think it has potential, not just because you hate (or think you hate) Windows, then please, act so.
Good way to get attention from the linux crowd:
- Submit interesting/meaningful comments... Be mature, that's you're chance to be listened to!
- Code! Didn't Alan Cox said something like he wished
/. would be more first patch! rather than frst psot!!!!!! - If you can't code, do something for the community! submit bug reports, write documentation, help people installing Linux...
- Last but not least, please do not annoy anybody... Sure this isn't a perfect world, but if you call yourself a Linux user, behave like one and show respect.
Do kids really get a kick behaving like assholes? Is that it? Well kids, seat back and think about the way you have hurt W. Richard Stevens's family. The guy is dead. He was well respected and a lot of people will miss him because he wrote good unix books and knew in depth the stuff he was talking about. Think about the way you have made not onlyNow, nobody actually asked you to use Linux. If you get pissed at people because you can't use it, there are alternatives!
Download the latest litestep and show your hax0r dude friends on IRC how cool you are while running those warscr1pts on your illegal copy of mirc...
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"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
The problem with this idea is, who would do it?
Enough people think that moderators are biased as it is. Giving moderators the power to delete posts would be disastrous. There are an awful lot of moderators, and I'm sure there are a few bad apples among them, even with all the controls that are established. The good thing about the system as it currently stands is that other moderators can counteract the effects of an evil moderator, and possibly even identify him as ineligible for moderation (The system is still vulnerable to the excesses of democracy, but I digress).
Giving the power of deletion to moderators would take away that balance, since once a message is deleted, nobody can undelete it, because nobody will know that it was there, except the poster (who will, of course, start bombarding Rob with e-mail about how he's being censored). I suppose you could set things up so that other moderators could see deleted posts, but then that wouldn't be deletion anymore, it would just be adding a -2 moderation level, which wouldn't really solve anything.
Furthermore, regardless of whether moerators actually did abuse their power, accusations of abuse and censorship would fly back and fourth, and everyone would start b*tching about how they are being censored. It just wouldn't be worth it.
As for CmdrTaco personally doing it, as you seem to be suggesting, that would be even worse. It's not like he doesn't have enough to do, and get enough flameage already, without becoming the Troll Police. There's just too many comments for one person to check them all, especially one person who happens to already be administering the site, and would also be way too much of a strain on that person. Rob claims to have asbestos skin, but I really doubt he'd want to take on this job, considering the (literally) thousands of flames he'd get for it.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" -Salvor Hardin
If a poster has a trollish history, make all "Troll" moderations count triple. That way trolls will still get moderated down with the normal moderation system, people who want to read EVERYTHING (on slashdot, not Everything :) ) will still get to see them, but moderation points will still be available to moderate up good posts.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
What I really dislike is how many of the automatic 2s are because of funny posts. IMO, 'funny' points shouldn't count towards positive karma. Conversely, 'troll' points should count twice towards negative karma or, perhaps, if the -5 daily karma limit is hit, that should count as an additional of -5 overall karma too.
One flaw with your treatise, however... rather than doing a hard reset every 2 or 3 weeks, the "karma zone" should just take a running time period of 2 or 3 weeks. So, the comments I post in the last 2 or 3 weeks would count towards my karma.
Another thing that would help with is the opposite of the problem with automatic moderation up: moderators are, as far as I've observed, less likely to moderate up a comment which is already scored 2. The only notable exception of this is certain people whose comments always immediately get moderated up to +5 for being insightful (*cough*Bruce Perens*cough*), though I'm not too bitter about that since said peoples' posts usually are insightful or informative. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
I think a good solution would be a personal kill file, where certain troublesome users could be filtered on an individual basis (or automatically given -1, or 0). This would also be a welcome feature for avoiding Bible thumpers and Mac zealots, since you can't really moderate them down across the board (well you can, but it would be in very poor taste)
This wouldn't help much for AC's, so I propose getting rid of them entirely. If someone waned to post something anonymously, they still could. You could also have 'soft' anonymity, and 'hard' anonymity. With Soft, things like default scores, and kill files would still work. Hard anonymity would strip the identity in the software, forever removing any record of 'who' posted. It would get a +1 score. Perhaps for problem users, we could remove the 'hard' anonymity option
Sorry my writing is so crappy, I just woke up
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Another Idea on how to deal with really offensive posts:
If, say, tree different moderators decide to moderate a post down, they get back the moderation point they used. This way, stamping really obnoxious stuff doesn't cost the moderators any points and can thus be done witout running into the "moderation DoS attack".
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