I like it! We can turn the entire bbs into a dystopian, mad max meets my little pony night-Mare!
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âTurn it intoâ⌠yeah⌠yeah. Lotta work to do there. 
My little unicorn chaser
Cyber-razor punk maser
On a more serious note, @codinghorror by way of seeing flagged posts already has a dictionary of word combinations and structures that are deemed unacceptable. Stripping meaningless words, utilizing stop words, and employing⌠Sigh⌠Artificial Neural Networks could result in Classifiers that catch bad actors before falcor even has a chance to eat them.
No cooloff necessary, and it would even catch abusive authors (like that guy who antinuous banned that claimed he lost fifty gazillion pounds eating only taters).
A simpler approach might be to auto-flag (or even force approval on) any post from a new user that contains dumb words like SJW, Killary, and junk like that. Or yâknow, breitbart.comâŚ
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Two possible issues Iâd see to forcing approval. If you make it clear whatâs happening, you could get people working at it until they figure out how to get things through. If you donât make it clear, you could get loads of âwhy havenât I been allowed to post?!? censorship!!!â posts.
Also, holy necrothread, Batman!
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I donât know how much work it would be for the mods to approve posts by new signups, but it is a good idea. Even with the occasional heat I get here, this is a valuable community, and worth preserving.
I have sometimes signed up for technical forums because I really needed the answer to a question, and posted as soon as I read the rules and got approved. This is not that kind of BBS, and any effort to keep random angry people from signing up and raging on BB is really appreciated.
(edit- I did not realize I was responding to an old thread)
all for it
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Allow new users one post per topic. If the Like / Flag ratio works in their favor they get a couple more posts. If they continue not drawing flags for a day they go up a trust level. Something like that should work and require much less mod intervention.
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I like it! But because me being me, I must add a horrific play on words.
âŚ
So, youâre suggesting banninâ Bannon?
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Huh, apparently thereâs a timeout for how old a comment you are allowed to edit.
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I wonder what triggered the re-opening of this thread.
Might have something to do with a certain HR decision regarding the US supreme courtâŚ
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I requested it be reopened. I think it makes sense, as broadly speaking there are two classes of discussions
- controversial topics
- literally every other topic
⌠and they behave very differently in practice, the former requiring far more moderation strictness than the latter.
We also had a related request come up recently here which is functionally identical
For the challenging discussions, what @sam proposed is that people would be limited in how often they could reply:
One post per user per hour
One post per user per day
One post per user per week
Perhaps with much more strict limits for new users, perhaps even excluding TL0 users entirely from replying â this would enforce the âyou must spend time reading to earn the right to reply to this protected topicâ rule broadly discussed above, though the reading required isnât specific to that topic, unfortunately.
I also have questions about how this would be triggered (flags? influx of new users?), since Iâd prefer that it be automatic versus mods having to consistently remember to flip a âthis is a contentious topicâ switch at the outset, because thatâs a lot to ask.
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18 months later, this feature does technically exist now, under Logs â Watched Words â Require Approval. Not sure if @orenwolf is a fan of this approach though.
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It is of course difficult to anticipate if a topic is contentious, or controversial. But for a start, boingers themselves could flag discussions of their posts as such. Of course this doesnât resolve the issues of suddenly heated subjects, as per discussion, or per random driving trollies.
Without re-reading the discussion, a possible part of a possible solution could be community moderators with a limited ability to mark threads as moderated, imposing limits like posting frequency etc.
I have been a member of a number of democratically structured organizations (one vote per member, every member who shows up for organizational meetings gets to speak) and in every one of them, at some point it has been proposed that new members should not be permitted to vote, or introduce issues, for some period of time.
Without commenting on whether this is a good or bad thing, I would simply like to note that it seems to be a very human thing - wanting to quell the voices of those who havenât been around long enough to know what points have already been addressed by the community.
I think people get understandably tired of explaining the same things over and over, and many value their own interest in avoiding tedium and exploring new issues more than they value enlightening new community members or being welcoming.
(Yes, I am aware that BBS is not a democracy.)
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How about âif a new user gets even one flag during their first [time period / number of posts] then their account is automatically suspended pending moderator review.â
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We do this for some terms, and will likely increase the number as needed. We hold those posts for approval, and it does catch several.
A version of this does exist to some extent. Itâs not as simple as one flag, but itâs close to it.
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