Iād credit that to the mods, who do strongly encourage flagging but who also chasten or banish offenders quickly enough that follow-up flagging is rarely required. In that regard the underuse might be a casualty of the systemās and modsā own success.
The Ignore analytic and threshold/alert system will definitely catch some sneakier offenders who know how to avoid the more obvious flags, though. This is one of the reasons I really appreciate your implementing it as a āshadowā flagging system. Iāve always thought this would be a particularly effective tool for BBS moderators and look forward to finally seeing it in action.
I canāt speak for others, but Iām parsimonious with flags in general because the site is remarkably low on trollies caught with the basic flags. Spam, Inappropriate, and (in most cases) Off-Topic posts are easy to catch and the mods are all over them immediately. I suspect āSomething Elseā is probably underutilised in comparison to the others but you have those metrics to validate it for yourselves.
I will say that I would be following the modsā encouragement to flag far more often if a āBad Faithā flag of the sort I described was available because there is a lot of that behaviour going on around here and it isnāt getting caught by the current flags.
Perhaps (with the modsā agreement and a public announcement of policy) you could simply re-label āSomething Elseā as āBad Faithā for a month or two on BB BBS as an experiment. I believe that flag requires some input in the text field, which would cut down the potential for abuse. I am sure the results would be useful and interesting for both you and the mods.
From what I saw, the guidelines were enforced fairly loosely in the Lounges. To be fair there were a lot of them, they were user-created, and it was also a reasonable assumption that the users whose consistently trollish behaviour was being discussed in a couple of them would never reach TL3.
I donāt entirely blame the system for what happened but the single āactual read timeā metric that allowed the āproblemā users to get TL3 and access to the Lounges probably needed additional existing factors taken into account (the other good stats your system tracks like number of Likes received by the community). Alternately, the member-created lounges should have had an additional invitation-only feature as I mentioned above.
As it is most of this discussion about the TL3 Lounges seems moot as the mods and publisher seem averse to turning on that functionality again.
Absolutely. I do understand that integrating payments and membership validation based on them would be an entirely new feature set and far from trivial to implement. I also understand that there are issues of moderating/openness philosophy and business-model fit related to it that might make it a non-starter. I thought Iād throw it out there as a more long-term suggestion for the devs, mods and publisher to consider as Iāve definitely seen it work elsewhere.
I appreciate your engaging with us at this level of detail as a developer. Itās a refreshing change from most other sites Iāve been on.
