Premoderation gone a bit too far

S

shkhln

I noticed some newly registered users have their second (and possibly subsequent) posts hidden for several hours, then these posts pop up right in the middle of the thread when they are eventually shown. What's the deal with that?
 
You may have noticed also that our FreeBSD-Forums are clean from advertising spam and other misbehaving first posts of "new members" whose primary intentions are exploiting the forum resources and breaking the Forum-Rules. And many of them are one shot only attempts and possible repeatings of those attempts.

We absolutely do not want to see this here so there is a need for "moderation" which means work has to be done and that takes time until it is done.

Unfortunately times have changed where breaking the rules may be preferred over respecting the rules by more than expected. So I think that delaying "premoderation" regarding the few first postings is the price to be paid for a well maintained forum for which I'm tankful to those doing this job mostly unnoticed.
 
What have I done to deserve an exceedingly condescending "how spam works on the internet" lecture? The emphasis is on the second and subsequent posts part. Reviewing the first post should be enough.
 
The first 10 posts a new user makes must be approved by a moderator.

shkhln I know the post that sparked this question and I agree it was confusing.
The thread was marked as solved but we could not see the users post in the same thread as to solution.

No big deal but it was surprising to see a comment land out of chronological order. Now I know why.
 
Phishfry said:
shkhln I know the post that sparked this question and I agree it was confusing.
The thread was marked as solved but we could not see the users post in the same thread as to solution.
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There was another thread with the same issue roughly one month ago. This time I'm just sufficiently annoyed to react.
 
Phishfry said:
The first 10 posts a new user makes must be approved by a moderator.

shkhln I know the post that sparked this question and I agree it was confusing.
The thread was marked as solved but we could not see the users post in the same thread as to solution.

No big deal but it was surprising to see a comment land out of chronological order. Now I know why.
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This is clearly wrong. I've more than 40 posts as I remember, I still have to be approved by a moderator. The thing only stopped when I complain on this subforum. My thread about this is never appeared as well, but I don't care much, I'm a full member now ;)

I used to have a thread solved but with no reply too. I solved the problem myself, I posted a reply but this reply was not shown until a mod approved it. Luckily it's not very long. I don't think it's inconvenient, though. I think it's needed to prevent spammers :)
 
It takes ten posts to figure out if it's a spammer? I would think a smaller number would be enough. In any case the spammers hit forums hard and I know it's big job that goes on in the background to keep forums clean.
 
CraigHB said:
It takes ten posts to figure out if it's a spammer? I would think a smaller number would be enough.
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I think we should trust that our admins/moderators got enough events to set what they think is appropriate. Spammers might even post a few not so obvious posts to pretend not to be a spammer. They became creative to get at least some "success" from their point of view.

It would IMO be not so clever to reveal the admin's rules here openly just to help spammers for possible workarounds.

If it works 95% fine we should not make a 'drumdrum' when occasionally getting attention of some few events or side effects.
 
getopt said:
I think we should trust that our admins/moderators got enough events to set what they think is appropriate.
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You are assuming this is a deliberate decision, rather than a forum software limitation or simply an oversight. I prefer asking to guessing.

getopt said:
Spammers might even post a few not so obvious posts to pretend not to be a spammer. They became creative to get at least some "success" from their point of view.
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That practically never happens. The more time spammers spend on tailoring messages, the less time they can spend on actual spamming activity. Spammers are not trolls, they have completely different behavior patterns.
 
shkhln I used to mod another programming forum and I'm in the upper 3% of Stack Overflow. Figuring out who is a spammer and who is innocently breaking the rules because they didn't read the rules is difficult. Some mods get hammered on a daily basis with reports of spam that aren't spam, too, but they have to make decisions in their daily lives by editing or deleting. And sometimes it must be done quickly in the middle of their own busy lives. One can get swayed by the number of reports complaining about questions or answers, too.

For example, on Stack Overflow this morning, I helped close or delete 60 questions and answers and that's typical of what I do almost every day. I do it while either drinking my coffee in the morning or before I go to bed at night. It can wear on you. "How dare you answer this question here, you maggot?!" But sometimes that 60th question becomes a blur and you hit "delete" without reading it carefully and you don't realize it till someone complains.

Rather than start a thread about it here, I suggest you directly message SirDice and ask the reason for it instead of us, here, who have no clue what you're talking about.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Figuring out who is a spammer and who is innocently breaking the rules because they didn't read the rules is difficult.
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drhowarddrfine said:
"How dare you answer this question here, you maggot?!"
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No, it is not difficult, spam is usually incredibly obvious. You are talking about other activities, such as trolling, astroturfing, low quality and off-topic posts.

drhowarddrfine said:
Rather than start a thread about it here, I suggest you directly message SirDice and ask the reason for it instead of us
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This is a "Feedback" section and that question never was addressed to community.
 
During the weekend there aren't a lot of moderators around. So things might get 'stuck' in the moderation queue a little longer than during the week.

Spam isn't always obvious, spammers are creative. I've seen innocent looking first posts, seemingly on-topic question, and someone "else" pops in a few days later with a "helpful" answer. This is usually a spam link or some SEO attempt. I've also seen first posts looking innocent, only to get edited a few days later.

The moderation threshold for new users is 10 posts and 10 days. Get past that and the auto-moderation is lifted.
 
My main concern there is "relativistic" ordering of posts. I really don't like answers to my questions appear before them :) Is there some possibility of fine tuning that? How much control XenForo actually allows there?

SirDice said:
I've seen innocent looking first posts, seemingly on-topic question, and someone "else" pops in a few days later with a "helpful" answer.
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That is true, but it's not clear that existing solution is effective against that.

SirDice said:
I've also seen first posts looking innocent, only to get edited a few days later.
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Ditto.
 
shkhln said:
My main concern there is "relativistic" ordering of posts.
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It's ordered as they arrive. So if post #4 is held, post #5 can appear before #4 is approved.

I really don't like answers to my questions appear before them :) Is there some possibility of fine tuning that? How much control XenForo actually allows there?
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None. We can only 'do nothing', 'accept', 'delete', or mark it as spam. You cannot change the order in which they appear in the thread.
 
I was thinking about adding second+ posts to the approval queue without hiding them, rather than reordering them. A search through xenforo.com suggests that each message in db has a message_state flag with either 'visibility', 'moderated' or 'deleted' value, which means this isn't possible with standard tools. The closest existing thing is a paid "checkpoint" addon, which a sort of an alternative approval queue.

It might be possible to display a publicly visible placeholder for a moderated post, so it doesn't come as a surprise at least. I'm not sure whether this is desirable.
 
shkhln said:
It might be possible to display a publicly visible placeholder for a moderated post, so it doesn't come as a surprise at least.
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There is a place holder for deleted posts. I don't see any for posts held for moderation though, I get to see the whole posts but it has an additional top bar that informs me it's still in the moderation queue.

I could live with a placeholder. Just showing the post (with the additional top bar) as I see them doesn't seem like a good idea, that would also make spam visible before we clean up the posts.

Case in point:
 

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shkhln said:
I noticed some newly registered users have their second (and possibly subsequent) posts hidden for several hours, then these posts pop up right in the middle of the thread when they are eventually shown. What's the deal with that?
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The most simple solution is to change time of posts with the time of moderator approval. By this way they will be shown in the correct position in the thread (e.g. at bottom).
 
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