|
One of the big things that people wonder on Something Awful is how things work behind the scenes with moderators and admins. Well wonder no more! I'm going to spill the beans on a lot of things here. A major thing to note: THE ENTIRETY OF THE FORUMS STAFF, JEFF EXCEPTED, ARE VOLUNTEERS. NO ONE IS GETTING PAID HERE, AND WE'RE ALL DOING IT BECAUSE WE LOVE YOU ALL. That means that we are all volunteers with lives outside of the forums. On top of that, moderating on mobile is a pain in the rear end, and none of the apps support the mod tools. That out of the way, a primer on user levels.
IKs If you must know, IK is one of many things, "idiot knight", "idiot king", "internet king", no one really remembers these days. Most people go with idiot king. IKs are usually appointed to watch over specific, high movement threads (see the megathreads in DnD for an example) or specific sub forums within a sub (like cspam). Sometimes they're used to see how good of a mod they may or may not be. A poster gets promoted to IK usually when a mod identifies a need for one. For example, a US based mod in DnD may want a UK based one to watch the UKPol thread. The fyad lites have rotating IKs. What usually happens is a mod identifies a need for an IK, then floats the idea to the rest of the mod and admin staff, a short discussion ensues on the viability of the nominated poster as an IK, and they're either approved or not. It's pretty simple. Mods Posters get promoted to mod in one of two ways: via an IK test ride, as above, or straight to mod from normal posters. The latter is usually reserved for, "Oh poo poo, X forum's mod stepped down and we need someone there," but not always. Like with IKs, the name is floated in the mod forum, discussed, though usually a bit more intensely than IKs, and then approved or denied. As stated above, you get access to the report and mod forums. For what it's worth, any mod or IK who's a mod of one forum will have access to their tools in the sub forums. For example, I have buttons in SAS, but also TRP, TFF, TAQB, and PSP. I don't generally exercise my powers there, except in TFF to change thread titles to annoy Athanatos  .Buttons Being part of staff gets you a few extra buttons:  Somehow it disables the report button in your own forum (which is dumb, but you're expected to handle reportable stuff so  ). The (i) button is the tools dropdown: (cancer isn't used anymore, so I'm not going to cover it) Each of those takes you to another screen, where you can tweak things, put in the reason for doing so, and other things. For probations, there's 6h, 12h, 18h, 24h, 3d, 1w, 2w, 1m, and 100k lengths. Bans are "regular or perma". There's two fields to be filled, one with the public facing reason, and the other for more "Behind the scenes" reasons, usually notes like "the probe is this long because they're a habitual shitposter" or "this probe is 100% a joke" for the admins to see while reviewing or for potential future punishment. On top of that, you get thread specific tools:  In order: open/close thread, edit thread (allows you to change thread title, tag, poll options if applicable, and see who rated the thread what), gas thread, move thread to another forum (usually for goldmining), stick/unstick a thread, and the two buttons everyone has. The History button is pretty much "hey, view the mod queue of this user." Which leads me to... The Mod Queue The mod queue is where the staff are able to see what their fellow staff members have queued up for users. For IKs and mods, it's also where non-auto approved items can be retracted. For admins, it's for them to review harsher punishments and approve or decline depending on the situation. It's pretty simple. As an aside, all bans need admin approval, apart from autobans. On that note, autobans do NOT strip avatars, instead turning them into a link to your rap sheet, if an image is present. The mod queue looks like this:   Each item has a link to the post (the type of item being queued is the link). Brown items have been processed, white are pending, light pink are "submitter retracted", and dark pink are "admin declined". Bans don't look too much different, only the length is removed from the punishment type panel. Titles will have a link to preview the title under the post link. You can also see the "reason requested", which is what you'd see in the LC, and the "mod-only notes", which doesn't get put out publicly. And no, mods can not retract sixers or other auto-approved items, only admins can. Other items that show up in the queue are thread moves and gassing. Forums cancer stuff shows up, but again, no one uses it. Reports Reports are sent to the report forum, where mods can review the reported post. There's many reasons for reporting a post, and they range from asshats we may have missed to "hey, change the thread title!" Reports look like this:  I cut off the bottom for length, but our mod buttons are at the bottom of the embedded post. You get the idea though. Because people can, have, and will abuse reports, there is a cap on how often you can. Do note that if you try to report something, and get "this thread has already been reported", that means that that specific post has already been reported. Oh, and for the love of the gods PLEASE PUT A REASON IN YOUR REPORT what may be obvious to you may not be to everyone else! Some other critical things to be aware of: there's no way for mods to be notified of reports. Checking is a purely manual process. There are no emails, PMs, text messages, nothing. Thanks Radium.In addition, all the reports go to the same area, which really is a sub forum. This has a pro and a con. The pro is that other mods can see the report and chime in if needed. The con is that certain subs, namely the quieter ones, tend to get buried under other reports. Final Thoughts This is pretty much "ask the mods, 2.0" here. Also, please don't treat this as a complaints box. QCS is open again, so keep it to more "how does X work", not "why did you do Y?" Thanks, and gods bless. iospace fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Mar 8, 2021 |
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 04:43
|
|
|
|
| # ? Sep 22, 2023 08:41 |
|
|
There really is no notification when a post has been reported? That seems like a hilarious oversight. Any chance Jeffrey is working on fixing that? Even the lovely forums my wow guild had seven years ago notified when a post was reported (I know because every officer got an email about it when I reported a post to see what happened).
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 05:37
|
|
|
Mr. Humalong posted:There really is no notification when a post has been reported? That seems like a hilarious oversight. Any chance Jeffrey is working on fixing that? It's my understanding based on hearsay that there may have been such a feature at one point but it is either incorrect hearsay, disabled, or broke. However, currently we do not receive notifications, correct.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 05:42
|
|
|
PHPBB highlights threads with reports as BRIGHT RED to mods and posts the same way, and despite being a pretty terrible board system in many ways, I feel like a similar system would really assist mods here with handling reports since a thread turning bright red would tell them there's a report un-dealt with in a thread. Of course, since this is all radium code we're working off, if that's even possible to implement HERE is another thing altogether
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 05:49
|
|
|
iospace posted:[*]IK: allowed to probe users up 6 six hours without admin approval and able to see the mod queue. Powers limited to specific threads or forums (and subs).
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 06:03
|
|
|
Haifisch posted:Wait, they can see the queue? I was under the impression that IKs couldn't see reports, based off what a few thread-specific IKs have said(and said IKs encouraged PMing them instead). The Mod Queue and the Reports Forums are two different things. The Mod Queue is a separate entity that doesn't have a link or anything, to get to it you have to basically have access to it, you're redirected to it after you queue something, etc. The Reports Forum is like, an actual normal forum, except all the threads are automatically generated by a bot when a report is made and we respond to them as if they were a regular thread.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 06:06
|
|
|
Gloomy Rube posted:PHPBB highlights threads with reports as BRIGHT RED to mods and posts the same way, and despite being a pretty terrible board system in many ways, I feel like a similar system would really assist mods here with handling reports since a thread turning bright red would tell them there's a report un-dealt with in a thread. This is the biggest thing to remember, theres so much of this code that is decades or even VB original for all we know that is load bearing to the software. Somehow getting in the function to add notifications may not be possible without a complete rewrite of whole sections of the code, which would probably break something else in the core VB software. On some of this I don't know how much is radium or just old hosed up coding from the late 90s. or a horrible abomination of the two thats entangled enough that its impossible to fix. On having a thread be colored it would be a bad choice, since so many posts in a thread can become an issue that the easiest way to tell is if a thread explodes in post number suddenly. since at that point you can assume that there is an issue in the thread in question. I say assume since most mods or iks have threads they pay attention to an know that an increase of 100 posts in a thread in 40 minutes may not be normal when a thread gets 100 posts a day at most. And diverting a notice in Pms doesnt work since the pm box is a finite box that only stores so much and would be blocking posters pms to the mods. Adding it to the SA forums front page would require people to go to the front page to Also for people curious the bot that reports on the report forum is SA report bot. As the admin The Finn found out, don't accidentally put a probe on donny the support bot and not the poster in question. Because then Donny will try and post a new report and cant because hes probated, then crash the forums as he goes nuts because the reports arent going through. UCS Hellmaker fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Jan 4, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 06:19
|
|
|
There’s also the fact that mods aren’t on call. Having them get notifications sounds great in theory but the reality is that they have jobs etc. This is part of why we try to get time zone spreads covered for the big, active forums. Plus, in the big forums you have the problem of spamming multiple mods with notifications. The system we have is imperfect but it works OK. Mods just need to check the reports periodically. I can tell you from experience that it’s rare that a report languishes for more than a day. Plus mods tend to be active in their communities. When poo poo really blows up its even money that they’ll actually get some moderating action in before the reports start. The main thing is realizing that just because poo poo is happening at 3pm doesn’t mean a mod is going to be able to respond by 330. It’s not a perfect system, and at times it shows it’s weaknesses (especially during big events or holidays when mod staff tend to be busy with family and posters aren’t at work etc so have more forums time) , but day to day it works well enough.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 06:24
|
|
|
The old forum I admined had a notice at the top of the page when there was a report made that we would just turn off after we'd dealt with it, but I imagine it would be a lot more obnoxious on a bigger forum like this when there's a bunch of reports being submitted all at once.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 06:31
|
|
|
Roth posted:The old forum I admined had a notice at the top of the page when there was a report made that we would just turn off after we'd dealt with it, but I imagine it would be a lot more obnoxious on a bigger forum like this when there's a bunch of reports being submitted all at once. This is part of it, but we'd tailor it to our specific subs. In theory, it shouldn't be too hard, but radium is the gift that keeps on giving 
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 06:59
|
|
|
 Mentioned in another thread, but radium still haunts us to this day it seems  I'm assuming his is some sort of unique root-level account that can't be disabled without breaking half the place. Asked this in another thread, but I'll ask here as well since it's much more appropriate; has any of the forums code ever been put up on like a git or even a pastebin? I'm morbidly curious to see samples of radium's genius after hearing all these legends. UCS Hellmaker posted:Also for people curious the bot that reports on the report forum is SA report bot. As the admin The Finn found out, don't accidentally put a probe on donny the support bot and not the poster in question. Because then Donny will try and post a new report and cant because hes probated, then crash the forums as he goes nuts because the reports arent going through. I love it Zakutambah fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Jan 4, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 07:46
|
|
|
Do IKs have mod forum access?
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 10:10
|
|
|
No, they basically just get report buttons and thats it I believe. They definitely don't see reports
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 10:20
|
|
|
Thanks, this is very interesting!iospace posted:Do note that if you try to report something, and get "this thread has already been reported", that means that that specific post has already been reported. It seems like it should be simple to change this to "this post has already been reported"... quote:Oh, and for the love of the gods It's really annoying how little room there is for report reasons, but I guess this is because reports turn into pseudo-threads in the reports forum -- it has to fit in a thread title. UCS Hellmaker posted:Also for people curious the bot that reports on the report forum is SA report bot. As the admin The Finn found out, don't accidentally put a probe on donny the support bot and not the poster in question. Because then Donny will try and post a new report and cant because hes probated, then crash the forums as he goes nuts because the reports arent going through. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 13:05
|
|
|
There are secret forums.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 14:03
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:It's really annoying how little room there is for report reasons, but I guess this is because reports turn into pseudo-threads in the reports forum -- it has to fit in a thread title. iirc a report title is just something like "[poster] reported by [poster]". the max report length used to be like half the length it is now – if you really need to say more you can just pm the mod.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 14:35
|
|
|
Iospace, you mention “thread moves” appearing in the mod queue. Can moderators move threads on their own authority, or is approval required? Zakutambah posted:Mentioned in another thread, but radium still haunts us to this day it seems The “radium” entity is still responsible for the autobans people get for, say, using the “BAN ME” thread icon.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 17:15
|
|
|
Mods can move threads but it’s generally considered polite to ask the mod of the place it’s getting dumped first.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 17:17
|
|
|
iospace posted:That out of the way, a primer on user levels. And IIRC, archives access isn't even a user level, it's technically an entirely separate forum that disables the ability to post/reply and just happens to have old threads moved over to it from the live servers periodically. This is also why you lose forums upgrades when you're banned (because banned user and platinum user are mutually exclusive user levels), but not archives access.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 18:51
|
|
|
angerbeet posted:There are secret forums. I am eternally taunted by unread posts in, say, threadid 3510844 in my bookmarks.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 01:58
|
|
|
Once you act on a report does it mean the post can be reported again? edit: I see it puts the post in an iframe, it would be cool if it "screenshotted" the post so it can't be edited out.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 09:03
|
|
|
Charles posted:Once you act on a report does it mean the post can be reported again? I do not know the answer to the first question. To the second one, the internal frame is actually active - that is, you can respond to, edit, or quote the post in question from the frame, issue bans/probations, etc. It’s a post within a post. In that sense making it a screenshot would be difficult because it’s not a picture or static item.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 16:12
|
|
|
Do admins see the same modqueue as mods or is there more information in there for them?
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 20:52
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:I do not know the answer to the first question. In a technical sense, actually taking a screenshot of a post server-side would be a pain, but then rendering it in a way that still has the reply/quote/edit/ban/etc buttons around it would be trivial (screenshot td.postbody and then render the <img> with td.postlinks underneath it). A better approach would just be to snapshot the contents of the post (i.e. what you see when you quote or edit it) and save that in the report queue rather than just displaying the reported post in an iframe, at the cost of requiring a tiny bit more server-side storage. This would also make possible to compare "post as reported" and "post as later edited". I have no idea if this is at all feasible because, well, radium, but in principle it's not that complicated.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 21:15
|
|
|
Yeah, I didn't mean literally a JPG, just the contents at the time of reporting. People can edit out what they were reported for. Add it to the very long wishlist of features 😅
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 21:19
|
|
|
cda posted:Do admins see the same modqueue as mods or is there more information in there for them? Its the same view, only there are a couple of extra buttons for admin stuff like approving / rejecting probations.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 21:23
|
|
|
This is interesting, thank you for sharing this. May I suggest you make an announcement pointing to this thread?
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2020 06:59
|
|
|
nashona posted:This is interesting, thank you for sharing this. May I suggest you make an announcement pointing to this thread? I'll see what I can do about that! Mods don't have the power to do that, admins do, but that would be a good idea. e: I did relay the suggestion, by the way. iospace fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Jan 10, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2020 07:01
|
|
|
Wait until some of the current announcements die out though. People will start ignoring them if there are too many.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2020 07:58
|
|
|
Do admins have access to the database, or is that a wholly separate set of credentials only issued by Lowtax to whomever is cursed with janitoring the forums software itself? Do admins have the power to de-admin Lowtax, or is his account a super-admin that cannot be touched? (this is not, as some dipshit in another thread thought, me asking for the admins to overthrow Lowtax, but more me trying to get an understanding of how much damage could occur if the wrong person was made an admin) UCS Hellmaker posted:This is the biggest thing to remember, theres so much of this code that is decades or even VB original for all we know that is load bearing to the software. Somehow getting in the function to add notifications may not be possible without a complete rewrite of whole sections of the code, which would probably break something else in the core VB software. On some of this I don't know how much is radium or just old hosed up coding from the late 90s. or a horrible abomination of the two thats entangled enough that its impossible to fix. I feel like more and more people have been forgetting this lately; the SA forums are a hacked-up, jury-rigged customization of software that was released in 2001. Much of the code predates MySpace.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2020 17:47
|
|
|
Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Do admins have access to the database, or is that a wholly separate set of credentials only issued by Lowtax to whomever is cursed with janitoring the forums software itself? probably not possible thru the UI (im guessing) someone with root on the servers and DB could probably lock him out (and/or assume his identity). but even if that happens, im sure lowtax can contact the hosting provider, show them that its his name on the credit card, get a new root pw on the server, and regain control. the thing is.... if a rogue admin is willing and able to do that, they would probably also be able to do much worse (zero out the db and blow away the backups). and its unclear if lowtax would have the patience and wherewithal to deal with the scenario i have laid out. im pretty sure lowtax gives almost nobody db and server access. jeffery of yospos might be the only one right now
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2020 21:04
|
|
|
As far as I'm aware, it's only Jeff and Lowtax with access.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2020 21:49
|
|
|
Helianthus Annuus posted:probably not possible thru the UI (im guessing)
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2020 22:02
|
|
|
Everything I have heard on the subject of backend access says Lowtax is incredibly paranoid about giving access. I'm willing to bet that if he knew how to do a deployment pipeline not even the devs would be able to access it
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2020 22:28
|
|
|
He probably should be a little paranoid about that.iospace posted:Do note that if you try to report something, and get "this thread has already been reported", that means that that specific post has already been reported. I've long wondered about that, specifically, since it seemed unlikely to me a thread could only be reported once, but the phrasing is odd. I've seen the message several times, which means I am slow on the draw to report obvious things. I suppose it's because the report turns that post into a thread, in the mod forum? Edit: here's a real question: What is the intended purpose of the 100k hour probation? Shouldn't someone hit with that just be permabanned instead? FuturePastNow fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Jan 10, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2020 23:12
|
|
|
I'm not a fancy back end admin, and my computer skills pretty much extend to troubleshooting Windows 10 drivers, but based on what I've seen as a mod yeah, the notice is just weird. I've absolutely seen two people report multiple posts in the same thread. Pretty sure I've also seen two people report the same post but like. . . . an hour or two apart. My gut tells me that it was put in to prevent the reports from getting flooded if someone goatse'd GBS and 100 people slapped report at once. With how we clear the report forum out that would be . . . . annoying. Imagine having to manually respond to and close 100 1 post threads. That's basically what it would look like.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2020 23:46
|
|
|
FuturePastNow posted:He probably should be a little paranoid about that.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2020 23:54
|
|
|
FuturePastNow posted:Edit: here's a real question: What is the intended purpose of the 100k hour probation? Shouldn't someone hit with that just be permabanned instead? It’s generally seen as a kind of joke punishment and rarely deployed because of begging this exact question.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2020 23:59
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:It’s generally seen as a kind of joke punishment and rarely deployed because of begging this exact question. Wasn't the permaban a feature that was added in later and so the 100k was initially the only way of stopping someone reregistering? E: didn't permadead proceed the permaban? Shut up Meg fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Jan 11, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2020 00:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? Sep 22, 2023 08:41 |
|
|
Shut up Meg posted:Wasn't the permaban a feature that was added in later and so the 100k was initially the only way of stopping someone reregistering? No, bans of any kind predate the entire probation system. Also I think this "this thread has been reported" is left over from vBulletin 2, but there are no extant forums left to compare it to.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2020 00:38
|
|