Discussion thread for possible FP/moderation changes to ILX

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re switching flag post back to suggest ban:

this messes up my vanity googling (ftb "bookmark suggest ban") so don't enact unless you hate me

poor mark f ... won't someone think of poor mark f

i've been thinking of the phrase "reheat days-old beef" for hours now

lol me too

Not directly related, but how much has number of posters / number of posts dropped over the years, and when did the usership decline start?

In reader terms it's not actually very different in recent years — we have roughly the same number of monthly unique users (100k) that we did 3 years ago. Lurkers (defined as people who visit the same thread multiple times in a month, or multiple threads, but don't post/sign in) usually are about 10,000 a month. I can't easily access the old stats, but that doesn't seem massively different to what it was before the suggest ban flag post pish came in.

I haven't done the numbers on post volumes though, I'll run some DB queries to figure out numbers there.

That’s a lot more witnesses to my shitposting than I thought.

I've convinced myself 300 of them are people I know from work looking for ways to cancel me out of a job

That's kind of astonishing; in my head, there are about a dozen people here.

is that 10,000 unique IPs or 10,000 impressions

that's users, we do that in impressions in about 25 minutes

fackin hell

surely most of them are just popping by to read darraghmac's "coal bucket" story and then quickly retreat

post volumes, though – big difference there.

Biggest-ever year was 2004, with 1.2m posts
In the period 2005-2012 we averaged around 900k––1m posts per year.
In 2013 that fell to around 700k, and further in 2014 to a new average of around 450k posts a year.

2013 seems to really have been the year to make the difference in post volumes, there's a clear before/after. This year shows a slight uptick vs the last couple but not much.

what happened in 2012-2013? 2012 was the year of Twitter's explosive growth iirc, and it's when mobile browsing got really big, they could be factors. Can't remember the board drama of that year.

when did we switch to requiring registration to post?

I've been pretty good at suppressing unhappy board memories. I kind of hope someone's been keeping notes on the site/history for the last 20+ years; it would be pretty interesting to read and find out what we did. xp

2007 it was on site-wide, iirc xp

I feel like new ILM posters used to show up via Google and that's kinda stopped - y/n?

HOW DARE U TALK SHIT ON THE NEW ZEBRAHEAD, U ARE FUCKER, U R NOTHING BUT A FUCKER

-geoff

I signed up in 2006 or so, drifted, and returned (at a guess) in 2014 via a Twitter link to the amazing ILX Gonna Shine in My Back Door thread and never looked back.

you can never look back

Though I have a feeling I've been flagged a lot (lol), I'm also fine with the proposals outlined above. I do think that knowing when one is approaching a threshold would be good-- we can all be a little overzealous at times, and blinded to how assholish we're being.

Anyway, feel free to flag this, but I really am glad to be able to spend time here, and appreciate the transparency with which this conversation is taking place!

i miss fake Tuomas

requiring registration really killed the random googler influx

i joined the board just to post about how the Darkness didn't sound like Queen since people itt were saying they did

I read way more than I post here and I've learned so much - notionally about music but so much more. It's one of the truly sane places in the world, let alone the internet.

omg i just found my first ever googler post and I used my gov't name. full LJing it

xpost very true. I've plagiarized many things Alfred has written and passed it off as my own thought. novel due out in fall.

This seems to be moving into lulz territory now, but prior to that, it sounds like we’re coming close to a consensus that the proposed changes are OK. We can still hold a poll as xyzzz suggested to be double sure that most posters agree with moving the FP goalposts.

this is obvious, but xyzzz is one of the main reasons we would like to move said goalposts

Let’s not. As above, I support resetting all fp counts to 0 once any change is made.

^ keeping the FP counts in place increases the chances of lulz in the first weeks of new regime though

wouldn’t you like to know your count

Sometimes you wanna go
Where everybody flags your post

And they all hate you the most.
You wanna be where you can see. the jerks are all the same.
You wanna be where everybody knows your display name.

Hi I

HI DERE

Hi I appear to be posting by accident.

there are no accidents. this is all pre-ordained.

you fuckin' Cylon

This seems to be moving into lulz territory now, but prior to that, it sounds like we’re coming close to a consensus that the proposed changes are OK. We can still hold a poll as xyzzz suggested to be double sure that most posters agree with moving the FP goalposts.

― sound of scampo talk to me (El Tomboto), Saturday, 29 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

this is obvious, but xyzzz is one of the main reasons we would like to move said goalposts

― sleeve, Saturday, 29 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

A 'troll' who gives the odd good suggestion, it me

Proposed poll options:

- 20 FPs in 30 days = 14 day ban; 50 FPs in 6 months = 90 day ban

- 20 FPs in 30 days = 7 day ban; 50 FPs in 6 months = 90 day ban

- 20 FPs in 30 days = 14 day ban; 50 FPs in 6 months = 30 day ban

- 20 FPs in 30 days = 7 day ban; 50 FPs in 6 months = 30 day ban

- No change (51 FPs in 6 months = 30 day ban)

I'd like to propose a rider to the bill which would bring back forksclovetofu-style comedy modding.

i will support "peace, man" if I can get board mod privileges for ILAFL

I guess I will chime in with my thoughts, fwiw.

Due to the contraction in the number of active participants and slow changes to the character of ILX over the past six or eight years, I'd be fine with alterations to the FP/moderation which lowered the 51 threshold and introduced some well-defined intermediate steps based on warnings and temp bans prior to permabanning. This sounds reasonable to me. Whatever we decide, we still need to be sparing with the ILX equivalent of the death penalty.

As for attempts to convert ILX into a safe space where anyone may enter secure in the knowledge that one will encounter no disturbing instances of racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, bullying, ad hominem attacks, or other similar ugliness, I think that any mechanism capable of ensuring such safety for everyone who opens an ILX thread and reads it would require such profound alterations to ILX that ultimately it would be reduced to a one-topic board. iow, trying to perfect ILX into an ideal society, while society at large is so deeply flawed and morally chaotic will eventually purge it of all but the most fervid moralists and that fervor will continue to narrow participation down to a precious few, as more and more energy is devoted to the finer points of who and how to conduct the purges, and everyone else loses interest and leaves.

Aimless, that strikes me as a rare instance of you being not OTM. The degree to which the community is moving in that direction is the degree to which the community is choosing to move itself in that direction. I think there's still plenty of room for people to slip up and misstep and misspeak even while, as a nebulous whole, we seem to be saying that it's not okay to intentionally overstep certain boundaries for the sake of provocation (or worse). And the mods are all fairly level-headed long-time ILXors who have avoided corruption from the great + heady powers they wield. Enough people have recently commented upon ILX as an oasis of sanity that I'm inclined to think we're on the right track and disinclined to worry about who we might lose because eg they can't sling transphobic pejoratives with impunity.

I think there's still plenty of room for people to slip up and misstep and misspeak even while, as a nebulous whole, we seem to be saying that it's not okay to intentionally overstep certain boundaries for the sake of provocation (or worse).

I agree that this is so.

I was speaking mainly to desires repeatedly expressed by [redacted], whose dissatisfaction with the present state of the community has been stated and restated over a period of more than a decade, and whose apparent objection is that instances of what they define as racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, bullying, ad hominem attacks have not been wholly eradicated from ILX, causing them emotional pain. To the best I can estimate, reforming ILX to this person's standards would require ILX to conform to criteria so demanding and narrowly defined that it would perforce recreate ILX as that person's personal domain.

That sounds like an issue for the individual in question. I think it’s good that this thread exists and we can discuss how we feel about the current system, but I also think of emily’s point above. Modding this place is a voluntary thing for everyone, expectations need to reflect that.

I like those poll options.