Hi, everyone! My name is /u/netrunnernobody, and I'm the newest (human) moderator on the /r/outrun moderation team. I'll keep the self-introduction short— I'm a synthwave enthusiast, a writer, and a game developer (currently working on a game named after Carpenter Brut's song Turbo Killer). My current favorite synthwave artist is probably Rale Daver, although FM-84 is a pretty close second, and it would be pretty sinful not to give a shout-out to Magic Sword's live performances... anyway, I'm sick off my ass at the moment, so I'm going to do the rest of this as quick and dirty as I can so that I can get back to moping in bed. My apologies in advance for any spelling and/or grammatical issues.
Recent Happenings
- Larger subreddits attract increased amounts of bot attention, and this subreddit is pretty damn big, given its niche topic.
- As a result, we have encountered a good number of remarkably talented bot accounts that make it past Reddit's spam filters, then proceed to upvote themselves until they look like reputable, community-loved posts. They are not.
- Trying to counter these bot attacks head-on is borderline impossible. Ban one, and two more will take their place, etcetera etcetera.
- This was made even more difficult, because for a remarkably long time, a team of roughly five people were manually flairing every unflaired post on the subreddit, requiring an incredible amount of time and energy. Seriously, let's give a round of applause for the /r/outrun moderation team.
- Because of the torrential downpour of both spam and unflaired posts, the moderation team at /r/outrun decided to add me to the team. Hi, guys!
- Rather than take a human approach to the problem, I've decided to ignore every lesson from the movie Robocop and instead focus on creating automated solutions to dealing with these nuisances.
Robocop (Phase One)
- To simplify the convoluted clusterfuck of a flairing system that we had before, and to make things a little easier for our automated systems, we've reduced the plethora of user thread flairs from some-million to, like, three: music, aesthetics, and media+culture.
- The gist of how the automoderator works in this regard is more or less with searches for keywords and the like. If you mention your "favorite movie, Terminator", we've got a lock on Media+Culture, for instance. Like all dumb AIs, it's essentially just a very large list of IF statements. Because of this, you can still (and should still) manually flair your post if the automoderator gives your thread an incorrect label.
- People with links to meme websites people using meme keywords are moved to the modqueue and requested to take their posts to /r/outruncirclejerk.
- People who explicitly trip over keywords that violate rule six are moved to the modqueue as well.
- There are a number of flagged keywords that low-karma/new accounts are specifically not allowed to use when making a new thread.
- There are a few common similarities in bot accounts that we use to autoban obvious, definite spam accounts. You'll really only trip this thing if you really, really try to.
Robocop (Phase Two)
Phase two is going into immediate effect, as of March 28th. This is primarily building upon Phase One systems, with a few additions based on community suggestions, issues, and consensus.
- We now have automated, sticky-post reminders whenever Music Mondays are in effect. Hopefully, this will help people that find themselves getting their posts removed on odd hours on Sundays and Tuesdays.
- Rule six has been modified to ban the topics of t-shirts, apparel, merchandise, and selfie photography. In no universe do we expect this to be an entirely popular move on our part, but these threads are almost always considerably low-quality content and oftentimes huge welcoming calls for potentially user-harmful spam accounts. These threads were also easy karma grabs, despite negative community feedback, with the suspected reason being that bot accounts helped upvote and promote these kinds of posts.
- New/unused accounts have some increased limitations, including but not limited to automatic filtering to modqueue of any posts with a link to an external site in it. We're dipping our toes into the water with this one, and if all goes well, we'll tweak it to be a little more fine-tuned in regards to what kinds of content it blocks.
That's the entire changelog. I hope this helps satisfy community concerns regarding automated spam content on this subreddit. I have absolutely no doubt that bots will eventually evolve to prove an effective Robocop opponent, but hopefully these recent changes will take care of the majority. Either way, I'm going to go get some rest now.
Yeeting off,
NN
Submitted March 28, 2019 at 10:27PM by netrunnernobody https://ift.tt/2UgzjLx
No comments:
Post a Comment