In 4chan-ish speak (or whatever)
Be me
Working. Look at clock, damn gotta run
Get up, about to leave, forgot I have to run vote manipulation bans
It's fine, they are ready to run, won't take long
Get first batch setup, double check it, looks good, execute the code
Get second batch setup, double check it, wait, a parameter is off
Think to myself, hmmmm, what was that parameter set to in the first batch?
Go look at the first batch again, parameter is wrong, interesting.
I wonder what that did.
Go look, yeah, banned a bunch of people I shouldn't have.
I'm going to be so late now.
No code to unban people, have to write it real quick.
15 minutes later, ready to go, execute code, great, everyone was unbanned. Feel like superman.
Finish rest of bans
Leave 45 minutes after I should have
Sometime later, check Voat on phone, make sure it's not down (you know, we have a thing with that).
Have 20 triilion unread messages. Oh no. What now.
Voat is going full rage goat about bans.
Try to answer as many messages as possible. It's a warzone. Usually is after every round though, so expected
Check Voat again later, saw ping in a random submission
It said a long time goat was banned. That's weird.
Started thinking how did that goat get banned?
Why would they be farming? They can't be downvoting can they?
Recall that Dan guy got banned on Reddit for up farming. Definitely possible.
Maybe power users are into that kind of thing?
Think to myself, Voat is weird.
Sometime later, still curious, log on computer, bring up ban data
Wait a second, that goat was in batch 1
I'll fix that. Fixed.
Look over it once again, find two more
Fix them.
Check a few users who've messaged. They still got served the ban hammer. Lol a little
Think we are good now.
Still thinking about what the goats said in the warzone thread
One user said we should have an appeal process
Process we use now is old as hell
Coded to kill farms with no mercy
Written for survival during the sanegoat days
That was years ago. Reminisce what is was like for a minute. Damn I'm getting old.
Yeah, maybe we should update this
So, that was how the bans went down from my side. Thought it was entertaining enough to break the ice for what follows:
I can't allow manipulation, in any way. If the votes aren't true, I can't put my name on it. Manipulation of votes was why I left Reddit in the first place. I take it seriously. I also need to define what we look for without giving away our playbook (I have to think about this a bit).
I'll double check vote manipulation bans, that is totally reasonable. I hate banning people for manipulation, so if a ban wasn't right, I'll fix it.
Conclusion:
We are going to have to add an appeal process for vote manipulation.
You guys have better ideas anyways, so how should we do this? What should the process be?
Let's just design it from scratch. And while we are at it… should subverse bans be appealable? Do we need to write new code for this?
Suppose we can just use PMs though.
Let's make it better.
Someone told me Voat loves stickies.
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CatsControlTheEU ago
He saw the names. He doesn't have to post it for it to be a breaking of anonymity. The viewing of those votes were not directly relevant to any administrative investigation. Before you say that my 'comparisons are not relevant because this is Voat not X' this is an example of how privacy laws typically work.
Even someone's personal doctor, is not allowed to look at their patients records unless it is directly relevant to something that's going on.
When people vote in things such as elections be it state or local at least in the United States, the people who see the actual vote (e.g candidate X or candidate Y) are separate from the people that input the names into the list of people who voted to determine whether or not someone voted twice.
virge ago
I disagree here.
Realistically all technology is transparent to the admins, especially the ones who wrote the code. Putt advocates Free Speech and demonstrably takes pride in making functions that even he can't unmask, joking pointing fun at how he can't de-code the anon posts because he coded them too well at one point.
If I pay some guy to pickup my trash, I expect him to pick it up and dispose of it without looking at it. If someone picks up my trash for free and is providing me a service then I loose any equitable interest in the trash once it's off my hands. As long as the trash guy who takes it for free never tells anyone else what's in my trash, if he goes through it and to what ends are none of my business and simply an unspoken part of the arrangement.
Voat stands for Free Speech. Privacy is at the sole discretion of the admin. The fact that he's never demonstrated he will break that unspoken part of the arrangement, then we have an equitable relationship.
So whats your beef with it? Do you believe he's broken some arrangement with you or others? If not, how do you justify why it matters to the operation of this community?