As promised I wanted to drop a small note about the action of modding a user to various system subs in an effort to purge SPAM. While this action was innocent and done to help Voat users have a more pleasurable experience, it has raised a few concerns and violated a rule we have in place for Subverse transfers.

So let me give you the background of this and then I will tell you what we are going to do.

Background

Voat has been hit with quite a few SPAM waves. Some of these waves are rather sophisticated and know our software base because they know the holes in our logic and can flood Voat with SPAM. When this happens, Voat’s new queues become unreadable.

Users have been complaining about this for a very long time. Other users have offered to help purge the spam but we have turned them down mostly because we have seen what malicious mods can do to subs when they “flip” (anon the sub, post malicious CSS, go on deletion purges, mod alts, etc.). So we let the spam be.

@Cynabuns contacted Voat many months ago and offered to help, but because of our concerns we delayed. It wasn't until recently that we decided to give it a try. Please support @Cynabuns for offering to help. We've already communicated our expectations with @Cynabuns and it should be a good thing for Voat. If not, then we will demod. It's that simple.

What we are going to do

We are going to implement a “Janitor” mod level. This Janitor level will have restricted permissions. This will allow System subs to take on more Janitors to help purge and discourage SPAM while not being able to perform any other malicious actions that we have been fearful of. I’ve already started working on this and @Cynabuns is going to help us test it.

On Rule Violation

I didn’t even consider the System rule violation when I modded @Cynabuns. Since it was a special case I didn’t even check other than to ensure this user wasn’t over the 10 subs. If this was a full mod case (subverse transfer) the bot would have rejected it but I did it manually so was unaware. We will be amending the rule to exclude these “Janitor” positions from this restriction.

On the other concerns

I really appreciate the passion Voat users have towards making sure Voat doesn’t go down the rabbit hole. It shows our users care and that means a lot to us. While we can’t satisfy everyone’s desires and demands we just want to reassure the users with concerns that this action wasn’t a preamble to anything sinister (You’ll just have to trust us until we can prove it).

On Soon™

We will have another announcement soon on a rather exciting development.

Requests

We have received 0 NS/FISA requests.