Hi. Are there plans to increase the character limit of subverse names to 21 like Reddit?

I suggested this a few months ago and would like to keep the original name of my sub. Thanks.

Good to know

Any update on this happening?

Edit: looks like the complete opposite has happened, more restrictions

Some users are seriously against these changes.

Whatever you do, I suggest doing it incrementally over a significant period of time rather than as a large step change. You'll get more information on genuine unforeseen effects that way, and saboteurs won't have an obvious trigger to work with.

Besides a spam button for comments and submissions, you could also use janitors who are more reputable than a regular user, but less so than a moderator. That way if X numbers of janitors all separately report a submission or comment as spam it can be removed.

Branching off of that, I think each subverse should have a right to defend itself from spam AND low-quality or irrelevant posts by having quality standards that are upheld by the moderators (and janitors if you choose to have them). If a submission is deemed to be watering down the discussion of the subverse then it can be moved to a secondary subverse. For v/pizzagate that would be v/pizzagatewhatever.

The mods can then message the person asking them to improve their post and list specifically what they should improve if they want to make the cut. That way their free speech is still somewhat protected, and they just get their post moved to a related subverse with lower standards until they step their game up to meet quality.

For comments this a little more tricky and downvoats certainly help identify repeat offenders. For negative users, you can use an RES flair, automatic minimize, or some sort of punishment that they have to work off. Yet, I feel this is addressing the symptoms and not the underlying issue that different subverses will all have different reactions to ideas. And I believe all users who are authentic and genuine (and not just trying hard to be shitty) should have a place to voice their opinions and be heard by like-minded individuals.

So I think the solution is:

1. Identify who is a real authentic user trying to express their opinion and who is obviously just choosing to consistently be shitty at the nuisance of others

2. Stronger subverses who have the right to defend themselves against low-quality posts, some policing of comments but still letting negative ccp post (with a further discussion needed on how we should restrict or punish them to prevent them from clogging up a specific subverse, or the whole site if they're repeatedly horrible everywhere)

3. Organization of users and ideas in specific subverses so that everybody (if they're a real, authentic user) has a place to express their own voice and be heard by their community base, whatever that group's opinions may be. So this means creating more subverses, with a strong centralized theme and enthusiastic user base willing to defend themselves and validate each others opinions.

That way, no one user can cry about how their post or comment wasn't getting any play in Subverse A, when they can always go to Subverse B and have a field day. Free speech, just better organization.

Good cuz I was banned from pizzagate by a evil mod after I was trying to post impertinent information exposing and connecting an organization to pedophile orgs

The results are that spammers spew more crap than ever to the site (17/25 in all/new earlier today), but we're still restricted for downvoting the stuff. Well done, you've shitted up the place more efficiently than SRS/Shariablue/Amalek/SaneGoat/MH101/Errol combined.

voat is now nothing more than an end-run around the reader's adblocker, spam is slide-censoring the real content and preventing free speech, it's great if you want to see endless adverts for vietnamese airlines, paki hookers, shitty pirate streams, low quality diet supplements etc tho!

How about a Voat sweatshop where low CCP users can go work to repay their CCP deficits. Maybe pay them 50 CCP / per hour.

Maybe we can reform and rehabilitate even the worst offenders. Voat can be the go to place for second chances.

It is a good idea.

If you don't want him to pursue this, your best option is to offer an alternative improvement.

This is a rare chance for him to make major changes at Voat.

You're right in that the new lower cost code is going to replace the existing code. Things will definitely change when Preview Vout goes live.

Be bold and suggest something truly revolutionary, yet executable.

Maybe there is a place at Voat for commercially viable content. Which means strong rules and greatly empowered editors. Or it needs its own domain. Maybe Voatlr. Maybe we need InstaVoat where we all make snarky profiles, and where new users might take the process seriously and use it as directed.

Besides Night Mode and Day Mode. Create something called Sunshine mode. A new look and a new filter for voat normies where everything is PG 13 and you don't have to see those evil bare breasts or mean racial slurs ever again.

I think Voat's biggest mistake has been offering a single one size fits all forum. I am doubtful that appeasing a few dishonest complainers that Voat lacks free speech is going to do anything to help matters.

Why not include a page where you can travel to multiple forums beside the Voat Main Site. Sort of like they have at 8chan.

good. a post should not be taken over by when harry met sally etc. or some other useless poster and their followers. Oh did I go off topic here sorry? I don't like it when a thread is taken over and their followers over run the thread and talk crap. Is this what we are talking about here.

Hope kind-Hearted people will watch this video and help others by sharing. Thank you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF-FpEWQHOE

PG seems to be getting hit as well since putt's announcement.

I think that announcement triggered movement of these "unproved" shill organizations.

The delay should probably depend on subverse activity: if on average the subverse only has 1 post per hour, then 10min could still be to fast. Or on a hot subverse with 2 post per minute, 3-5mins could be reduced further.

some broad thoughts:

1) spam and unpopular opinions have different voting statistics: the upvoat/downvoat ratio goes towards 0 for spam. with unpopular posts it also approaches a small value, but its significantly larger than 0. example: lets say 10% of Voat hold an opinion that the rest disagrees with by downvoating. If the 10% also upvoat each other, then the up/down ratio will approach 0.1 as votes accumulate. So given enough votes, software can differentiate between spam and unpopular opinion. The only questions left would be: "how large should a unpopular group on voat be so that their posts are not dismissed as spam? 10%? 5%? 1%? ".

2) Its logically impossible to have a spam free /new . No matter what anti spam solution you use, it will always lag behind in time. if there was any type of review-queue for new posts /new wouldn't be really new anymore.

3) its easier to identify spam on niche subverses compared to /whatever, because what is ontopic on a offtopic subverse? :) So if there is any way to encourage posting in small and focused subverses instead of catch-all, that would help no matter what anti spam solution is in place.

4) spam has low information content, in theory you could run a compressor(zip, rar, gz..) over the recent 5 posts concat-ed to determine if they contain repeated text: spam would compress to a small amount of bits. The reference would be compressing each post individually.

5) If the goal of the next anti spam solution is to allow few dedicated users to do most of the filtering work, then there must also be a way to vote them out of that power in case they abuse it. This could be implemented even without additional separate "voting events": let a random 10% of the posts marked as spam by these "janitors" through. If a post ends up beeing interresting determined by upvotes, then trace back which janitor made that spam decision and remove him if it occurs too often.

A lot of people are suggesting that the subverse for anti-spamming be used as a means of getting rid of spammers.

At that point all ShariaBlue CTR has to do is infiltrate that. They would use bots to mark "hateful" posts as spam and use bots in that subverse to auto-ban. Not a solution.

This is a tricky one. If you implement system-controlled spam prevention, you run the risk of opening up new venues for system abuse (like spammers abusing IP bans by accessing Voat via public wifi, or necessitating moderator power structures as seen on Reddit). Maybe let people create public user ban lists that other users can opt to use (Voat mods)? So nobody will be censored, but users can opt-in to the community ban-list (which they could further modify to their liking) with the press of a button to get their "optimal" Voat experience up and running as quickly as possible by eliminating spam for them personally.

If someone has negative CCP but is not spamming I say let them keep digging, but perhaps flair their username or change the color. Something to forewarn the community that this person may not be entirely reasonable without censoring them. Then the community can decide whether any individual comment warrants enough downvoats to hide it.

As far as spammers, perhaps a graduated system. 1 hour ban for first offense, then 1 day , then 3 day, then one week, one month, one year, permban. Something like that. That way retards who don't know or simply don't consider that they're spamming don't get shafted because of a mistake, but it's got a steep enough curve that bots and shills will be weeded out fairly quickly.

"Unsafe for SJW's"

You will never stop me. Embrace me.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Seriously.

I've programmed for almost 40 yrs, and people are insanely obsessed with changing things in software.

Adding items to control spam is useful. However, I've looked at the histories of some low vote accounts. It is not lack of political conformity. It is that they are assholes. Voat will not be improved if they are allowed more comments. Moreover, you may simply pave the way for ShareBlue and many others to destroy this community. If you, as the overseer, wanted to destroy Voat, this is how you do it.

What I would do is create new areas of Voat, while leaving the existing areas unchanged for the most part.

Consider what already exists. The current voat which is /v/all.

Look at how 4chan has /b/, /pol/, and dozens of other top level forums. Each independent of the other.

http://www.4chan.org/

I would just refer to each board as a single letter. Not give them each names. the boards /v/, /w/, /x/, /y/, /z/, /a/, /b/ would differ based only on the rules, though I suppose you could name each board. /v/ would be classic voat. /w/ would be limitless. /x/ would be experimental. /y/ would be called positive. /z/ would be numberless. /a/ would be quant, /b/ would be called nameless...

Why not do that on Voat.

You could create /w/all. In this new top level forum, you could bring over all the shells of subverses themselves. But have them all be unowned. And without content. Or you could bring over all the existing users and content and replicate it if you wanted to.

In the /w/all subverses there would be no restrictions. You would have a /w/news where voting had no effect on users at all. If this is a better system. It would eventually become more popular than all the old /v/ subverses.

In the /x/ subverse. Everything would be experimental. Users would have all the powers of devs in this subverse. It might break from time to time, but that would be up to the /x/ users to set things right.

In the /y/ top level forum subverses. There would be no down voats.

In the /z/ top level forum subverses. There would be no voats of any kind. Just post things in a category.

In the /a/ subverses there would be even more maths and statistics. Every user would see how much CCP and SCP he gains from an average post.

There would be all kinds of reports where users could compare themselves on a numerical basis. Who is the most popular poster. /a/ would be a dick measurers paradise.

In the /b/ subverses there wouldn't be any usernames. You would put things wherever you felt they belonged. But there would be no history of who did what.

These are just a few examples of what could be done. This would be more intune with the true experimental esprit of Voat in my opinion.

It's easy. Let me downvote submissions. Lots of content DESPERATELY needs to be downvoted on this site. In fact, I want to downvote more submissions than I upvote. The current system makes this impossible. I can't downvote ANYTHING at ALL. I can almost exclusively upvote submissions.

This is not how this system should work. Generally speaking, there are more shitty submissions than there are quality posts, which means I should be able to downvote more than I upvote.

Pls remove the downvote/upvote ratio, or maybe it shouldn't be 1:1, more like 5:1 or 10:1.

There are a few things that need to be fleshed out as well as the voting restrictions:
1. A system in place to recognize account creation abuse to bypass spam and voting restrictions. I've been playing around with hashing and then running that hash through a whirlpool encryption to make a decently unique string to identify an IP address without knowing that IP address. It's not foolproof, but it gets the job done as a anonymous way to store a unique string.
2. Tiered User Levels. Each new user will start at level 3, which will give all normal permissions (like now with accounts that have over 100 ccp). Based on SCP and CCP, number of posts/comments, upvoat/downvoat rate, plus whatever else, the User Level will go up (for more trusted users) or go down (for users that normally post junk and spam), granting and removing permissions (like randomly being selected to confirm spam, vote on subverse moderators, maybe even help with other sitewide functions?). This should help curb vote brigading, since people who vote brigade will also be restricted based on the CCP and SCP plus upvoat/downvoat rate, and should take care of spam accounts quite well.
3. User moderated spam system. Like other root discussions, Placing the spam filtering into the hands of random users will be the best way to do this, since "normal" spam buttons can and will be abused. Using the system above, more trusted users will see the spam button, and should keep the quality of the reports up as well. Having a human verify the spam is also needed, since there will be false reports that get through, and dropping reports into v/ReportSpammers is an amazing idea. Also using points 1 and 2, People abusing the system will get their accounts restricted/banned, and any known alts as well
4. Give users the ability to set a Downvoat threshold to auto minimize comments, and maybe default it to the current sitewide limit while also removing that limit. It'll make Voat more dynamic, and allow users to custom tailor their feeds.

This system is going to need a lot of tweaking, but it should be a lot more forgiving than the current system as long as the user isn't trying to actively be an annoyance (Shareblue, CTR) and give users a second chance at getting to have a conversation without being restricted.

I vote against that.

Giving over total control to the popular vote just results in "popular" people leading... which isn't the same as being qualified to do so fairly.

just provide an option in settings to turn on/off default visibility of shit comments

Raise the CCP requirements based on the age of the account. New account must earn 100 CCP in the first month to comment (restrict new users to certain verses). After two months old the account must earn 200 CCP and so on.

The numbers are flexible of course, but you need some system in place to limit new users from turning into fast moving spam accounts..

Anomalies will exist in all things, kevdude, but thank you for reminding me to check my cynicism.

When a Voater gets banned form multiple subverses, it should collate to an invisible list (calm down, hold your #TRIGGEREDs and keep reading) where the bans are tallied. Any bans in a subverse where the Owner or Mods are the same as in another subverse that the Voater has been banned in should be ignored. That is to say that if I banned PuttItOut from /v/bigboobscosplay and /v/comicbooks--subverses of which I'm listed as the [O], the list would only count as PuttItOut having a "ban score" of 1. But, if PuttItOut is banned in /v/bigboobscosplay and /v/fatpeople hate--the latter of which I am not an [O] or [M] of--then PuttItOut would have a "ban score" of 2.

Then, use the list to investigate and evaluate the post history of a top percentage of people with the highest ban scores for further (or more permanent) action. It should be pretty easy to see whether or not they're actually contributing anything more than spam right away.

Either the bans are justified in a majority of cases, or they are not. If the ban is justified, then more permanent action can be taken for the offending account and they can be removed from the list or otherwise ignored. If the ban is not justified, reset their ban score to "0" (this could be done without undoing their existing bans in any subverses), effectively removing from the list.

I'm going to disagree about his intentions, but ultimately I likely won't be affected too badly no matter what happens. If my own crappy writing sub becomes overrun with slobbering retards brigading me I'll just go somewhere else, and honestly, people like him have made it abundantly clear that "free speech" only exists here because Putt believes in it.

At the end of the day this is not a place for rational discourse outside of a few isolated pockets. That's sad and unfortunate, but nevertheless a reality.

I'm "whining" about his argument, I don't give a fuck about my CCP and I've said as much before. To you, if I recall correctly.

His "ya its free speech here but freedom aint free u gotta conform" does not fly with me and it never will.

Interesting definition of "concern trolling" you have there.

I was calling out bullshit in his argument that voat needs a bouncer to determine if you're 1488 enough to be here.

Sorry, that's not free speech, that's reddit.

I just got banned from a subverse for disagreeing with the popular opinion. Are rulings like that going to be reversed?

Personally, I'd like to be able to track people I've downvoted and automatically mute their posts once they're below a threshold.

Problem with this is that it seems a little heavy to implement on the server side and would be better lent to something like RES.

seems like you need a way to create a vector that recognizes when the behavior occurs, versus tracking a specific user.

Bring back Jailbait and other controversial but legal subs.

Hahaha why am I laughing.

Would make for a great "Member when Voat meta'd itself to death"

It would be interesting as a social experiment on real Voat. I'm guessing that chaos would be minimal, what do you reckon?

Hahahaha that wouldn't happen in even my wildest dreams. Come on Putts, just for one day?

https://i.imgtc.com/jJu2LAk.png

Maybe my fault was assuming that you had? Anyone who follows the logic sees the end and what other motive could there be to continue to promote it under the guise of "the poor trolls and the restrictions they brought upon themselves".

You assumed a motive and a characterization of my self based on a single comment, which was half-realization of where my proposal had led, half-"I'm too tired to properly identify this flaw just yet". You took that and exploded it into a thread where you pinged many users I know and respect. I admit to resenting that, but I do not fault you for your conclusions given your history.

What about all the blatant child porn? Do something about that.

You have outlined my logical process correctly, and notice that the "mod intervention" is at the end. When I reached that point, and even tired I was hesitant in writing those conclusions, which I think to you should be evident, I first began to realize the flaws in what I was proposing. This was of course amplified when you brought that final conclusion into public view in order to slander me as a concern troll. I now have many reservations about what I have been suggesting. That is the point of discussion, in case you have forgotten -- to discuss ideas and weigh how they might affect reality before introducing them into reality. There's that ideas/reality duality I mentioned earlier. Huh.

You have showed me only one comment of my own that I have not liked to read, one that I have rescinded. Thank you for bringing that back to the surface so I could better reflect on it in a less tired state.

We should limit the amount of subs one user can moderate.

Honestly, I think 1 is enough.

a stuck up prick who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room.

Far from it. You conclude this based on a single "arrogant" comment? My my...

I am not the one advocating for changing a functional system because some trolls might have to fill out a few more captchas.

It was for the benefit of innocent users I spoke, not trolls specifically -- but if they are to troll that is their freedom. However I will not and have not advocated for any change so long as it has been demonstrable that a change is inferior to what we have now -- this is the last time I will say this to you.

Not just he will flood. Voat will be flooded with thousands of shills running all kinds of schemes.

The end goal of all the schemes will be the destruction of Voat and the ending of it being an uncontrolled haven beyond the reach of the majority thought police squads.

@Peaceseeker certainly was part of it, probably under a different SN

Mate, i don't think they were. I'm not saying give them the big power hammer but I would trust @PeaceSeeker not to abuse that power if they had it and I'd be the first to bash down Putts door if it was abused :)

I have a vested interest in freedom and truth, and you have spat in the face of the truth this day. Of course I am determiend to correct you.

That user votes should not impact other users.

I never argued for this. I maintain and have always maintained that downvotes as a ranking system, and even the collapsing of comments, should remain. It is only the use of downvotes for assigning restrictions that I objected to.

That votes are true censorship

I also never said this. I said the consequences of accruing too many downvotes are not in the spirit of freedom (I explicitly said that it is not censorship, that it is just at the same time not appropriately free!)

And finally that actions should not have consequences.

What a ridiculously sweeping statement. I never argued for this; I argued for the opposite -- that specific actions should have specific consequences and that only those who commit the crimes should do the time. If this is how thoroughly you've misunderstood me it is no wonder you have started a totally unnecessary and counter-productive witch hunt against me. Do you know how desperately I want Voat and its freedom to flourish? Enough to reply to every single one of your slanderous comments to defend myself. Enough to dedicate large hours out of every day to test bugs for the Voat port. Enough to keep track of everything that happens on Voat and ensure actions taken are still in the interests of freedom.

Fuck you for all of this. We ought to be working together to defend Voat and its freedom, but instead you've done this.

And what is "it", kevdude? Do you even understand that? If an entire community comes together and says: "this user is disrupting every thread, please delete their spam comments", you would under no circumstances even consider that course of action, when public modlogs keep track of every ban? I don't even think this is the proper solution but you are treating this like simply proposing it when desperately trying to support a separate proposal that I am cursed for life to be viewed as nothing but a malevolent force on Voat. It is absurd and you are being incredibly irrational.

This seems like a poor use of scarce programming time.

Can anyone point to a single person who is restricted from commenting due to negative CCP that should have their restrictions lifted.

I've never seen one.

The only type of people who stick around here long enough to go deeply in the negatives do so because they are on a personal mission to destroy Voat, disrupt Voat, or demoralize Voat users.

Any normal person who has beliefs that are unpopular on Voat can simply go to Reddit, Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else that allows their mainstream beliefs to be discussed.

This is a solution in search of a genuine problem.

No platform has a suicidal obligation to support those who are actively trying to disrupt and destroy it.

Many opinions are unpopular here, but are popular everywhere else on the internet.

If indeed their are any unpopular opinions that are being prevented from being voiced, and the holders of those opinions aren't trying to damage Voat, specific actions can be taken in those few cases.

I don't think there's any kind of programming that can identify and protect these minority dissenters, should they even actually exist.

If you fail to see the relation between ideas and reality then you are doomed to bring nothing but ruin on anything you touch.

No. They technically have those powers in their mod tools. But when they try to use them they get attacked by the community.

And the only removals I hypothetically suggested were ones compelled by the community -- i.e. content that was giving some trouble to the community, thus provoking some kind of response. But you have conveniently left that out of all slanders.

If not then surely you must know that you are echoing arguments that were soundly defeated 2 years ago

Please state exactly what argument you think I am echoing so I can clarify for you once and for all that I am not in support of said arguments.

this is who you are opening the floodgates for.

When no floodgates are yet being opened. Fear-mongering.

And yet you will issue no corrections or follow-up posts in light of all the context and explanations I have provided. Your true colours are shown publicly.

Peaceseeker certainly was part of it, probably under a different SN

Now you're just pulling slanders out of thin air. Your dedication and irrationality with this entire fiasco has proven to me certain things about your true nature. Furthermore no pushes for powermods were made by me. None. I made a statement about mods with the powers they have now removing spammy content, and I have rescinded those words. Kindly stop slandering me.

No decisions have been made at all and I am doing no opening. I attempted to formulate a system that might be better than the one we have. Perhaps I failed. You are fear-mongering.

Not all spamming and trolling is bad. People get exposed to spamming and trolling but in the end they create an immune system to the spam. If the cost of spamming and trolling does not bring down voat or cost then it should be part of Voat.

What makes Voat interesting is that it is an unique place where you are not shielded from harmful messages. The front page should warn you "Enter at your own risk!"

Baseless claim. Putt has stated that I have not spoken to him about this matter at all, and even if I had my words would have no greater weight than yours.

Peaceseeker's comments about mods making rules on "thread derailing" certainly would suggest that this is the direction things will go.

Putt's words and actions are all that matter. My single comment from an over-tired state in a faulty attempt to justify a separate proposal in support of user freedom is irrelevant to the path Voat is taking.

So, at a time when shills are hammering the fuck out of the site, you want to get rid of the site's immune system?

Guess Amalek and Sane were both right when it came to Voat; why should the government & the left fear what they already control?

You are incorrect in that supposition, entirely. I desire nothing more than freedom for the entire userbase and my comments on mods contributing to a smaller problem was not well-thought-out.

I disagree because those restrictions are not necessarily applied to spammers. You would potentially punish the unpopular or compel them to state ideas that are not their own in order to game the system and earn the CCP necessary to comment freely. I disagree with this fundamentally in defense of innocent users' freedoms and if you truly cared about freedom you ought to at least be concerned by the prospect yourself.

Is captcha too easy to bypass?

PEOPLE ARE NOT COMING TO VOAT BECAUSE YOU ALLOW THE CP SITES TO EXIST. REMOVE THE CP SITES AND YOU WILL FLOURISH. FREE SPEACH DOES NOT MEAN CP AND PEDOPHILIA ARE OKAY. THEY ARE NOT OKAY.

No idea. TBH I would lift every restriction for a few days and see what happens.

Commenting restrictions on negative CCP accounts that aren't spamming their comments

Limiting any account that spam comments

Please get rid of it. It's stupid and goes against the "have your say" motto of voat. With the restriction it basically says "have your say---but only if you agree with the hivemind".

@Antiracist10 @SarMegahhikkitha @bojangles

that's cool news .

let the users pick

Soon

nice post

Daily Most Viral

Don't change anything. We are facing a well funded machine. Automation is the only way for a forum like this to defend itself. What you're calling for here is essentially opening our borders.

Filled with gasoline!

My main concern is that we keep an option to hide people with negative CCP (even if it isn't the default) and effectively keep the same behavior. I honestly don't give a shit about listening to someone who is so distasteful that they get constantly downvoated.

Give people a way to opt into all the crap. Put in an option to "Show Users with Negative CCP." Put a "show moderated posts" checkbox on each subvoat that puts all the stuff modded out back in. Freedom of speech isn't freedom to force others to listen to your shit. If a user wants to see it, they can. If they don't, don't make them. I don't know the back-end, but hopefully the current mod logs give you enough to hook that back in without a total rebuild.

If I were building the site, I think I would even call the master switch "The Shitshow" that would turn off all moderating site wide. You would get the firehose of bullshit. I think that a few hours of that and people will be clamoring to turn it back off and wanting more moderating.

Btw as someone who is very close to the pulse on how v/reportspammers works all this talk of handing over spamming reports to it is almost almost laughable. There are handful of users who report things but even less who actually investigate spamming groups and look at spamming trends on the site. Namely just one @Cynabuns. I occasionally do it for v/technology and v/sports and it's very time consuming, so I hope the people suggesting it are ready to roll up sleeves and do it themselves. People are talking like they already have a dedicated team running smoothly where all the reports are legit.

Add settings for users allowing them to screen out pests themselves. Give them an anti-spam level that blocks all users who've been flagged a given number of times, over a given period of time, up to eternity (if alerts have been found to be false, they should be discounted). Also give users a setting that lets them block all users below a given level of contribution points. Also allow users to set a threshold allowing them to block users who've already been blocked by a given number of people.

Well he is just one regular user.

I say keep the restrictions tbh. Perhaps the restrictions should only become active when comments consistently have above a certain downvoat:upvoat ratio?

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, huh? Not an easy task to run the show.

RIP Amalek, he died for our sins.

Slowly increasing amount of time between posting to the same post/same subverse/ posting period? POst, 30 second wait, post, 60 second wait, etc. ?

Here is an idea

Have an option to have subs be created thst are not can never can be moderated.

There can still be modersted subs .

Eventually users will grsvitste toward whateveris the best and ths t will change overtime and thts fine.

So for example i coukd createa sub called whatever and declare that it is not and can never be moderated. Snd then it woukd gsthernew users a d of it got tsken overbyspam peoplecouldjistform a new unmoderstoedsub witha differentnsme.

users given a number of report abilities ,once these reports are used members have to pay to re credit conversely once a user has been reported they too have to pay to be re entered .somewhere along the lines of 5 to 1?

Reporting spam doesnt work. Thst just empowers maleusers and commonthink mobs to become censors of other people.

The best system is everyone gets a certain number of post points a day and they cant comment further after that. There is no perfect soltion but this lets unpopular opinions still be heard withoit censorship but stops abusive commnenting spam by numbers.

Unfortunately it does stop tje 80/20 rule where80% of your good stuff comes from 20% of the people beicase they now cant post 400 good things a day.

There is no perfect solution.

But just reporting people as spammers is terrible because it makes voat become an echo chamber for whichever group numerically dominates.

And you really really want the one guy with the very unpopular far fetched theory to be able to post because he might be the next galileo or darwin or ... And because its important to know what everyone is thinking...even the stupid people. Sometimes knowing what the stupid people are thinking is the most important of all.

The problem I see with every implementation is the unknown, unknowns. We may never truly be able to combat spammers, and the like, but it might be the price that will have to be paid for the freedoms allotted.

Let's take things slow, so that we can make the right changes necessary in the right timeframe. The one thing that scares me is the ability for those that disagree to abuse a system that was meant to help the real users, not the vindictive users.

Not sure if you can't already, but the ability for individuals to block certain accounts from appearing in their own browsing session would help a lot.

The core problem as I see it is that voats are currently both single-dimensional and rate-unlimited. You literally have no way (that is not NP-complete) of differentiating between "This is spam" and "This is a waste of my time", and you have infinite amounts of it. Long story short, there's no way to do what you want while those two attributes exist -- even one of them can be very hard to deal with. Add that to all the users and the posts and comments each user can make, and it gets out of hand very quickly.

Both those issues need to be dealt with before any solution can work. Otherwise, you're going to run straight into a lot of issues that already exist in other places.

One of the methods I've seen on making voating less single-dimensional is to add a descriptor to the vote. That way both posts and comments can be voated as +1 Informative, +1 Pron, -1 Old, -1 Illegal, and especially -1 Spam. A previously very well functioning and popular site had this feature (which died due to allowing full user-inputted html and javascript). There may even be users of said SensibleErection.com floating around here. This is actually the way Steam games are tagged. A game is privately tagged by a user, and the publicly facing tags are generated from all private tags. It operates independently of the user ratings, and is indescribably better than searching with the pile of garbage that is the Google Play Store. (I was interested by a "Offline Games" list, and the second one was Summoner's War.) This is not the only way to make voats multi-dimensional, but it is one good way.

As for the other part, the only way to make something not rate-unlimited is to limit it in some fashion. It's going to be unpopular with some people, but there needs to be a quantitative cap on upvoats and downvoats that a single account can hand out per duration. That alone will both severely impair the ability to spam and allow unpopular opinions to a degree.

If an account can't downvoat until a certain condition is true, then fake accounts lose that much value, because the entire point of such a thing is to invest as little resources as possible for a gain. Legitimate users will use downvoats to hit spam, and not some random guy asking questions.

If an account can't upvoat unconditionally, then it becomes much harder to undo legitimate downvoats on spam and hater accounts. Legitimate users will upvoat things important to them, instead of every little thing they're interested in. Of course, it's entirely possible to have unconditional upvoating, but it requires safety mechanisms.

Think of voats as a resource. If a user has infinite of a particular resource, every single game ever devised will crash and burn. Every single thing somebody likes will be upvoated. Every single thing they dislike will be downvoated. There is zero neutral ground. But when people have to choose between spending limited resource on something they like and something they dislike, very close to 100% of people will spend that resource on something they like. If somebody spends a limited resource on a dislike, it's incredibly unlikely that they're doing it just to be a dick. (EX, you have ten dollars. You can spend ten dollars to spike that asshole's drink with laxative, or you can tell him to fuck off and buy yourself a [INSERT FOOD HERE]).

The method and particular limit on how many upvoats and downvoats a user can exercise can and should be discussed. The particular voat descriptors can also be discussed.

Also, I am against completely removing the part of the system that limits a user's ability to post or comment. It's not something that should be utilized frequently, but it's a tool that solves a particular problem. Refusing to use that tool is just an open invitation to let that problem run rampant.

Here are a few thoughts

• Since voat's userbase is so belligerent it doesn't take much for an person (or group) to decide to troll with them.
• Voat's userbase is highly concentrated at this point and this means that people of differing opinions get gagged by the low ccp rules.
• Adding spam button will most likely get abused by both sides. Trolls will use it to cause grief and some voaters will spam it anytime they think someone is up to no good.

That said, since a spam button will probably make things worse how about an alternative. Make it easy for you (or whoever) to boost a user's ccp. That way they can enjoy the site, and potentially dilute the population again. Also maybe punish those who don't know how to properly down voat by stripping their ability to down voat for a week.

Hopefully with time the userbase will equalize and you won't have to do this long term. Since down voats will be might will be might with a number of up voats..

In the user profile why not have a visible chart of vote history (both received and given if given votes are shown) so that users can themselves check. Crowd source it, theres no elegant one solution fits all spam prevention algorithm you can program that the human brain can't spot in 20 seconds of effort.

Scenario A: "This guys account is a month old and has one submission and which has gotten 250 upvotes, I wonder if hes a spammer hmm the chart says that within the first hour of the accounts creation it earned enough CCP to submit a link using one comment, this is probably a spam account and I have cause to report it"

Scenario B: "This submission / comment / contains information that directly contradicts the groups widely held beliefs, maybe it spam from agitators and would be paid influences. Oh okay so this month old account built up CCP over that month, maybe I should check the comments that got upvotes, okay they look like regular comments and observations. This submission / comment / information is probably worth looking into"

Any chance you can add a search function in both the ban page and the ban log page? Unbanning people in /v/fatpeoplehate who were banned awhile ago is a real pain atm

If you want to fix something, put a mark all as read feature in the user page. I've had 6 unread responses sitting there for months and I can't find them.

Sure it is. You are using his definition of "censorship".

No, it is not an argument. You are comparing my ideas to his ideas (by really comparing my character to his character, for when you compare to SaneGoat you are really insulting my character, for that was the main issue people took with him), and in any case it is irrelevant. If you take issue with my definition then structure your argument around that definition, and leave other people's characters and ideas out of the discussion -- or if you are compelled to include them, do no pretend they are relevant to the argument.

So if you are arguing against restrictions put in place to stop people like SaneGoat from rendering the site unusable using his definitions you can expect to be called out on it.

And at what point was I arguing against the restrictions themselves? I was arguing against the method by which they are imposed.

I'll help find good examples of users unfairly targeted.

Hey SBBH/SDBH. Which users are you ass clowns downvote brigading these days?

Algorithmmmms!?

Seems like a fun problem to solve. I have a simple idea, but one I think should be likely to work. The first thing is that the following algorithm would only be used after an account has been been reported by a sufficient number of humans as being spam. That way we can be fairly resource intensive without concern since it will run infrequently.

• Create a structure of Dictionary<string, Dictionary<string, int>>
• Go through each post the user has made and insert each unique word as a key. Its value will be the word that follows it. If said value is already present then you increment it.
• After completion, traverse the dictionary and get the average number of repetition in the value dictionary.
• Divide that number by the number of posts used to populate the dictionary.

That number should be something 'x' for a regular user. It should be something much higher for a spammer. The idea here is to try to prevent spammers from slightly changing a word or two to avoid spam detection. This example goes only one node deep but you could actually go arbitrarily deep.

Examples:

• Two identical posts: "Go to spamsite.com." "Go to spamsite.com."
• (Go -> (to -> 2)) (to -> (spamsite.com -> 2)) (spamsite.com. -> (EOF -> 2))
• Average repetition factor is obviously 2.

• 2 / 2 posts = repetition factor of 1 = the user is likely repeating the same thing over and over = spam

• Two slightly varied posts: "Go to spamsite.com" "G0 to spamsite.com"

• (Go -> (to -> 1)) (G0 -> (to -> 1) (to -> (spamsite.com -> 2)) (spamsite.com. -> (EOF -> 2))
• Average repetition factor is (1+1+2+2) / 4 = 1.5
• 1.5 / 2 = reptition factor of 0.75 = the user is almost entirely repeating themselves with some minimal variation

Sample Implementation

    float BotValueTest(string s, int totalPosts)
    {
        var results = new Dictionary<string, Dictionary<string, int>>();
        var words = s.Split(null);

        for (int i = 0; i < words.Length; i++)
        {
            string word = words[i];
            string nextWord = (i < words.Length - 1) ? (words[i+1]) : "";

            if (!results.TryGetValue(word, out Dictionary<string, int> wordHit))
            {
                wordHit = new Dictionary<string, int>();
                results[word] = wordHit;
            }

            if (!wordHit.ContainsKey(nextWord))
                wordHit.Add(nextWord, 0);

            ++wordHit[nextWord];
        }

        int totalKeys = 0, totalValue = 0;

        foreach (var secondWordDictionary in results.Values)
        {
            totalKeys += secondWordDictionary.Count;
            totalValue += secondWordDictionary.Values.Aggregate((a, b) => a + b);
        }

        float result = totalValue / (float)totalKeys / totalPosts;

        return result;
    }

Analysis

In playing with it it seems to work extremely well. An interesting aside is that it also picks up posts like "fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck" as spam, which they generally are.

I don't think this would be likely to miss much spam until we get to adversarial examples, like somebody ensuring each word they spam is followed by a new unique word such as: "Go to spamsite.com" "Go _ to ! spamsite.com #" However this becomes impractical as the amount of spam increases and obfuscates their spam. And if necessary the algorithm could be trivially expanded to go to further depths. Anytime a word is the 'nth' word following another, we would increment the counter. And in fact this could even also be done algorithmically. Perform what's described above as a relatively low cost first pass. If it's results are unclear then bump it up to two words and so on.

License

All code/ideas in this post are released by the author under the unlicense. In other words you're free to do anything with them.

My new favourite gif!

think about checks and balances and human behavior.cheers!

What about Shroomcloud aka beetlejuice, who has been spamming people's inbox accusing them of being pedos to get them off the site?

My .02 on a solution. Make a separate tab for conversations that either go totally off topic or get so many negative comment points. This way they may continue to converse but the mainline readers don't feel spammed. Place a marker in the mainline stating this comment is controversial and is continued in that conversation chain

Two words: mag nets

I really like how radical of an idea this is.

As far as brain storming goes, A+.

Thank you for submitting this.

But nothing I have proposed goes against user moderation or initiates power mods, and it is not on behalf of shareblue shills but on behalf of anyone who wants to have their say on Voat and do so in a non-platform-violating manner. And comparing anything I've said to SaneGoat or anyone else is not an argument.

You could place a throttle on new account creation. For example, every new account would cost $5, or needs a unique email address from a recognized email provider, or require sms verification. Each has drawbacks, but sms has the least.

This might also throttle growth, so its not necessarily great for the future of the site. But raising the "price" of a new account would make users value their accounts more.

These are not my actual suggestion, however. My real suggestion would be to have an iceberg-model for voat. Surface voat would stay the same, but voat could avoid bad-faith users by making more of the site, like the internal chat functions on designated subverses invite-only with a reasonable donation. Something like $50. This would make funding for the site more opaque, but it would give problem users a specific space for them to fling their shit.

To infringe is to encroach upon or violate. Freedom is the enjoyment of personal liberty and the state of not being subject to forces in violation of this. To limit one's speech through force is an infringement of liberty where Freedom of Speech is concerned -- it is an impediment, a limitation that is not in place necessarily through the violation of some other's liberty. When the restriction is applied to the spammer it is just because the spammer violated the platform and thus the other users' liberties. When a non-spammer is subjected to these restrictions it is an impediment, an infringement. It also happens to be an inconvenience.

Fuck niggers.

Rules be damned no rules this isn't free speech if you have rules.

You talk the talk but you won't walk the walk.

Spam will clog the system up and then VOAT will die. Most web sites have these popup ads that are very annoying and I try to stay away from them. Banning spam is good but the free flow of speech is good.

How about a different example. Child porn.

We don't screen for that, but if we find it, we delete it.

If I propose two situations, I want you to tell me which one is more favourable:

0.01% of users are unjustly restricted with minimal effort.

0.0001% of users are unjustly restricted with minimal effort.

And before you cry "fallacy", let me make clear that I am saying setting up a false dichotomy -- I am not saying these are the only possible two outcomes. What I am saying is that it is justifiable to try to reach the second option, and if we fail or find that too much effort is required for what it is worth, * we will revert back*. This is not just some arbitrary hypothetical we are talking about, kevdude -- this is the unrestricted freedom to speak of users on a Freedom of Speech forum we are dealing with. IF WE CAN WE OUGHT TO TRY.

You're treating it as if I were committing a logical fallacy (which I was not). I was simply stating the the fact that I am not a small minority in my thinking, which does lend some credence to my position. The same is true for you. I am amazed by your present hostility.

At the moment all CCP restrictions do to prevent spam is stop comment/post flooding by unpopular users. The sensible alternative is to make rules that directly prevent flooding. You can look through the data and see the frequency distribution of users' daily posts/comments - this is a good reference point. (At the moment low-CCP users are limited based on a 24-hour window, I think moving to a 48 hour window would be less of an inconvenience for genuine users - what follows doesn't depend on the window chosen.) Take for example the 98th (or xth) percentile relative to the frequency distribution above and set this as a global comment/post limit for all established users regardless of CCP score. Nobody can comment/post more than this within the chosen 24/48 hour time period. Apart from this fixed limit, let users post/comment without captchas until they get to say 80% (of whatever you want) of the maximum, introduce captchas for posts/comments from 80-95% of the maximum, double the necessary captchas for 95-100% of the maximum. This should kill flooding by individual accounts while only inconveniencing a few genuine users. Users who regularly hit 100% of their limits despite the apparent inconvenience of captchas would be red flags for administrators to investigate further.

I also consider the ability to upvote/downvote as an important aspect of free-speech, and think they should also be subject to universal limits for established users similar to the above.

In my opinion, discriminating against users who are not 'established' on voat is not an infringement of free speech so long as becoming 'established' has nothing to do with the popularity of users' ideas. Clearly CCP is a terrible measure of a user's patronage or sincerity. I suggest a new measure whereby a user becomes established when they have accrued 50 (or whatever) days when they logged in, voted on something, and commented/posted at least once. This may be overly harsh towards lurkers, so perhaps just logging in and voting is enough, though this has greater 'security' risks for voat regarding establishing the reputation of a user and guarding against some manner of hostile takeover by newbies. I also think such an establishment score should be degraded steadily if a user is inactive for more than two weeks (or whatever). This acts as a measure against sleeper accounts. Something like 25% (or whatever) of established users' commenting/posting/voting limits for newbies might be appropriate.

I don't view the ordering of content via up/downvotes or the mere act of reporting a CCP score as real impediments to free speech, especially when we have the option to order from the 'bottom' as well as the top. This type of user control of how they view content could be expanded: firstly by giving a 'Bottom' ordering for posts that complements 'Top' by swapping the role of up and downvotes. Various 'Middle' type orderings could also be introduced for comments and posts.

I am against increasing moderator powers - most people accept that this path is easily subject to subversion. The ideal is to have the site owners/PuttItOut doing the vast majority of moderation algorithmically.

When it comes to preventing intelligent subversion, CCP restrictions are useless. People or organizations are free to open as many accounts as they like, and many smart professional operators who wish to steer apparent opinions on voat are not dumb enough to draw attention to themselves by posting commenting too frequently from single accounts. CCP restrictions are also easily gamed by saying whatever voat wants to hear, posing no impediment all even to isolated individuals whose goal is subversion. I cannot think of any way at all to counter professional subversion while preserving user anonymity. I see this as an unsolvable problem unrelated to voat upholding free speech for its users.

The exact details of spam rules may reasonably be subject to secrecy. However, I think CCP-restrictions have little to do with spam, and are instead related to free-speech. Whatever rules you decide on regarding user-limits on commenting/posting/voting should be made painfully obvious to all new users, preferably before they open an account.

Woah woah woah. Hold your horses. Don't go putting words in my type field.

Noice

Great question! I downvoat.

Ask George Soros for help?

Comments can be flagged as "likely spam" and users have a "hide spam" checkbox. Comments are flagged as "likely spam" if X users report it or if the commenter's account is flagged as "likely spammer". The "likely spammer" flag could be sub-based so that being a "likely spammer" in one sub doesn't make you a "likely spammer" in other subs. The user flag could be removed after X amount of time or after getting X ammount of PP in the sub or never.

/v/noobftw needs some action.

I'm not trying to convince Putt of anything, and I think you're missing the point entirely.

For one: if whatever system is devised is shown to be worse than what we have now, we will revert back.

Secondly,

Limiting comments requires you to make a new account. Which people do

The suggestion is not to remove this but replace it with something that only affects actual spammers. Why not try if we can come up with something better?

Third:

Downvotes collapse comments but do not delete them so they can still be seen.

No one is talking about removing this functionality. The only proposition at present is to dissociate downvotes (specifically where negative CCP is concerned) and the ten comments a day restrictions. The restrictions are not supposed to go away, only the cause is supposed to be more deliberate and controlled.

Call me a troll all you like, but these are identified issues and I am only trying to think my way through proposing potential solutions. As far as I am concerned, the possibility of innocent people who have done nothing more than post unpopular opinions being limited in how much they can use Voat is worth trying to change the system for. I am not alone in thinking this.

I have a grievance with post restrictions for new accounts.

One on hand, legitimate new users feel unfairly throttled. Many people coming in from other places ( not just Reddit ) complain about this.

On the other, someone can still create a bunch of new accounts and spam or troll away, as long as they have the patience to keep creating new accounts. Case in point: https://voat.co/v/whatever/2077393, check out all of the day-old accounts shitposting there.

I propose that you:

• loosen / remove the general post restrictions for new accounts
• add new post restrictions per subverse for new accounts
• make new post restrictions per subverse for new accounts configurable in the subverse settings ( e.g. restrict users younger than _ amount of time from posting or commenting more than _ times per _ ) ( yes, this means a subverse owner can prevent newer users from posting at all in their subverse by using a "0" for that second number )
• use a sensible default for all subverses that don't have this set, to compensate for the loosening / removal of the previous general restrictions

This is intended to allow subverse owners to temporarily or permanently lock down their subverse in response to spam / trolling from new accounts, as well as giving legitimately new users more freedom throughout the rest of Voat while they remain "new". It still won't be able to help system owned subverses, or ones with an owner that went missing, but it can help more active subverses to withstand abusive users.

Pretty sure it's too late.

No, but the users should be permitted (and given the means) to protect themselves.

They still have that with downvotes and spam reports! If your argument is that users should have the ability to use downvotes to reduce certain users to 10 comments a day based on what the disliked shills are saying, that is absurd from the get-go.

Until you give names of actual users I am accusing you of lying about this.

Then call me a liar, because I cannot recall the names of others. Putt has confirmed that there is a small minority of users with restricted accounts who are not guilty of spam, however, and I don't see how it matters whether or not they are shills where Freedom of Speech is concerned.

Accounts with negative should scale appropriately (TBD)

ex. An account with -100 or less can only post 5 times a day. => The idea is that they should be contributing, eventually they will be able to recover if they are not spamming.

An account with -500 or less can only post 1 time a week,

An account with -1000 or less can only post 1 time a month.

The numbers are variables, but the idea is restricting the account the more and more they go into "karma debt" so-to-speak. The user should always have the ability to "recover", which is why they should still be able to post, but on a stricter and stricter basis

What about creating multiple accounts and then using those accounts to have conversations with each other to steer a narrative?

It is not Voat's desire or role to protect the users from disinformation tactics.

What about then using the votes from those accounts to start collapsing comments.

There are going to be systems in place to prevent people from upvoting their own alts -- it will be detected as vote manipulation and they will be banned. If legitimate users upvote their disinformation, again that is "legitimate" and they have "earned" their downvoting ability. If they use it to target specific users Putt will also detect that and ban them.

Again, can someone show us real users that have been affected?

I have met close to ten, most seemed innocent. Unfortunately the only one whose name I remember is p0ssum, whom you have brushed aside based on being ShareBlue. But even with his case, if it's just unpopular / forced response-type comments he's posting, and not spam, why should he be restricted? Us downvoting his bullshit out of sight (or just bloking him) should be sufficient. The point is that it is totally conceivable that new users could fall victim to unpopularity downvotes. Crensch has argued that such users should assimilate, and while that argument can be compelling, it is fundamentally in contradiction to Voat's principles. This is not 8chan -- anyone can say anything here, as long as they say it responsibly (no spam or manipulation!) The current system does not allow for unpopular opinions right off the bat without restriction, and that is simply wrong and we should try to avoid that system if we can. If we can't, oh well, we would have tried.

I didn't say a thing about their mod point system. I think random juries best.

Justin, no, don't do it.

We're here for free speech. If you limit it, even for spam, you're going down the wrong road. Free speech isn't for popular speech, it's to protect unpopular speech!

Now, if you want to limit spam then do so. Just give the mods a spam button, then watch us become Reddit.

We're pretty good at policing this site ourselves.

Myg is part of the 75% of restricted accounts Putts recognizes as hostiles.

Yes, those affected are a small minority, but if something can be done to give justice to that minority without jeopardizing everything else, we ought to at least try. Freedom of speech means people can be mean -- doing so won't gain them any love, attention, or respect, but as long as it isn't spam they should be free to end every comment with "I hate you, you literal faggot".

There are janitors who can remove posts (with a given reason) in every system-owned sub. The problem with manipulation is that it's hard to prove without admin-vision.

Personally, I find utility in letting the upvotes run their course so that all the accounts involved can be flagged and eliminated if worthy.

Literary faggot lives!

I did that, and I was here for months with barely a few upvotes. Then I started trolling a bit and making white supremicist comments and my rating shot up pretty high, got over 00 pretty quick once I realized the dance you have to do here. I am not a white supremict, I just dislike certain parts of Reddit and want to come here to avoid BS once in a while.

You’re right, of course. The question of balancing ‘right to lie’ and ‘right to do harm via lie’ is always a tricky one… I’m starting to appreciate more how Voat’s owners are apparently actually committed to freedom of expression. They’ll sort this out.

The topic of this thread is that people with negative CCP are only allowed to post ten comments a day. This is an unjust restriction for people whose only crime was posting nothing but unpopular opinions -- in the spirit of Voat unpopular opinions should be allowed. Auto-collapsing will still be present, so will comment sorting based on score. Spam can still be buried -- the spammers just won't be automatically restricted in their daily comments through downvotes if a change is made. The restrictions will come into effect some other way, such as in response to a spam report being flagged as actual spam.

You absolutely know the answer to this kevdude.

Just because we don't have an army of programmers making it happen overnight doesn't mean that we are not committed to the direction we have stated.

The great thing about how we designed Voat's rule system is we can turn off and on rules easily. They are not hardcoded into the code base.

So, let's say we make a huge mistake with a new rule... we can turn off that rule and turn back on the old ones.

PuttItOut says "I have made a decision to .. remove restrictions."

Noble sentiments indeed, however someone has set my subverse to private against my will whence it remains hidden, where after I change it back and save the changes it reverts back to private again .. so how about fixing things up so ppl can read it.

I'm banning you!

(this is a joke everyone, calm down)

This is surely the turning point. How authoritarian will it be in the end?

The best part of the restriction was that they were set in hard code. The law was king and it was set. Now we are going back to an oligarchy; the likes of which I fear will be the end of voat. However well intended.

Can we also have the default comment sorting to 'new'? if we have it on top the only comments people will see is the 'popular' opinion echo chamber like Reddit and the unpopular opinion at the very bottom because of it being down voted below everything.

It does not accurately reflect the extent to which people disagree when all you see is a top comment that was upvoted 300 times. If downvotes were enabled that same comment might have been downvoted 400 times -- it's only a top comment because the people who disagree could not find a contrary comment to upvote more. It is fundamentally unbalanced.

Does it matter as long as we know that it IS one?

Any word on self-destructing comments? Comments that don't show up on my profile after a time period so somebody can't go in my post history and doxx me if they tried hard enough.

Awhile ago you said you were thinking about it, but I have not gotten a response yet.

If possible block the IP address of offenders after being warn against spamming say 3 times. Banning user names is useless by the way.

There is no reason putt would do this to benefit you guys unless he plans on making you and your SRS crew part of this team people are suggesting.

There isn't anything you can find on me that's shilling except for the discord server. And that was only because of the restriction in chat caused by your group. Putt mentioned it in here.

So we report and wait? Ask the subscribers of v/chicago and v/canada how that has worked out for them.

Putt is going to introduce code to give subscribers more power in their own communities, de-throning power mods etc.

Putting the power in the hands of a select few. Why not just go back to reddit then? Seriously? There is more content there.

kevdude, this is not power, it is a transparent marking of content as true or false so others can act on it accordingly. All of this is done transparently, something reddit lacks entirely. Hierarchies of competence as essential for advanced systems to function efficiently; what is important is that everyone involved remain accountable, and the modlogs ensure that.

It will create a situation where subs can be overrun. The community will lose its powers to police itself.

I do not see how this is the case. If people are spamming they will be restricted and then banned as usual, and downvotes will still hide content after a certain threshold.

I don't think that where we are really merits any change. Show me actual users who were affected.

This is the main important argument; perhaps a change truly is unnecessary based on how small a percentage are affected by this, when compared to the additional amount of changes and work that would have to be put forth to compensate for this group. Putt has confirmed that the group, though small, does exist. He will have to decide whether the change is worth it once the decided upon system is presented.

This is a good move. When I first got here, I felt like I just had to post a bunch of white supremecist/comments to get 100 upvotes to actually be able to participate fully and by pass the 100 limit.

I wrote this long thing but to break it down simpler. A mod to mod mods with another mod to mod those mods.

1. If the entire community is an alt farm, there's no point in having the alt farm.
2. If the abuses of power are publicized, the ability to vote to remove power users is granted additional legitimacy.

bloodguard posted this and I think it is worth reposting so it is near the top of the pile:

Until I have the ability to click on a Mod's nick and unmod* them from my perspective I really don't want to give them that power. *unmod them (for me) and see everything they've spiked, banned, censored and blocked. If other people want to keep them as -their- mod that's fine as long as I have the ability to "fire" them.

We can’t rely on one person to consistently manage all aspects of voat. Unless this changes I don’t see it improving drastically. I’m not insulting Putts efforts, he does the best he can but its not a job for one person.

Just compare what people are trying to post to their recent previous posts. Ez.

it will take over a year to repair the damage its cause

Dude, I could

1. write a script to scrape social media for conversations,

2. connect over vpn or other methods,

3. create dozens of profiles with faked useragents for a headless browser, do this every day to age some of the accounts,

4. let some of these accounts age, while I use others to auto-post and cross-post with the aforementioned scrapper

5. use a dictionary to find+replace words in the scrapped conversations with synonyms

6. even vary the writing style, with or without emojis, with or without caps, inserting ums and ahs, preference for commas or not, shorter or longer responses, etc.

7. Manually log in to a handful of accounts each day to push more important, specific agendas on multiple fronts, like getting Puttitout to favor committees, or abusable spam buttons, or even user take over of subverses--or creating the impression that manual solutions where every report has to be reviewed is the answer (and then abusing the hell out of that system in order to slowly push a crisis where he reconsiders bringing on mods or community members who are really just the hypothetical shill accounts.)

I'm not saying I do any of this. I don't, but I'm a mediocre scripter and it is well within my reach. Imagine what the share blue cunts and other private disinfo bitches have available in terms of tools?

Edit: The ONLY thing that will work is being willing to adapt to the changes, on a semi-regular basis, like every 3-6 months to account for abuses of the system--and providing as MUCH transparency as possible.

When those liars make multiple accounts to manufacture consensus. When those liars post the same shit in multiple threads, even if it is off topic. See there are things that require moderation. Either you are going to put it in the hands of the few, or leave it in the hands of the many.

If it gets to such a point as to be overwhelming surely it can be identified as spam. The entire community (the many) maintains the ability to report anything as spam. We can either entrust a vetted group of people to flag these reports as spam or try to manage it with the entire community doing the flagging -- I think the former method would be more efficient and more reliable without significant issue since their actions would be logged. In any case, if threads are being derailed by off-topic ramblings the community can report as spam and if judged by whomever to be spam the accounts might be banned. More likely a moderator could delete the off-topic ramblings. There are many possible avenues that need not restrict the unpopular.

Show me one that does not require increasing moderator powers substantially.

What about the system I proposed here increases moderator powers? All it does it give a few people the janitorial ability to flair a post as SPAM so that Putt can ban them. And these people's actions will be publicly logged for everyone to see and anyone can replace them if they do not do their job properly.

In Smokratez case it's child psychology.

Yeah, I kinda know how ya feel, When they are mentioning giving v/reportspammers more power I felt the same. I don't report spammers for badges or glory, but just because I see the jerks as stealing from us all and it's part of my little way of giving something back to Voat. Cynabuns already does a great job filtering through the reports and sending them on to Putt for bans and such. I don't need or want the power to do that myself. But on the other hand, Putt can't do everything and does need to delegate more. So it's a conflicting thing I 'feel' on this whole thing. The Putt will figure it out ... and the gods of Voat will smile upon us.

And yes, to preserve the site as a whole I can sleep with one or two dolphins getting caught in the tuna nets.

I understand that, but the entire point of this thread is instituting a change if a better system can be devised. What is wrong with restricting accounts solely based on actual spam instead of how unpopular they are? I've heard a number of people rambling about shills and their lies, but I frankly don't see how it is our perogative to censor liars. Let us downvote them to hide their lies from sight, but only ban them if they are actually spamming the website. Maybe we need to put out a more stringent definition of spam, but it seems to me that there are ways of only punishing the guilty -- or at the very least punishing fewer innocents.

Charge a nominal fee in bitcoin per user e.g. 50c, $1. That goes towards the servers.

Everybody else must type capcha.

One thing is for sure. Whatever system is implemented make it as transparent as possible. Give us access to the logs of moderators to see who they banned, who they muted, how often, and on what SPECIFIC posts, if any. Put a deadline for bans/mutes on any given post. Require that when mod permissions are used, such as banning, the mod has to enter into a field the particular post banned for, and they cant ban on posts that don't have a certain number of 'spam/shill' votes, and require x amount of referenced posts in the given field in order to effect the ban.

In this way we can see who is doing what, why in general it has been done, and the specific origin of the action. What this does is prevents mods from banning/removing posts that the community doesn't want removed (only the community can be complainants, not the mods themselves), requires an overwhelming voat so a small minority of shills have to work harder, and more importantly, mods can't troll old posts in bad faith just to silence a user for something that was recently posted.

Transparency means even if we dont have the means or rules in place to limit bad behavior now, we can catch it early because otherwise anonymous moderators have nowhere to hide. Reasons for actions need to be concrete and referenceable, to make 'arbitrary' censorship difficult.

Manufacturing consent is not free speech. The current rules, which were intended for spam only, actually address it quite well. It would be a shame to loose our manufacturing consent protection. This community is too small to weather a sufficiently large and/or lengthy attack.

Fundamentally users ought to be able to express disdain or disagreement as easily as agreement; YouTube and Facebook voting systems have always been broken because you can only upvote. The downvotes are not the issue; the consequences potentially are.

What does it matter if there is a single innocent involved who might be saved by a systemic change?

If your alternative involves user moderators deciding who is welcome or not on subs then that is the reddit model and destined for massive abuse eventually and failure. You only need to look at how many moderators you have had to remove on system subs and how many unmoderated subs there are, to see that good mods are hard to find. Look at the elections in any country to show you that any choice people are given in elections the choice is usually between stir-fried shit or boiled poop.

I think the more important gate is the one restricting people to three posts per hour in each sub and ten per day.

Anyway you have a model already for your ideas in ProtectVoat. We don't remove anything but repeat posts. NSFW and commercial spam. Bear in mind if you look back through the /new section more than 80 percent of "spam" posts by legitimate users have been removed by virtue of them deleting their accounts.

Allow mods to rate limit in their respective subs, max of 7 days can make x posts and y comments per day, public list. Get rate limited by x number of subs in y number of days and go on trial in public sub for global rate limit for z days. Simple upvoat downvoat duke it out in the comments publically, have your say at least. Disregard scp for rates be as unpopular as you like. Naughty step if your a time waster.

Complete spammers flagged via spam button, bots, direct linkers etc either rate limit to 1 comment / post per day if they are real and want to say fuck you, let them.

this is censorship?

Might want to actually define what counts as spamming.

Once a user has -5 ccp or less, can his future comments be immediately collapsed by default?

If you were admin, what would you do?

And the Owl has determined after reading through all of this that the answer is there is no answer. My thoughts on this are simple. I've never liked the whole up vote, down vote system, but it is what it is. Though my personal opinion falls in the mainstream of thought here on Voat, I've always wished we could see more opposing views. So yes, there is a problem ... but how to fix that is a mystery. I'll leave it up to you, Putt ... and after you've read through all this, and come to a decision which way you wanna go, I promise I'll give it a chance, as will most good goats. I wish you luck though, for this certainly seems like a conundrum, damned if ya do, damned if ya don't situation. No matter whatcha do ... you'll take heat ... so go with your instincts, they've always got us through all this in the past.

I'm late to the party so this will probably get buried, but what about a randomized screening system? New accounts are flagged for several random users to look at and see if they're spamming or not. If they are, the account goes. If not, they stay, and get checked again at certain points (maybe every week or so for the first month, then they're in the clear) by a completely different random group.

That way they can still post whatever they want, but the training wheels only come off after they've shown they won't abuse that ability. And with each check being done by a different group of randoms, you can avoid a directed effort to silence someone.

And if any of the users are reporting spam when it's really just something they don't like hearing, they get a temporary site suspension, and are also eliminated from the "jury pool".

I find the presence of upvotes without the presence of downvotes to be an overly saccharine, forced, stepford sort of positivity. It feels fake and plastic. If this place becomes pleasantville, the shills can fucking have it, I'm out.

Back in my Slashdot days, I went for YEARS without ever getting any mod points. Then suddenly I got them every time I turned around. Never did anything different, but suddenly it was "You have moderator points", even when I couldn't have cared less.

The rules Voat uses were put in place in to combat this behavior. They are old rules, mostly remaining unchanged from the initial versions of this site. Most, if not all, of the rules were in direct response to spam attacks. It was never Voat’s intention to limit non-spam accounts, but this is what has happened as an indirect result of these rules.

I'd like to know who these non-spam accounts are.

For number 1 that is a legit issue. It's creating an echo chamber.

Similar with the downvoting mechanic... you needed like 100 ccp or something?

Either way it meant I tended to avoid the racist topics and just let them circle jerk, and only posted the things I had in common with the Voat zeitgeist.

Still doing better than reddit, but far from free speech.

If downvotes no longer restrict an account's ability, I want User-Configurable Silence Threshholds. I want to be able to say "Don't show me posts from a user with negative CCP" or "Don't show me posts from a user with less than 1000 SCP"

That way, downvotes still have meaning, assholes can still release their shit, but I don't have to smell it.

This is a good idea. Owl endorsed. @Slayfire, @gabara ... you win the coveted 'give a hoot' award! It doesn't address the overall issue at hand, but what a great way to limit YouTube clicks!

Probably. I can refute him just like the rest.

Would it be of any help to give v/protectvoat some real powers in this area? Give you guys who are all old school original Goats the ability to actually take a report you've been sent, determine that the user reported is legitimately a troll or shill deserving an axe, and put them in a penalty box or something. They could still make alts and go on and go, but sooner or later, the luster would wear off for them on that. Especially if new users alts are forced in the Captcha stuff with every new account. They'd burn the alts they've hoarded quickly and be stuck with nothing but accounts in a time out more or less, or new restricted ones.

I trust you guys to handle something along these lines, some won't, but that's another story ... in the meantime, v/reportspammers can handle the legit spam. Same as usual.

The only way they could be corrupt is if they flag something as spam that is not spam, and if they do this all of us will know and we will have grounds for replacing them.

Average upvoat and average downvoat per thread

Knowing an account is getting upvoats from bots or shitty accts would be nice

MH101 and Amalek are gone right now. Submission spam is much more problematic than comment spam. Keep the restrictions in place but make it for submissions and not comments. That will slow the spammers down. See how it works out and then find a new solution if that doesn't work.

Maybe this isn't the best way to do it because it will cause problems for people with unpopular opinions but I feel like at this point, comments aren't a problem when it comes to spam. Any system in place restricting how many comments someone can post is unnecessary at this point in time.

Implement a "report spam" button and a "not spam" button and an indicator showing the smamyness level. Once you reach a specific threshold, the comment or submission is nuked from orbit.

Unfortunately, this is a vector for brigading.

I started trying to use it - stopped as soon as I saw that. Not wasting a minute of my time for each spamfaggot post out there. I can report faster than that - if you want my reports, don't limit me on them.

We need to allow unpopular opinions while preventing comment spam.

If it was just unpopular opinions, I'd agree with you.

We have paid opinions to worry about. We know Shareblue has been here, and it'd be naive to think they've left.

Is there something separate in store for that issue? If so, I suggest that both changes be made on the same day.

The real problem is alts.

Require 3 captchas to register. Require unique email, maybe? Anything to minimize automation of account registration.

New accts: 2-5 posts a day, for a month.

As to voting. I dunno. Allow a certain number of votes early on. I'm more concerned with 3-4 alts plastering all/new with the same spamporn site than who gets points.

No, it just introduces a different set of issues. Yes or no are two fundamental choices for every option, you remove one you violate a basic law of nature.

I don't understand your question. What/who is a "Hotep" ?

Don't concern your self with a downvote, most people have some angry downvote fairy that -1's anything they post or say.

Here's an option that could mitigate forms of spam to an extent: Rather than just testing for duplicates when submissions are given, simply put a filter on the user end that shows the first link posted, and ignores duplicate posts so the user doesn't see them. This would make alt accounts useless for flooding v/all.

For users who are penalized or restricted for any reason, allow them to respond to posts on their own thread or responses to their posts; and allow them to post in their own sub-verse.

Give each user a value contribution rating that levels out over time. When users get upvotes their value rises, and it falls when they're down-voted. This rating will be factored into the comment sorting along with the up-votes/down-votes on the post itself. So the posts of someone who's been consistently bad for a day start with a penalty, and someone who's received more upvotes essentially gets extra points factored into their posts.

Stifles growth of the site.

I dont agree. Consider the fact that you have been here for over 2 years. What if 2 years ago, you had to take an extra step with a throwaway email, that you probably alread have anywy? What difference does it make.

If you re a real user, and you plan on actually contributing to the site with posts and comments, will these few extra clicks make you chose not to? I doubt it.

Spammers on the other hand...when they want to make 100 alts need about 15 minutes to do so. Well now they first need to register 100 fake emails, copy paste those into the field, and then go verify them in the email, all while changing their IP 100 times. It messes with their shit from 15 minutes, to 4 hours. And since those alts dont last more than one post due to reports.....they might just give up on the mass approach.

a banhammer for alts

I meant bannhamered by putt against Chinese spammer alts, as well as myg alts, because as soon as those restrictions get lifted, you know he will start again.

Also the sleeper accounts. Those 1 year old faggots with no posts or comments or given upvoats. Then when that blonde jew threatens them on reddit, they show up in v/thedonald by the thousands and demand the sub to be handed over.

ive been asking for that forever lol

i attacked the censorship. I haven't done anything to disrupt Voat's operations. I simply use words in a way that has gotten your entire shill group focused on me. I welcome putt to log into my accounts and see for himself.

He is helping people who have been brigaded. I can see why that bothers you

yeah im not farming alts. As far as im concerned you made those and add them to your conspiracy that everyone you dont like is SaneGoat or someone.

How do you define the behavior of creating multiple alts?

There would be no need without restrictions.

This thread is full of hours/minutes old accounts arguing with each other. https://voat.co/v/whatever/2077393

That almost seems intentional. Originally that post started out with people shitting on it and the ones supporting it getting downvoated. You specifically said you wouldnt allow it in PG because of your shitty ruleset that stifles discussion. Now all of a sudden new accounts pop up shilling and you respond to every one of them. Not suspicious at all.

What you are talking about right now is limiting the ability of the userbase to moderate content.

Thats what voting is for. There doesnt need to be censorship.

Without those restrictions trolls will overrun subs.

I have a feeling the only trolls overrunning subs will be from your subs and /v/SoapBoxBanHammer and the rest of the mods from there and the subs they own.

That will force mods to start banning abusive users because the users will no longer have the power to deter the behavior as a group.

We will watch mods closely.

That power in the hands of a few mods (as opposed to being spread out over the "herd" as it were) will lead this site to become reddit 2.0.

Removing the censorship is a step away from reddit. I'm curious to see how you shills handle these changes. Putt made it clear he is investigating. My conscience is clean, is yours?

This is why i want a banhammer for alts as well as a harder process for registering accounts.

Reasons for your upvote/downvote need to be added. Then people can set their own threshold for "spam" and be able to legitimately downvote non-spam for other reasons, eg. "asshole".

still at what? BTFO your beta ass again?

Arguably correct, but it was through restated and reworded opinions over time that got to where he is, and that potential is not something Voat needs. This system can be optimized without possibly restricting the voices of those who have not spammed at all. If a brand new user from reddit shows up and starts rambling about how they really think communism is the way to go, chances are they'll start they're time on Voat with negative CCP. That should not condemn them to only 10 comments a day right from the get-to.

As the machine god replaces more and more of your body parts with machinery, you will need less and less blood. We make a deal with the blood god, he gives us the PUREST and FINEST WHITE motor oil! We will need that more than blood in time.

Putting any person or people in charge of deciding what is or isn't spam seems like a really bad idea. Just hide comments with enough negs. Id rather decide for myself if I care enough to look.

Just make the spam confirm/deny log public. That way abuses of power are always visible if the community knows a user not to be spamming.

Given that your example lists specific, apparently notorious, user accounts, I assume that this discussion is not in reference to the massive amounts of BOT spam with which we're inundated, right? So is the concern "shilling" (universally or simply mass-posting content from a single source or single ideological source) or simply "trolling" behavior?

Give him our blood?

Ycombinator (basically a reddit clone for nerds) has a feature where downvoted comments are less visible, or are collapsed. you can still read them if you want but they don't clutter up the real conversation. I think that may work well.

You know... I don't know. I haven't thought about it since digg died and reddit took over.

For anyone interested, here's an imperfect, quick guide to how easy it can be to choose whether you use YT or HT.

https://voat.co/v/hooktube/2074435

This isn’t Free Speech as I see it or as I want it.

RIP VOAT

I've said this idea time and and time again. NO restrictions. Let the mods do their job. And have a report feature where a small committee that the USERS choose investigate the account and vote to remove or limit. There should also be the same thing happening to mods that get reported. The committee can change every 6 months, and a person can only join the committee every 2 years or something. This can stamp out user abuse and mod abuse. They can still say what they want (outside illegal content bans) but you take away their ability to abuse the system. The people requesting committee spots must also meet certain criteria. Or you can just choose them putt. Edit: forgot to add, just remove up and DV. It works for 4 chan. I know posts disappear and that helps, but votes are just retarded. People can agree or disagree while reading comments, having a voting system just ruins subs and sites.

More likely people who have been dedicated to fighting spam for years, like the /v/ReportSpammers folks. Their actions will be public. They will have no power you will not be able to see or criticize. If someone flags something as spam that is not spam you will be able to see it and call them out on it.

What exactly are you complaining about, in that case?

It was more the work of alkehol + machine god music.

i disagree

@system gets the gas.

Like Digg?

Id like one account immune to your brigades please, thanks for the post Putt

hurr durr i was only pretending to be retarded

Until I have the ability to click on a Mod's nick and unmod* them from my perspective I really don't want to give them that power.

*unmod them (for me) and see everything they've spiked, banned, censored and blocked. If other people want to keep them as -their- mod that's fine as long as I have the ability to "fire" them.

Tell me my fanfiction.net username if you know so much about me then. C'mon.

Used to play WoW with an Amalek. Was a little Paki kid. That guy was an annoying shit also.

I don't need to see anything. That's just a drawing, just like nigger is just a word. I just want freedom.

People who have negative CCP can apply for an "official Troll" status, that allows them to carry on normally as long as they are not spamming. They loose the "official Troll" status if they are caught spamming and get reported and sentenced. As @KingoftheMolePeople said, abuse of the report spam button to silence trolls should be taken very very seriously.

Edit: Ceremony to hand out "official Troll" title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oskCypnfoA8

https://imgtc.com/k1gVtFt

Comment Meanie is broken. I'm tired of having been here for as long as I have, and being unable to downvote things.

No its a bot that prevents you from down voting submissions, only submissions not comments, if you have more down votes than upvotes.

I get that its to encourage uovoting and community involvement, but its easily gamed and prevents users from trying to stop spam.

The only itsy bitsy tiny change I would make is that when you post a comment, it defaults to one up vote instead of no upvotes.

The problem with that is then users would get 1 CCP for every comment, eliminating the utility of 100 CCP downvoting restrictions etc. All a spammer or shill has to do is post 100 non-spam comments and suddenly they can downvote. Submissions have a default upvote because SCP doesn't matter.

Not on fucking mobile. Why don't you just replace youtube with hooktube? Give us the option instead of forcing us.

As a long-time contributor to v/ReportSpammers (hell, my entire history of submissions on Voat is more than 75% for that subverse), I am annoyed that my (~2) years of dedication to "keeping this site free of spam" has left me unable to downvote any submission whatsoever (when posts are normal, I am more likely to avoid voting at all rather than mindlessly upvoting or using the downvote as a "disagree button", while when posts are spam, I just go through everything and hit that downvote button on as many posts as I can find from the spam issue: long story short, I still need to upvote over 900 more submissions before I am even allowed a single downvote on spam posts).

If we're removing the restrictions from both the spammers and the people who have been mindlessly shouting opinions that the majority of Voat seems to oppose (just based on their inability to ever find a crowd that agrees with them enough to get a positive CCP again), then we should also remove the restrictions on the people who have experience dealing with the worst of the spammers.

Yes, true, but the users with the power can sit in all/new and send them to account hell with the click of a button.

I downvote and also report spam comments. The downvote eventually will collapse it in the thread and the spam button hopefully gets to community moderators at some point so that they can remove the comment.

:D

I'm upvoating allot i dont normaly would to keep a positive score to downvoat spam in v/all/new.

HEY, LISTEN!

I've got an idea that could work, but I don't know if you can implement this. Please patent this for our website, so reddit can't use it. Ha-ha.

This is how it goes:

1 - Comments, and submissions have a report spam button. People click that button.

2 - The report goes to the sidebar, or another area of the website, and it asks RANDOM users if it's spam. They can voluntarily click to verify if it's spam. This way the power to judge something isn't in the hands of a few people.

3 - If a user's account gets too many verifications of spam, then they will be banned. However, if they want to, they can appeal, and ask for an un-banning.

4 - Of course what will motivate random users to moderate? Users will get points, and badges for identifying spam.

So, this is almost like the system we have now, except moderation is in the hands of many users. It's not necessarily bullet proof, but it leads us away from certain groups, and a few powerful people ganging up on an individual.

The only suggestion I have is to remove comment restrictions entirely and have a small army take care of any resulting spam flood - I don't mean reports, I mean reviewable bans.

Stop. In the name of all that is holy leave it the hell alone. It works fine the way it is. laissez faire

I don't know if I want to click on that. What is that sub?

Thats why putt made this announcement. Thank god too!

Let me have my original account back i deleted @MightyYetGentle

Timeaaa, ludla ludla, timeeeeea

Could we have a post limit on accounts with little or no CCP? Especially on /v/gaming , we have a gorillion of accounts who only use the subverse to shill their own site or Youtube channel, which effectively means only 1 in 10 users actually watch and comment on content.

They take over subs, create alt accounts and cuck the shit out of it. v/Chicago is currently the worst one. There were others. Most of us were banned for merely submitting articles about Chicago. Mine came from the Chicago Tribune and there were no comments on it. The mod got kicked and he merely used one of his alt accounts to continue to cuck it. Go take a look. All of those mods are the same guy. He also tried taking over my Chicago Cubs sub using his primary and all alt accounts to do the same thing to it.

ah fuck

Eat some ice cream

I think someone is downvoting mostly everything in this thread.

But that won't matter if there are no downvote restrictions; downvotes will only be a means of ordering posts, as they should be.

All i see is a link to jail bait with a request to do something to stop it. Thats not posting CP

It's not an easy problem to fix. You are probably better off not being open how it will be done because it opens up to how it can be gamed.

Too many comments for any one opinion to be heard. Sort them into categories, and allow people to discuss and vote. Then cultivate a shorter list of viable ideas for a final discussion.

We don't care, i just posted my comment in favor of removing the restrictions, pinged you in it.

To my knowledge, nobody has ever been restricted by -100 with the exception of @MightyYetGentle1488 aka sanegoat aka amalek.

He is literally the only person that has suffered from this, and had to make 1000 alts and an upvote bot to combat this. There have been a few more obvious trolls who probably don't care and enjoy the reputation of "the most downvoated person".

And the only reason why the above mentioned user receives so much dowvoats from everyone is because of his spam campaign against you and Atko. We actually believe that aggression played a role in atko's leaving, even tho he never said it did.

Everybody was laughing when amalek was about the anti-jew spam. Its when the hostility was turned against you two and fuzzy that everybody started pushing back against him.

In my opinion, you should have been more aggressive with the ban hammer back then. Memebr when you threatened to ban him and your comment received 6milion upvotes? Absolute support from the community because we knew that that situation had nothing to do with "freedom to state an unpopular opinion" but obvious destructive behavior due to mental illness and a complete lack of a life. Possibly even money involved tho various findings that came later just show mental illness.

So i don't think you need to feel bad because in the end those restrictions affected only one user that should have been banned long time ago for destructive behavior anyway.

With all that said, now that things have calmed down, removing that restriction might be a good idea, but ONLY if you can get decent control over spammers with a combination of both ban hammer and ALT CONTROL/limitation, something that was never even attempted. If it can even be controlled.

Here's one that people don't agree with: registering a voat account should require an e-mail and have a delay. It doesn't raise privacy concerns because everybody has a throwaway email, or can easily make one.

That extra step, plus a 24 delay means nothing to a real user who needs one account, but make it one more annoying step for spammers.

Who ever doesn't have the patience for that once, probably isn't here to contribute anyway. Think voat is passed that point where it needs to make it super easy just to attract as many users as possible just to get up and running.

Also, you mentioned you would clean up all the "sleeper" accounts that all the shithead redditor scum from r/thedonald made in an attempt to overpower v/thedonald . Deleting those accounts, requiring an e-mail and a 24h delay for new ones, would keep those kinds of mass actions at bay to a small degree. That's something to keep in mind.

System subs don't really have mods though. So that's a problem

No, that's my alt, and because of the restriction i cant comment until this fix is implemented.

I never once had an inclination to do harm to Voat or it's users (nor am i capable), in fact i've been highly vocal for the opposite. There are people intentionally keeping Voaters from networking on a larger scale and pointing that out makes you a target.

I've made many posts here that shed light on the subject of voat manipulators. My original account @MightyYetGentle was the first account to ever be hit with a massive bot brigade resulting in a loss of 8k ccp in 4 hours. I deleted it because there was no stopping it at the time. Atko even reset my CCP but it went right back to -3000 an hour later and nothing else came of it.

Even SaneGoat and Amalek weren't trying to destroy voat. They were just trying to point out something that was being suppressed and handled it poorly. Some of the top posters on this site are the ones trying to slow-kill and subvert the site. /v/ProtectVoat, /v/RidersOfTheReich, /v/SoapBoxBanHammer /v/SoapDoxBanHammer /v/ShitpostersTavern etc etc are the ones who want to ruin the site, and have been successful in changes in behavior of the demographic.

I 100% do not support the removal of restrictions from negative CCP accounts.

The first thing that will happen is the CTR/ShareBlue cunts come back and endlessly post their outright lies, again. If you let those people have fully enabled accounts, you're just asking them to act in concert and upvote each other's posts. (They all work in one office. It's easy for them to organize behind the scenes.)

The next things that opens Voat up to are hostile takeovers like r/the_Donald has outright said they will try to do, again or r/SRS, as they never really gave up.

Taking away negative CCP restrictions sounds so great and altruistic on paper, but that's one of the main things that have protected Voat from organized groups of subversive cunts that aim to control and change this place to their own whim. You aren't helping new users, you are only helping our enemies to attack us and attempt to gain control of the site to change the entire culture of Voat.

I like this place, as it is, and I'm not even a Christian or a Republican. I like being able to stand up and say, "NIGGER-FAGGOT," at my whim. The people that this change will help most are the people that fully intend on downvoting every instance of what they consider, "offensive speech." First, they're allowed to exist and post as much as they want, then they organize a large group to upvote eachother, then they use that large group of now positive CCP accounts to impose their own brand of cultural Marxism on this site, just as they have done, everywhere else.

This is going to be your greatest mistake, @PuttItOut. This could potentially be the beginning for the end of Voat as your current userbase is concerned. If you want to make life easier for new users, that's one thing, but unrestricting negative CCP accounts only serves to empower Voat's enemies.

That was my idea for a site a few years ago. It would look like Voat but operate like 4chan.

Maybe the default sort in a post should be "top". This currently only affects the parent comments only though. Make the sort apply to the children comments also. That way the most upvoted comments would be in descending order with the lesser voted comments at the bottom. Of course, brigading would need to be eliminated.

Can you tie restrictions to IP addresses rather than individual accounts? If someone like sanegoat is hopping between alts on the same IP (or multiple IPs used in the past), the codebase could automatically slow down his posting.

Making spammers burn an IP address for each alt seems like a decent way to slow them down.

Yes, amalek the jew.

Ayyy, finally. Will this apply to chat CCP restrictions too?

Thanks Putt!

We need to allow unpopular opinions while preventing comment spam.

With that in mind let's evaluate what "free speech" is, what it consists of and why it is important. Freedom of speech is needed to challenge popular and unpopular ideas alike. It is meant for a free people to acknowledge and address the behavior or thoughts of others. It is paramount that it remains unrestrained.

That said, here at voat people do not downvoat without cause. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying there isn't usually a coordinated mass effort to silence people. There are accounts that are downvoated into oblivion because they are purposely trying to achieve that.

I'll use my own account for an example. I hate cops. I mean I FUCKING HATE COPS! and say so regularly which IS an unpopular opinion here at voat. I don't ever, ever restrain myself and I do so fully aware of the "consequence". A quick look at my most downvoated posts shows this...I'm sorry, my cop hate has seemed to have been dwarfed by my veteran hate. So a -16 was the best they could do. So what are those people doing that have negative CCP? Something awful. They do not belong here. We all have freedom of association and we obviously don't want to associate with them.

Now, if they truly wish to interact and the CCP restricted account is a problem then they can make a new one. It's not a problem.

Limiting any account that spam comments

Spam has nothing to do with freedom of speech. They aren't speaking for or against an action, they are selling something. That's capitalism not freedom of speech. BAN THEM. BAN THEM OFTEN AND QUICKLY.

@inthetimeofnick will call anyone he doesn't like a tranny or pedo if he hates him even more.

He has 0 proof every time...but hey who cares about proof right?