You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

Vindicator ago

We had a sex offender on here named Rob Robinson who spammed the board dozens of times a day with the same few memes. He used over 300 versions of same alt PizzagateIsStupid. Regular users would get all screechy if his "Podesta Arrested!" meme was left up for more than a little while. Deleting these dozens and dozens of posts coming in every two minutes for two hours was challenging -- especially with modmail filling up with other users complaining. To keep up, you literally had to have the subverse bans page open in a separate window, the ban reason typed in, and be pasting in the new alt, hitting "BACK" and pasting in the next new alt (all with the same five or seven posts). Spam is quick to type into the ban window and in that situation was accurate. Also, no one complained, LOL, because everyone hated it. Two mods couldn't take it and drifted away.

I messaged cynabuns to see if there was any way to get this account banned at v/ReportSpammers as a spammer, since he always linked to his own memes. It didn't meet Voat's definition of adspam, though, so no.

I started put "Rob Robinson frustrated pedo spam" in the ban reason window, got a disgruntled DM denying it was him, and when I kept doing it, he stopped altogether. ;-)

Unfortunately, I think it desensitized @Millennial_Falcon to the use of the term "spam" in the ban reason field. A legit user making a post they think satisfies Rule 1 who repeatedly tries to repost with modifications (guessing at what might be needed) and then receives a ban with nothing more than "spam" in the auto modmail message they get (no explanation comment in the thread), is going to be pretty pissed. Especially if they went to a lot of work. Unfortunately, this has happened numerous times.

On the other hand, there would have been no way to keep up with the PGisStupid shitposts if we had to write explanations before removing every one or banning every alt. No one cared, when it was PGisStupid. Perhaps that was the whole point of those posts -- to wear out mods and tempt us into bad habits that would overflow onto legit pizzagoats.

With no clearly defined policy in the Moderator Rules about when, why and exactly how a ban should be enacted, it's not surprising this situation evolved. I am glad we are discussing it.