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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3931 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is it possible to make more clear/transparent what the process for getting your account past the "new user filter" is? I figured nobody was interested in what I had to say but I checked the forums logged out and none of my comments are appearing, so I'm assuming nobody else would've been seeing my comments.

I understand the need to filter out trolls/bots and nobody is obligated to respond to your thoughts/messages but frankly speaking it is discouraging to ask questions/comment and to be met with complete silence. A simple message to new accounts saying "hey, as a new user you may need to be manually approved" or something would've been nice to have. Was there an obvious message/process that I just didn't see?

I fished out all your comments from the filter. They seemed like good comments, keep it up.

There probably should be some message to new users about things not appearing. Might be a good item for the backlog @ZorbaTHut

Typically I read all the comments by a particular user. Trolling stuff never gets out. If we have recently banned or perma banned users I have to be on the lookout for similarish commenting.

There are certain thresholds you have to hit before your posts and comments get auto-approved.

Spam and bots are not serious problems. But trolls and ban-evaders are major problems. The time delay of a moderator reading the comments and approving them helps lower the effectiveness of trolling, and makes bans actually costly (unlike on reddit, where they were trivially easy to dodge as long as you didn't piss off the admins).

We try to lean heavily towards approving new comments and posts. So all of your comments will eventually get approved.

Approving a comment "eventually" doesn't mean much when it doesn't appear as a new comment. It just hides the fact that the comment was hidden.

I think you are already out of the new user filter.

Can you speak plainly? Are you saying that only people currently in the filter should comment on it?

If I don't have a red highlight on my name I'm not giving a warning or speaking about breaking the rules. Any mod warnings to not do something should be as clear as possible. I will often say something obvious like "don't do this" or "this is just a warning".

I was giving you information you might find useful.

We just recently added new moderators, so comments are far less likely to sit in the filter for a long time.

Will we ever remove the new user filter? Absolutely not. It's one of our only ways to enforce bans. And it's one of the best ways to prevent low effort trolling. Otherwise banned users can just create new accounts.

I see. I appreciate the insight into process. The level of discourse and communication is superior to many communications on Reddit, so I guess its working.

Are there any rules to reposting previously asked questions/posts? I'd like to have another go at my question on the publicly available federal spending data, since by the time that comment got approved we already had another Sunday thread. I'd probably split that up into 2 or 3 comments since I was rambling near the end into completely unrelated questions.

In this specific case feel free to repost what you previously had.

As a general rule, reposting from a previous week's thread is ok.

Intentionally reposting from something that is already in the thread is frowned upon.

The rule of thumb I use when modding: is there already a live discussion on this topic, if so, just join that. The deader the previous discussion the more ok it is to repost it and start it up again.

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