Will blogs or comments ever be shunted into moderation without the author receiving a notification? Also, are photos more likely to be diverted to moderation than simple typed posts?
Will blogs or comments ever be shunted into moderation without the author receiving a notification? Also, are photos more likely to be diverted to moderation than simple typed posts?
I actually saw that exchange between you guys today, and wondered exactly how moderation worked... Thanks for your help.
At this point it's better not to speculate about what is or isn't wrong with moderation. It's catching all the bad stuff but for some reason it is catching other things in a very haphazard way. There is no rhyme or reason, but I'm confident that some progress can be made now that investigation was done last week with elvan.
Mark
EX Community Manager
SkyGirl wrote:
Will blogs or comments ever be shunted into moderation without the author receiving a notification? Also, are photos more likely to be diverted to moderation than simple typed posts?
I'm not sure what you mean by shunted into moderation.
Hopefully in the near future Jive will determine what is causing a majority of false positives for items going into moderation. I expect once they figure it out that the number will drop significantly. However it can't be expected that all false positives will be eliminated. On occasion someone may post something that mimics similar structure to known spam types. They can't make the filter so insensitive that actual spam gets through.
Otherwise posts like this from Juan667 will get through and clutter up the place. If one gets through they'll tell their friends and be back with a lot more.
I can't and frankly wouldn't provide suggestions to bypass the spam moderation filter as that would also give hints to the spammers. I will say that posts with photos and @mentions shouldn't be any more likely to go into the spam filter than plain text posts. That's where the mystery lies right now. Once they get the first thing solved it will either help us determine if there is still a legitimate issue and it's working correctly or if there needs to be some additional tweaks.
I will say it's always better that it's a little overzealous than underzealous. If it's underzealous then the spammers will flock here and make it a really unpleasant place to be.
Mark
EX Community Manager
Thanks for your reply, Mark. I guess I should have used a different word than "shunted". What I meant by that was "diverted" or "sidetracked". I'm kind of imagining a system that is programmed to notice particular things about a post and then uses a "shunt" to send it off to a different destination (meaning Moderation vs. the blog/comment it was intended for). I guess this shows my age, but I'm imagining back when a railroad worker would flip the switches to send a train off onto a different set of tracks. Too much explanation of what I meant; sorry.
I completely understand and agree with the protections that Jive has in place to stop spam from getting through. Under the old format, we used to get a lot of crazy spam posts. The one I remember best was obviously translated from another language and offered to sell us "warm fur boots if we wanted to connect with commodities". Huh?
I wasn't asking for ways to bypass moderation at all! I should have been more specific to the actual situation that caused me to ask that question; I thought I posted a comment on someone's blog (with a photo of the two of us) and it never showed up. I had seen something earlier in Questions about how moderation worked so I wondered if that was what had happened. Actually I must have just not hit the "Post" button (boy, is my face red now!) I rewrote the comment, added the photo and it posted just fine. So, my bad, I guess. I'm sorry to have wasted your time. And I DO appreciate what Jive's protections do for us, Mark! Thanks for responding to me.
SkyGirl wrote:
Thanks for your reply, Mark. I guess I should have used a different word than "shunted". What I meant by that was "diverted" or "sidetracked". I'm kind of imagining a system that is programmed to notice particular things about a post and then uses a "shunt" to send it off to a different destination (meaning Moderation vs. the blog/comment it was intended for). I guess this shows my age, but I'm imagining back when a railroad worker would flip the switches to send a train off onto a different set of tracks. Too much explanation of what I meant; sorry.
I completely understand and agree with the protections that Jive has in place to stop spam from getting through. Under the old format, we used to get a lot of crazy spam posts. The one I remember best was obviously translated from another language and offered to sell us "warm fur boots if we wanted to connect with commodities". Huh?
I wasn't asking for ways to bypass moderation at all! I should have been more specific to the actual situation that caused me to ask that question; I thought I posted a comment on someone's blog (with a photo of the two of us) and it never showed up. I had seen something earlier in Questions about how moderation worked so I wondered if that was what had happened. Actually I must have just not hit the "Post" button (boy, is my face red now!) I rewrote the comment, added the photo and it posted just fine. So, my bad, I guess. I'm sorry to have wasted your time. And I DO appreciate what Jive's protections do for us, Mark! Thanks for responding to me.
Ideally most people in the community wouldn't even know about the spam moderation filter. Unfortunately it's a little too over-sensitive at the moment likely due to a bug (though it's really only catching small portion of all posts). Once it gets fixed it will hopefully be hardly noticeable. Once Jive figures out what is happening and fixes it, then we should know if there is or isn't anything else going on. If there is anything else going on, hopefully it can either be calibrated or we can identify behaviors to avoid.
Yes the old system was very annoying. So many Buy Ugg boots posts . When it was a new blog by a spammer it was really easy to report and get rid of but when it was spam on someone else's post as a comment then bad things happened. Several people (one was Jenn_06-03-14) got banned as a result of spam getting posted on their blogs because people reported the post and the author of the blog got banned instead of the spammer. Glad that is in the past.
No worries, we all have moments where we think we did something but we didn't. Happens to me too!
Mark
EX Community Manager
Well, I was wrong. When I reposted, it showed up and looked like it posted just fine. But now it's gone. Perhaps the OP didn't like it and removed it? Is the OP the only one who can delete a comment on their blog?
SkyGirl wrote:
Well, I was wrong. When I reposted, it showed up and looked like it posted just fine. But now it's gone. Perhaps the OP didn't like it and removed it? Is the OP the only one who can delete a comment on their blog?
I don't remember ever seeing anything of yours going into moderation. It could have happened but it might be so infrequent that I don't remember.
Yes there are some cases where you're able to delete your own post and it will also delete any associated comments. This is really unfortunate as people shouldn't ever be allowed to delete the comments of others even if they are children comments. This happened to me recently as a member decided to remove their post, my comment was removed as well. They probably only intended to remove their own and not mine as well. Unfortunately the response I had given is now gone forever...
There is a case or maybe a couple where you cannot delete your own post if others have commented on it already. If the post has no comments then it allows you to delete but as soon as someone else comments, you lose the ability to comment. This is more ideal.
SkyGirl From my experience, blogs such as the one Mark mentioned would have been flagged for attention by one or more of the Elders on the site had it been noted. Dale was up the earliest on the West Coast and caught the majority of them. I, for one, am not speculating on what is or isn't wrong with "automated" moderation. I see the benefits and the harms. I'm just making a point of the fact that it's there and interfering with the normal flow of the support community as I knew it. But then - that's "as I knew it." The fact that it is interfering and that there are questions and confusion about it all is certainly not helpful. MOO
From your comment, I am deducing that you are saying that blogs/comments/photos that Jive deems possibly questionable are sent to ELDERS for approval and subsequent posting. Is this correct? Or am I not understanding how this all works? I think it's great if certain Elders have the authority to determine what is acceptable for posting. Because I think their experience and knowledge would be a much better judge of what should be allowed and what shouldn't. But what a responsibility for an Elder to commit to!!! And what an uncertain timeframe that means for posters! (Crap, what if Dale oversleeps??? LOL). Do you know if there is an explanation anywhere here on the new forum that spells out what is acceptable and what is not? P.S. Can I come visit you in Tennessee yet? How's your foot?
SkyGirl No you deduce totally incorrectly. I simply meant that Dale caught most of the morning spammers and others of us who were on line later would flag content (well I least I would) as spam when we saw it. NOTHING was/is sent to Elders for approval/moderation whatever by Jive. We have no say in the matter. Yes, there are many explanations of what's acceptable and not as far as word filters, but other filters related to spam - I haven't a clue. Nor does Mark. It's apparently proprietary Jife info. Here's the word filter info Prohibited Word Filter There are two different issues being discussed. One is "moderation" related to spammers, the other is a "prohibited word list" filter. The former has to be released by Mark in order to be posted, the later is an automatic censor on specific verboten words which are asterisked out. If you want, PM me and I'll try to send you those links that might be helpful PS You know you have a bed here any time you want one. Foot is coming along. Fly safe, friend.
Giulia wrote:
SkyGirl From my experience, blogs such as the one Mark mentioned would have been flagged for attention by one or more of the Elders on the site had it been noted. Dale was up the earliest on the West Coast and caught the majority of them. I, for one, am not speculating on what is or isn't wrong with "automated" moderation. I see the benefits and the harms. I'm just making a point of the fact that it's there and interfering with the normal flow of the support community as I knew it. But then - that's "as I knew it." The fact that it is interfering and that there are questions and confusion about it all is certainly not helpful. MOO
In the last year I actually was going through every user account daily and removing people who were spammers. Many times before they had even posted a blog. Yes, it got really really bad in the last year. Fortunately, I was able to take care of it without people even knowing in many cases. There were cases where jonescarp.aka.dale.Jan_2007 helped me immensely by creating a list of people who had profile spam during the few hours I was sleeping. A majority of people had profile spam in the last 8-9 months of elgg because they were becoming ineffective at posting spam that stuck around. They figured that profile spam would fly under the radar but I was right there to delete it 7 days a week. Elgg's spam moderation service was hit or miss. It was good at catching private message spam but only catch blog spam on occasion. Fortunately I knew some tricks to locate it and deleted a lot of spam from 2008 thru 2015 that went undetected previously.
If the system were working correctly (sadly it isn't at the moment) then it wouldn't be disrupting the normal flow of things. In reality it is happening infrequently, but none the less, annoying even at the frequency it is happening. Since things aren't working as they should, offering any "advice" on how to get around it wouldn't be helpful. When it's fixed there hopefully won't be any need to offer advice as it should only catch legitimate posts on a rare occasion. The situations it would catch at that point should be fairly obvious. I have a good sense on how spam filters work but the exact information is always proprietary as it won't be effective if you tell everyone
Even when everything is fixed, on occasion there will be people who are peddling vaping products and other things who will come to post comments or blogs that will not get caught by the spam filter and will require members to click the "report abuse" button for my review.
Giulia Based on your post I read it just like SkyGirl read it. But yes, there is no member moderator moderation protocol right now because Jive doesn't support it yet. Hopefully in the future there will be an ability to have non-employee moderators. I really don't envision or hope that there will be a lot of moderation as that takes away from participation on the site by those members and suggests that there are larger issues going on. Being a volunteer moderator can be a tricky responsibility. Impartiality is often what people struggle with most, especially with really close knit communities.
Select other community platforms have the ability to give moderation to non-employees but they are deficient in some very key areas as a community platform or were very complex platform, not suited for our member-base. We had to select the best option based on the options available to us at the time.
Mark
EX Community Manager
Giulia wrote:
Sorry about not being more clear on my reply. Didn't mean to confuse.
No problem. Happens from time to time
Mark
EX Community Manager
From my experience - I used to get moderation notifications on a regular basis, now I don't. What I get now is a notification of the "release" of the moderation only. There seems to be no consistency to the moderation process. It could be @ mentions or ... who knows what. Today I responded on a blog were someone had @ mentioned me with a question and I had NO IDEA what they were talking about. And then they told me it was because it was "in moderation" and I actually had already responded to it... Obviously the "system" is not working very well.